A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler by Glen Petrie, Viking Press: New York, 1971

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A Singular Iniquity: The Campaigns of Josephine Butler
Glen Petrie,
Viking Press: New York, 1971

"Neither in men nor women could the sexual act be entirely divorced from guilt, if enjoyed -- though, clearly, the guilt was more intense form women. Middle-class men tended to have recourse to prostitutes or semi-prostitutes-- servants or lower-class factory-workers-- because sexual intercourse, when enjoyed, was essentially a conspiracy to do something wicked, and was therefore unsuited to 'respectable' people. In martial sexual relations it was often as incumbent upon men as it was upon women to conceal satisfaction in the act. At the same time there was a natural, if frequently subconscious, male resentment at female frigidity, and here lay the paradox which so bedeviled Victorian sexual attitude. The man who would have been shocked and disgusted by any display of enthusiasm on the part of his wife resented his inability to arouse her to that enthusiasm. He was compelled to have resource to prostitution in order to enjoy sex without inhibition; he was compelled to despise his partner in sexual pleasure because she shared in, stimulated and compounded, his guilty enjoyment of the act; he was compelled to seduce the daughters of his social inferiors in order to prove his own virility.
Even if he was callous enough to wish his wife to participate with him in a conspiracy to enjoy sex, the Victorian middle-class husband was unlikely to meet with any success. A typical example of a late-Victorian bride wrote to her mother from her honeymoon, announcing that she was engaged in lengthening 'his' nightshirts so that 'I shan't be able to see any of him.' A less amusing example was provided by Sir Richard Burton in the introduction to his book The Customs and Manners of the East when, in comparing the attitudes of western and oriental brides, he cites the case of an English girl who retired before her husband on her wedding night, and chloroformed herself, having pinned a note to the pillow which read, "Mama says you are to do what you like." " p. 83-84
      "An obvious reductio of such a situation led to the acceptance of prostitution as being necessary to the health of men, to the respect due to virtuous wives and to the stability of the home. The prostitute, wrote the eminent historian Lecky in 1862, 'is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder would have known the agony of remorse and despair.'
      At the same time, by recourse to a prostitute, a normal healthy young man could postpone marriage until such time as he could keep a wife in a manner befitting an 'Angel in the Home': 'The man who marries before he is in receipt of an ample income and has to face the struggles which await the poor, is considered to lose caste. parents will sooner contrive at illicit amours in the case of their sons.'
      So wrote John Forster, Charles Dicken's friend and biogrpaher." p. 85
"Hell knows fury like the scorn of a man who has been humiliated in debate by a sexually attractive woman." p. 90
"After the meeting was officially closed, a group of railway engineers came to her, and explained why the audience had, from the start, been predisposed in her favour. They had been seconded to Paris for some months, they told her, to assist in the development of the French railway system during the Second Empire. They had been shocked and appalled, not at the blatancy of the prostitution as practiced in Paris -- it was no worse, and probably better, than in London -- but by the inhumanity, corruption and blackmail exercised by the Police des Moeurs, and the terror in which they were held by the wives and daughters of the French colleagues. They were genuinely horrified by the idea of such an institution being imported into Britain." p. 92
      "Having won the sympathies of her audiences on the emotional level she took care after each meeting to organize ad hoc committees among the artisans ostensibly to agree on a programme of action, but, in fact, to endorse the Declaration of Policy which she was engaged in drafting during the long and often arduous railway journeys from meeting to meeting, and which the editor of the Daily News had promised to publish. The Declaration was comprised of eight major points:
      1) The law, in safeguarding individual liberty outside the home, had not, hitherto, discriminated between men and women. The [Contagious Diseases] Acts, however, constituted just such a discrimination. Moreover, a significant alteration to the Constitution which affected over fifty per cent of British subjects, had been passed through Parliament without the knowledge or consent of the electorate as a whole, but also unnoticed by a large number of Members of Parliament.
      2) The Acts placed the liberty, reputation, and persons of young women entirely into the hands of the police.
      3) When an individual is detained by the police, the Law clearly demands that the offense for which he is detained should be publicly stated. The Acts constituted a complete disregard for that demand.
