Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
Page 13
Some historians emphasise how, in this new domesticity,women became modest and passive, their sexuality dormant and their fate isolation and loneliness,33 while others show how management of a household was raised to the level of a science. Theories of hygiene, nutrition and regulation of personal behaviour were turned into a series of norms intended to prevent the family from falling apart, now widely called the Domestic Ideology.34
During the Rise of the Social, the bourgeoise believed it had a duty to civilise the working class, as the aristocracy before believed it had in relation to the bourgeoisie.35 And in the same period that European explorers thought that natives in faraway places would benefit by being colonised, so did the ‘more enlightened’ class think the working class would benefit by intervention in their affairs. The middle class proclaimed the right way to live to everyone else, placing the bourgeois woman in a position vis-à-vis the working-class woman in which ‘a new continuity was established for the bourgeois woman between her family activities and her social activities. She discovered a new missionary domain in which to operate.’36 Not by chance, there was a sizeable social area that needed her. As Engels pointed out in his study of Manchester, the bourgeois capitalist system created an ideal of home and family life that was impossible for the workers to attain:
The various members of the family only see each other in the mornings and evenings, because the husband is away at his work all day long. Perhaps his wife and the older children also go out to work and they may be in different factories. In these circumstances how can family life exist?37
In France, Jules Simon published popular works (L’Ouvrière 1861, La Famille 1869) railing against women who worked as ‘impious’ and ‘sordid’, no longer women. They represented disorder, when order was defined as family and maternity. In Britain, bourgeois residents moved to oust brothels from their environs.38 As Weeks sees it,‘The more ideology stressed the role of sex within conjugality the more it was necessary to describe and regulate those forms of sexuality which were outside it.’39
With the identification of families as virtuous and normal, large numbers of people were discursively converted into social misfits: people without proper places in a domestic structure. Not only flagrant beggars, homeless children and criminals but people who spent too much time in taverns, who gambled, who bought meals outside the home, who weren’t interested in marriage and who liked to dawdle in the streets: all were peered at through a lens that sought to know why they did these things and how they could be prevented. Non-conforming individuals, those outside the hearth, were seen as threats to normal society who had to be steered toward a right way of life, cared for, protected from their erring ways.40 This meant setting up machinery of social control that included investigation, surveillance, codes of dress and behaviour, definition of acceptable pastimes and vocations as well as techniques for classifying and recording the information collected. Donzelot calls this philanthropy:
not to be understood as a naively apolitical term signifying a private intervention in the sphere of so-called social problems, but [to] be considered as a deliberately depoliticising strategy for establishing public services and facilities at a sensitive point midway between private initiative and the state.41
The discourse of problem groups necessitated the creation of jobs for those who would carry out the projects. ‘Prostitutes’, once viewed as miscreants who assaulted men in the street and offended good taste, were now seen as pathological, capable of contaminating good citizens and needing to be controlled.
The Drive to ‘Do Something about Prostitution’
According to Tony Henderson, what the eighteenth-century London poor said about themselves (as opposed to what the non-poor said about them) indicates that ‘prostitutes, both individually and collectively,were perhaps as much an accepted part of plebeian London as any other identifiable group’, and they appeared to have had little difficulty in moving into other roles.42 But the Vagrancy Act of 1822 named ‘prostitutes’ as one among other stigmatised groups who could be arrested.43 Even so, efforts to count and locate offenders were frustrated by the impossibility of agreeing on their definition. Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor, classified ‘prostitutes’ with vagrants, professional beggars, cheats and thieves, and subdivided them into ‘park women’, ‘female operatives’, ‘maid-servants’, ‘ladies of intrigue’, ‘keepers of houses of assignation’ and ‘cohabitant prostitutes’. But Mayhew himself said that ‘literally every woman who yields to her passions and loses her virtue is a prostitute, but many draw a distinction between those who live by promiscuous intercourse, and those who confine themselves to one man’.44 Lynda Nead cautions us to read the term ‘prostitute’ not as
an objective description of an already-determined group; rather, it actively constitutes a group which is both socially and economically specific. In the nineteenth century this process of categorization was produced through various social practices, through legal and medical discourses, religious and cultural forms.45
That the term did not have a firm meaning is reflected in the following excerpt from the trial of a woman picked up under the Contagious Diseases Acts:
