Prostitution And Victorian Society

A study of alliances between prostitutes and femminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police.

Attwood examines Victorian attitudes to prostitution across a number of sources: medical, literary, pornographic.

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and asserted their presence in the public domain. An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press. A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases. The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue', aroused the ire of many reformers, not only women’s rights campaigners. Paul McHugh analyses the social composition of the different repeal and reform movements – the liberal reformists, the passionate struggle of the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Tory reformers whose achievement was in the improvement of preventative medicine, and finally the Social Purity movement of the 1880s which favoured a coercive approach. This is a fascinating study of ideals and principles in action, of pressure-group strategy, and of individual leaders in the repeal movement’s sixteen year progress to victory. The book was originally publised in 1980.

An examination of the issue of prostitution in Victorian society, which looks at the extent to which it was practised and attitudes towards it during the period, with consideration of groups who argued for and against its legalization.

Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 is the first comprehensive overview of attempts to eradicate prostitution from English society, including discussion of early attempts at reform and prevention through to the campaigns of the social purists. Prostitution looks in depth at the various reform institutions which were set up to house prostitutes, analysing the motives of the reformers as well as daily life within these penitentiaries. This indispensable book reveals: * reformers' attitudes towards prostitutes and prostitution * daily life inside reform institutions * attempts at moral education * developments in moral health theories * influence of eugenics * attempts at suppressing prostitution.

The first book to tackle the controversial history of prostitution in modern Ireland.

Victorian society -divided by rigid class barriers, obsessed with a puritan conscience, in the midst of industralisation and poverty -was in 1885 confronted by a sustained attack on the organisers of prostitution in Britain and continental Europe. A "douvle standard" of morality prevailed, and prostitution was on the wholde condoned by the establisment. Josephine Butler rejected the double standard and demanded continence from both sexes. The Salvation Army, Methodists and the Quakers joined in, and William Stead, in the influential Pall Mall Gazette, conducted an exposé of London prostitution and the whole slave traffic to the continent. In this lively and perceptive study, Michael Pearson describes one of the seamier sides of Victorian life -the brothels, the characters who frequented or ran them, corrupt policement, indifferent politicians. Here also is the story of the origins of the Women's Liberation Movement, of the crusading Booth family, and of a skilful but unscrupulous journalist who vigorously campaigned for legal reform. -4e de couv.