      4) The medical examination and treatment imposed under that of sentence to Hard Labor constituted a punishment, and it was manifestly unjust to punish one partner only for the practice of a vice which obviously required two participants. Particularly was it unjust since the female partner was all too frequently the social and moral victim, in effect the consequence of the vice, rather than its root cause.
      5) The Acts were openly designed to ensure that men could have safe and easy recourse to prostitutes.
      6) The specific measures recommended by the Acts had a peculiarly brutalizing effect on those prostitutes already committed to their way of life, and tended to harden and to make more abandoned those girls who were still new to prostitution, and therefore more readily reclaimable.
      7) In countries where licensed prostitution was practiced, notably France and Prussia where statistics were readily available, there had been little or no diminution in the incidence of venereal diseases -- for the very good reason that venereal diseases were carried to prostitutes who had previously been examined by their clients, who were subject to no such examination.
      8) By imposing a system of 'regulated' vice, Society was divesting itself of the responsibility of examining the social and moral causes of that vice." pp. 93-94
"As a Liberal and a 'republican' (to user her own term), she was deeply opposed to the idea of any legislation which granted the police special powers of summary arrest and imprisonment (albeit in a prison infirmary) without trial and proper conviction; it was unconstitutional, a denial of all she had learnt from her father. As an enlightened and educated woman who had enjoyed intellectual advantages denied to most of her sex, she believed that the Acts constituted a discrimination in law more grave than anything enacted before, an enshrinement in the statute-book of the iniquitous 'double standard.' " p. 95
"In fact, evidence tended to reveal that the operation of the Acts consolidated, if not actually increased, the practice of prostitution in protected areas." p. 109
"The necessity for girls to get drunk or 'half-drunk' before submitting themselves to examination was amply confirmed by other witnesses." p. 110
"On the other hand, military and naval surgeons testified readily enough that, while they would object profoundly to inspecting soldiers and sailors for symptoms of venereal infection as being degrading both to themselves and to the Service to which they belonged, they saw nothing degrading in inspecting the queues of young girls for signs of the same diseases." p. 111
      Butler testifying before a Royal Commission: " 'I grant you then that you reclaim ninety per cent of the women, if that will satisfy you, but it is not of the least consequence to my argument, for there is a double motive in these Acts, there are two ends to be served by them, and we cannot serve two masters. There are two motives, one the providing of clean women for the army and navy, the other the reclamation of women. We cannot serve two masters. While you reclaim the women you are stimulating the vices of men. That is the point, and I insist on this Commission hearing it; and what is the use, I ask you in the name of Heaven, to save women while you are stimulating the vices of men? ' " p. 114
      Later in her testimony before the same Commission:
      "She went on to emphasize the fear engendered among decent working-class families by the thought that the Acts might be extended to the civil population -- a fear which ran like an idee fixe through the letters she had submitted to the chairman of the Commission. One such letter, from an employer in this instance, fairly sums up the views expressed in a host of others:
I feel impelled as an employer of more than 150 women and 100 men and youths to tell you that no language can express the indignation, dread, and shame with which they view these Acts. There is not one dissident. The women say they are at work all day; the evening is the only time that is their own, and unless they remain entirely in the house and debar themselves from chapels, lectures, seeing their acquaintances, or even from fresh air, they must often be out then, and it is abominable that they are to watched by policemen or any spies, and at their evidence or suspicion be compelled to submit to treatment too degrading to mention; and all without trial by judge and jury, which the worst of criminals are allowed before they can be punished. Many of the, feeling too helpless and friendless to struggle against such laws, look forward to a prison as their future lot, almost for life, if the laws are extended.

      Finally Josephine was asked what weight she would place on the findings of the Royal Commission.
      'All of us,' she replied, 'who are seeking the repeal of these Acts, are wholly indifferent to the decision of the Commission. We have the Word of God in our hands, the Law of God in our consciences. We know that to protect vice in men is not according to the Word of God. These Acts are abhorred by the country as a tyranny of the upper classes against the lower classes, as an injustice practiced by men on women, and as an insult to the moral sense of the people -- an iniquity which is abhorred by Christian England.' " p. 115
      "Some effort had been made by the Commissioners to meet the views of the abolitionists, at least regarding the worst abuses produced by the Acts. Josephine, however, was far from satisfied. The preamble of the majority report was enough to put her on her guard, particularly the section which read:
      'There is no comparison to be drawn between prostitutes and the men who consort with them. With one sex the offense is committed as a matter of gain, with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse.' The principle of the 'double standard' which she so deeply resented could hardly have been expressed more succinctly.
