Fallen Women

Victorians thought that prostitutes were women with deviant sexual desires who needed curing and that some prostitutes offended out of ‘feeble-mindedness’. The real reason women took up the trade, of course, was their poverty.

Victorian ideas about respectability restricted what work women could do. It was low-paid work. If a male bread-winner was lost to the household, a woman's earnings as a maid, or from doing laundry, charring or hawking, would not feed the family.

Prostitution was common. Girls as young as twelve years old were sold into the trade by parents in need of money. I was confused when I discovered marriages among my ancestors in Northgate involving girls of fourteen, but the age of consent then was only thirteen and, in poor families, child marriage was the better alternative.

Blue Town

Blue Town prostitutes mentioned in newspapers lived in narrow places behind the High Street, such as Bethel Passage or Kings-Head Alley. They were usually with a soldier or sailor and were generally charged with being drunk or riotous, causing a disturbance with their shouting and swearing. They typically got a 14 day prison sentence.

If a man was drunk enough, a woman might not have to go through with an immoral act to obtain the food and money she needed.

In 1872, a woman lodging in West Street found herself in need of money to pay a fine. The alternative was prison. She targeted a sailor from the Naval Barracks in Sheerness who had spent the evening in various different public houses in Blue Town. She and a friend got talking to him at the bar in the Lord Nelson. At closing time, she went with him to Mrs Middleton's cookshop and persuaded him to buy her a sandwich. He was very drunk. She ordered a bed for him, telling Mrs Middleton he would pay for it in the morning, and went upstairs with him. An hour later, she was back at her lodgings telling her friend he had given her the money she needed to avoid prison. He woke the next morning to find he'd been robbed.

Some landladies clearly benefitted financially from prostitution at their houses, or turned a blind eye. However, a landlord could fall foul of the law very easily.

After the police made an undercover visit to the Swan Inn, for example, its landlord was fined for letting prostitutes carry on their trade there. A number of women had been observed 'dancing with marines to the strains of a violin' and identified as prostitutes on that basis. The police said the barmen 'knew their character'.

Interestingly, the landlord sought clarification about how he should proceed in future because he had to serve the women, whether they were prostitutes or not. He was told not to let them ply their trade or get drunk and not to let them stay too long. Not much of an answer, is it. How long is too long? It was not against the law to chat and dance, after all. What this tells us is that a landlord was expected to know who the prostitutes were, in the same way the police did.

The Contagious Diseases Acts

In the early 1870s, a policeman had absolute power over any woman's freedom, reputation and body. She could be locked up, forcibly examined and charged with prostitution on his say so, without any evidence being collected or any case being made. What's more, if a perfectly innocent woman was abducted in this way, the fact she had been examined once meant she was highly likely to be targeted again.

It must have been terrifying. The policemen who rounded women up wore plain clothes, you were being set upon by a man who looked like any other. You were taken to a police cell and restrained while a doctor carried out an internal examination with a metal speculum to determine whether you carried venereal disease, your feet in stirrups. If you cried out or resisted, your skirts would be pulled up over your head and used to bind and gag you.

If you were discovered to be infected, you were sent to a Lock hospital, usually a former leper hospital converted for the treatment of syphilis, until you recovered or your sentence was completed. This could be some time. An original period of three months had been extended to a year in 1869. Women could only return home after obtaining a certificate of discharge.

Let's just take a moment to let that sink in. A woman could be arrested, forcibly examined and imprisoned for up to a year without any evidence, where no crime had been committed. You're not going to be surprised when I tell you that there were no such compulsory checks or periods of confinement for men, though they, too, carried and spread the disease.

A song included in 19th century ballad sheets, about a young soldier or sailor, refers to the treatment of syphilis at a Lock hospital in the form of 'salts and pills of white mercury' and being wrapped up in white flannel.

"As I was a walking down by the Lock Hospital,

As I was walking one morning of late,

Who did I spy but my own dear comrade

Wrapp'd up in flannel, so hard was his fate"

It describes a young man cut down in his prime by the disease, and this is the crux of the matter. The government was concerned at the weakening of its armed forces, consisting exclusively of such young men. This is why the police were given such arbitrary and far-reaching powers to round up women, in ports and garrison towns initially, where prostitutes were seen as a necessary evil because servicemen lived under conditions of enforced celibacy.

The song makes clear that this disease was something women 'did' to men, because if she had only told him, he could have sought a cure in time. It was a war between the sexes and only one side was ever going to win. A contemporary prostitute says it best:

"It is men, only men, from the first to the last that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayer and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die!"

Her statement refers to the fact that, while being treated in the lock hospital, you would be cured of moral deviancy by means of Christian ministry and improving texts in an associated lock asylum, where you were taught a decent working-class profession to rehabilitate you back into respectable society.

Statistics had been available since 1862 showing that regulating prostitution did not reduce infections among servicemen, but in 1864 legislation had been passed anyway. Then, five years later, it was rolled out across the whole country. Florence Nightingale was active in opposing the measures, recruiting a journalist to write up the background material she provided into newspaper articles and launching a Ladies Association for repeal of the Acts. In 1870 the Association published a detailed explanation of what was unjust and unlawful about the Acts in the Daily News:

"As far as women are concerned, they remove every guarantee of personal security which the law has established and held sacred, and put their reputation, their freedom, and their persons absolutely in the power of the police."

Canterbury Barracks

The Barracks on Northgate Street spread over nearly half a mile. Around 2000 soldiers lived there in overcrowded conditions, with poor sanitation, poor drainage and poor ventilation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, drunkenness in the city's pubs was rife. Venereal disease was a problem. The Barracks had its own Military Hospital where sufferers were treated in the 'itch ward'.

The streets alongside the Barracks in Northgate included Ruttington Lane, where Mrs Bradford kept a house of ill-fame in 1871. After a caution from the Relieving Officer, she promised to discontinue 'the trade she was carrying on'.

In Broad Street, nearby, women employed as servants at the Marquess of Lorne Inn used an outhouse for immoral purposes and gave the money to the landlady. Several were sent to the Lock hospital and confessed the life they had led to an agent of the Canterbury Social Purity Association.

For more on the forced examination of women

https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/a-nasty-history-of-the-vaginal-speculum