      There were, however, more grave implications to be found in the Report, in Jospehine's opinion. On 14 November 1871 she addressed the annual meeting of the Ladies' Association:
The secret information which is to make them [the authorities] believe that a prostitute is diseased can only come from one of three sources: -- 1st, the woman herself; -- 2nd, the accomplice of her sin; -- 3rd, a brothel-keeper. This is a very dangerous power when put into their hands. Under the present Acts, a man whose infamous proposals have been rejected by a girl, may inform the police against her, and on his evidence the girl may be subjected to examination and ruined. Under the law the Commissioners recommended, he would only have to hint she is diseased; before his words could be proved false, the girl would have been brought before the magistrates and condemned to be examined, and, whatever were the result, the man's revenge would be completed by the Act of the Government. A like power would, by such a system, be legally vested in the hands of the brothel-keepers. If one of these wretches should mark a young and friendless girl for his victim -- and the more innocent and helpless - looking the higher the value to them -- his course would be easy. A secret information could be given to the sanitary officer that the girl had been ruined and was diseased. She could be brought before the magistrate, and ordered for examination. At once every lodging house would be closed to her; no employer would have her; rude men and women would jeer at her. Then the brothel-keeper would have but to meet her, be filled with compassion, take her in, feed and shelter her; knowing well that under this new law, once inside his door he is sure of her. pp. 117-118
"A new theme was entering into Josephine's arguments. The parallels between the old slave trade, which had played so strong a part in her childhood and adolescent imagination, and prostitution had always been present in her mind. But now, the parallels were becoming more exact. In Liverpool in the 1860s she had been dealing with mendicant prostitution and girls who had suffered from individual seducers. Now, with the wider knowledge and experience offered as a result of her emergence as a national leader of the abolitionist cause, she was confronted more and more often by the 'traffic in flesh,' by prostitution as a capitalistic enterprise condoned if not actually encouraged by an astonishingly large proportion of apparently respectable middle- and upper- class manhood. Jospehine could not know, when she faced the individual member of the Royal Commission, or a group of high-ranking member of the Liberal Party known to her from childhood, which of them, for all the sympathetic hearings they offered her, resorted habitually to Mrs. Jeffries's flagellation houses, or were prepared to pay up to twenty-five guineas for the pleasure of raping a terrified twelve-year-old virgin; and it was this which provoked her outcry to the Royal Commission, 'I will set a floodlight on your doings!' " p. 118-119
"At this point, Jospehine removes the debate from the area of vice and individual morality. Two years previously she had argued that the Contagious Diseases Acts were contrary to the principles of the Magna Carta. Now she states the danger to Society as a whole inherent in the very nature of the Acts and their extension:
the many dangers of the future which arise when men become willing to barter constitutional freedom for liberty in lust; when they make over their citizen-rights and the guardianship of their morals to the police, which grows continually in power and in insolence, until they come to be no longer amenable to those who gave them power." p. 127
"More and more she came to see prostitution as being the result of a social structure in which there were gentlemen who had the means to purchase what they wished, and women who had nothing but their bodies to sell. As the years went by, the word 'gentleman' became, to Josephine, a private terms of abuse." p. 138
"If a boulevard sweep failed to net a sufficient number of girls, attention was turned to girls living in furnished rooms and hotels. Agents, supported by uniformed police, would arrive between two and five o'clock in the morning. They were not of course looking for girls en carte but insoumises -- girls without visible means of support; any girl who was not with her legal husband, whether she was alone or with a lover. Instructions were laid down as to the method by which the agent should establish that the girl was a prostitute: 'il devait regarder les draps, inspecter les serviettes et la cuvette', or, more simply, he must examine the girl's hands, and if they were soft he might legitimately arrest her." pp. 160-161
      "Guyot's first impression of St. Lazare was the smell of the yards, which were used as a depository for every kind of slop, and the way in which this stench penetrated every room of the buildings to mingle with what he called the 'shut-up' smell which was the result of the gross over-crowding in the wards. He noticed that the girls' uniform-dresses were filthy, as were the girls themselves. This was hardly surprising, since they were permitted neither to wash their clothes nor their bodies -- the nuns insisting that they should never be permitted to undress lest they commit an offense against modesty. The nuns, however, did instruct their charges in the use of a syringe which, as Guyot pointed out, since it was never washed, probably accounted for the incidence of venereal disease among Paris prostitutes.
      The girls lived and slept in dormitories containing four rows of beds crowded together in such a way as to provide exactly half the space which government regulations laid down regarding ordinary prisons. Their working day began at 4:45 a.m. when they were woken to the cries of Vive Jesu! By 5 a.m. they had made their beds, completed the minimal toilet allowed to them and were assembled in the workrooms for the Morning Offering. There, they worked until 8:45 a.m. when they received their first meal of the day, soup consisting of water-broth containing a single carrot or leek. Afterwards they walked in the yard until 9:45 a.m., when they returned to work. At noon they had lunch consisting of bread which had been dipped in vegetable soup (the soup itself being reserved for the staff), after which, they worked again until 3 p.m., when they received their last meal of the day, a plate of beans. The then had an hour of recreation spent in walking silently around the yard, worked until 7 p.m., had Night Prayer and went to bed.
      Any breach in the regulations -- failure, for instance to genuflect when a nun passed by -- meant removal to the punishment rooms, as did refusal to submit to being placed en carte. These rooms consisted of windowless and airless garrets whose sole furniture consisted of one tub for the performance of natural functions, which was rarely emptied. In these garrets, girls spent day and night, fed at irregular intervals on bread and water which they had to consume without the use of the hands, since they were bound in straight-jackets. Guyot inquired of the Mother Superior in charge how long girls were confined under such conditions. They remained there, answered the Mother Superior, until they volunteered to be placed en carte, or, i the case of those who had offended against the regulations, until she-- the Mother Superior-- was satisfied that they were sincerely contrite. There was a second alternative she might have mentioned: until, in the permanent semi-darkness and ammoniac dung-heap stench, they went insane -- a condition always put down by the medical officers as being the result of advanced syphilis.
      Finally Guyot visited the wing reserved for children suspected of having been engaged in prostitution. Their dormitory consisted of a darkened room, without windows or lights, and their beds were wooden cages. The reason offered for this was that these children must not pick up immodest habits by observing each other as they retired to bed, and the cages ensured against them instructing each other in lesbian practices in the darkness. He asked what happen to such children after they had been released. Lecour, who was with him during his visit, replied that the authorities wrote to the mairie of the district where they had been born, and if the officials of the mairie could not locate their parents or guardians, they were apprenticed to a licensed brothel." pp. 180-182
"The young man blackens the prostitute, 'speaks of her as beyond all hope of restoration' because 'it lessens the uneasy sense of guilt' which stirs within his breast." p. 184
"Both Howard Vincent and Superintendent Dunlap obviously felt frustrated in their inability under existing laws to suppress the traffic in girls. This was emphasized by Superintendent Dunlap in his testimony. He complained that in the Tower Hamlets area, he and his colleagues had discovered old gentlemen actually in bed with girls of twelve or thirteen, and had been unable to take any action even when the girls sought police protection. For such girls to obtain redress at law it was necessary for them to produce medical evidence confirming that they had been physically violated against their will. Such evidence is notoriously hard to produce, even today, and since frequently the victim had been chloroformed or drugged prior to being violated, virtually impossible for them. Children of eleven and under were scarcely better protected. Often sold by irresponsible and inadequate parents to procurers -- under-age children commanded high prices -- they could not be rescued until the police obtained a writ of Habeas Corpus against the brothel-keeper for a specifically named child. The only charge which could be laid, even in such circumstances, was that of abduction, and then only if the father of the child was prepared to prefer such a charge. Since mother could not, in law, prefer charges of abduction, fatherless children who had no legal guardian, children of widows, children whose fathers had deserted the family, illegitimate children, were completely unprotected. Finally in the rare cases where a brothel-owner was actually brought to court on abduction charges, it was necessary that the child-victim would give evidence on oath. To do this she had to prove that she understood the meaning of the oath, an absurdly difficult test for a working-class girl of those days, and impossible for a young child. Prosecutions virtually never proceeded beyond the oath-taking." pp. 226-227
"The reason for this indifference is easily explained. An atrocity on a massive scale (it is worth mentioning here that a hundred young girls a year were sold to one client, King Leopold of the Belgians, and a similar number to a wealthy Harley Street physician, to arrive at some idea of the number involved) redounds on the human condition in general, demanding the admission that humanity rather than an individual is capable of such viciousness, that Society itself is in some way deficient. " pp. 227-228
Regarding her refusal to assist in the suppression of "free lance and part time" prostitutes, Josephine said, " ' My principle has always been to let individuals alone, not to pursue them with any outward punishment, nor drive them out of any place so long as they behave decently, but to attack organized prostitution, that is when a third party, actuated by the desire of making money, sets up a house in which women are sold to men. ' " p. 228
      "In the fashionable brothels of London, according to the Pall Mall Gazette, the profit derived from conventional prostitution was minimal to the point of loss-leading. The real profits were to be found in the exploitation of 'fresh girls' up from the country. West End club-men would pay anything up to twenty-five guineas for a teenage virgin, and up to a hundred for the privilege of raping or tormenting a young child. One house, in Half Moon Street -- and it is difficult to imagine a more fashionable area -- specialized in the flagellation and rape of young children imprisoned in sound-proofed rooms. In Panton Street and Jermyn Street, which had been sanctuaries for affluent vice since the 1830s, no such precautions were deemed necessary, and the air was rent with the screams of the victims.
      In such establishments, girls who attempted to defend themselves where straight-jacketed, strapped to their beds or simply held down by servants of the house. When fastidious clients wished to take their pleasure undisturbed by screams, the children -- mostly between the ages of ten and sixteen but not infrequently much younger -- were chloroformed, or drugged with 'drowsers' (a medicated snuff'), or, most frequently of all, were gagged with the leather thong which was employed in the armed services for those undergoing field punishment by flogging. Young girls frequently died from the combined effects of shock, mental and physical, and suffocation from the gag and the pressure of their assailant's body lying on top of them. In the more expensive establishments a permanent medical staff was retained to repair the lacerations caused by the violation of young teenagers. This was not the product to an improbable compassion, but was due to the high price provided their vaginas were not grown slack: there was, indeed a considerable trade in 'second-hand virgins'. Needless to say, there was little benefit to be derived from patching up the sexual parts of infants: they were thrown, bleeding, out on to the street. Virginity, and pre-pubescent virginity in particular, was the intrinsic specie of West End brothels -- all else was but a poor substitute.
      Methods of recruitment varied. The most usual was the out-right purchase of children from drunken or feckless parents, though kidnapping was far from unusual. Unwanted babies were acquired, often from day-nurses in slum areas, and from baby-farmers. They were kept until they were old enough to practice fellatio; at four or five they were deemed to be sufficiently developed for penetration, after which they were discarded, brutalized and tormented beyond the capacity of sanity to endure. . . .
      Older girls were lured into brothels by the same means as in the case of Annie Swan: by procuresses dressed as nuns, or 'ladies' who maintained they represented charitable welfare services; or by charwomen who said that they could recommend positions where pay was high and no 'character' was needed. Girls, even of the more prosperous classes of society -- particularly from the class of skilled artisans, whose families had pretensions to gentility -- were peculiarly vulnerable since, as Stead emphasized, far from being on their guard against plausible abductors, they had absolutely no knowledge of sex, let alone of prostitution." p. 248-250
"The controversy which raged around the Eliza Armstrong case has somewhat obscured the results of the Maiden Tribute campaign. It was a notable victory, not merely in the specialized history of woman's emancipation, but also in the story of the development of nineteenth-century liberal democracy. For a thousand years it had been tacitly accepted that the daughters of the lower orders were freely available for the sexual enjoyment of the privileged. The lower orders were now in a position to impose and enforce a denial of this dubious right. But the privileged were still in a position to exact a price for this limitation of their pleasures." p. 254
" 'Our race is suffering largely from a species of moral atrophy, from a fatal paralysis of the sense of justice. Many literally do not know what justice is.'
The root cause of this blindness, this 'moral atrophy', is the failure of the prosperous to understand, and to be concerned for, the poor." p. 271
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