Q. You know the man who goes by the name of William Simmons?
A. Yes.
Q. Have you lived with him for some time?
A. Yes, for six or seven years.
Q. As his wife?
A. Yes.
Q. And you are not a prostitute?
A. No; only to the one man.
Q. Only to Simmons, you mean?
A. Yes.
Q. You mean that you are not a prostitute, other than as living with one man without marriage?
A. Yes, that’s what I mean.46
The difficulty in counting and locating the right women, rather than throwing doubt on the project, incited more discourse, more investigation and more surveillance. But the dangerous connection to sex was certain; sexuality was becoming ‘a continent of knowledge, with its own rules of exploration and its own expert geographers’.47 In France, investigators affiliated with the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, charged with researching factory life, were like ‘travellers in foreign lands, [ journeying] from city to city, recording in minute detail the new and strange sights they had seen’.48 Their reports were reprinted and their views were cited as scientific evidence for programmes, but
Programmes presuppose that the real is programmable, that it is a domain subject to certain determinants, rules, norms and processes that can be acted upon and improved by authorities. They make the objects of government thinkable in such a way that their ills appear susceptible to diagnosis, prescription and cure by calculating and normalising intervention.49
So the social invented not only its objects but the necessity to do something about them, and thereby its own need to exist. Before, various kinds of authority figures, including kings and clergy, pronounced and decreed about promiscuity, commercial sex and adultery, and there was no contradiction in the fact that members of the royalty, nobility and clergy themselves bought sex and ran brothels, and that some nuns sold sex.50 The relationship between those doing the decreeing and those being decreed about was hierarchical and judicial, those above deciding what the duties and faults were of those below, without any self-reflexion on their own roles.51
The question is not whether ‘prostitution’ had long been simultaneously deplored, combated and tolerated, because it had; the whore stigma had been severe and the punishment at times horrific (as it was for many crimes). But what appears in histories prior to the social consists mostly of municipal authorities’ dictates on how to deal with problems of crime and public scandal, with the clergy providing pious reasons in support. Discourses changed little over hundreds of years. Some phenomena were condemned, but they were thought to exist inevitably, through a ‘great chain of being’, God’s will or Destiny (which didn’t stop some individuals from trying to alter fate). But when problems began to be viewed as inte
rdependencies within the social fabric, a different relationship arose between the person considering a problem called ‘prostitution’ and the ‘prostitute’.
Érica-Marie Benabou draws a detailed picture of the situation in Paris before the Revolution, when a system of policing the sex trade was already in place. The police des moeurs (morals police) were more interested in finding out about aristocratic clients than in penalising women who sold sex.52 In 1769, Restif de la Bretonne published his ‘utopian’ plan, which suggested placing 20,000 women in state-regulated houses, with older, former workers in charge, for the better convenience and delight of the clientele. One element of his proposal recommended mandatory medical exams for the women, whom he called filles de joie – gay girls.53
Filles de joie or putains (putrid women): the schizophrenic nature of ideas about women who sold sex is not easily explained. At the beginning of the social period, the most widespread image was the ‘vile harlot’, whose body was a stinking sewer threatening society but who was also carefree, pleasure-seeking and seductive. An alternative image saw her as a victim of circumstances, and this image came to predominate as time passed (in tandem with the rise in helping professions). Nead devotes a good part of her Myths of Sexuality to images of the ‘prostitute’ and theorises the metamorphosis from dangerous to victimised as a mechanism allowing outsiders to feel pity rather than fear: ‘Pity deflects the force of that group and redistributes power in terms of a conventional relationship organized around notions of social conscience, compassion and philanthropy.’54 The various ‘prostitute’ images were never perfectly distinct from one another but rather acted at one minute as the symbol of lighthearted pleasure, and at the next as vile, contaminating or damaged – a tendency that still exists.
Considered the bearer of syphilis, the woman selling sex was associated with excrement, dead meat and decay.55 To the French police, she was a member of the ‘dangerous’ classes, irrevocably associated with the crime and criminality that obsessed Parisians early in the nineteenth century. A police report published in 1828 summarised the actions required to solve the city’s problems:
(1) Put a stop to usury, which is becoming excessive; (2) Curb the bailiff’s rapacity; (3) Expel five-sixths of the beggars still here; (4) Clear Paris of a crowd of vagrants who do nothing but spread theft and crime; (5) Halt the proliferation of common prostitutes.56
Through a series of administrative decisions that responded to the spirit of the time, rather than the passing of any law, the Paris police prefecture imposed both state regulation and mandatory medical examinations on ‘prostitutes’, together comprising what came to be known as the French System whose essential principles were: (1) create an ‘enclosed milieu’; (2) supervise it constantly; (3) compartmentalise this space according to distinct perceived types, in a hierarchy. Corbin’s work demonstrates how these principles facilitated both the surveillance and the disciplining of those selling sex and how they form part of a typical Enlightenment project to ‘destroy confusions’ of categories.57
The social investigator who produced the necessary knowledge was Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet, who had already investigated Parisian sewers when he took on ‘prostitution’. Considered the chief authority during the nineteenth century, his Paris research and ideas were emulated all over Europe. He took the regulatory system to be a natural development towards the new concept of public health, and through his presentation of extensive statistics approved what the police had already done. But Parent-Duchâtelet’s research produced another kind of result. Interviewing thousands of Paris women, he was unable to prove that there was a ‘prostitute’ type, a regional tendency or a predisposing professional life. Although he began his work believing the ‘prostitute’ had immoral proclivities, he ended by seeing her as a victim of poverty and as a member of the urban proletariat.58
Writing of the nineteenth century, Jill Harsin calls the police des moeurs a ‘creeping bureaucracy’, an administrative department with a huge budget, while a military corps of gendarmes royales was required to accompany them on their rounds.59 Registered brothel-keepers became one sort of civil servant, brothel inspectors another. Dispensaries dedicated to the business of examining women’s vaginas employed doctors who used a new metal apparatus, the speculum. The studies and diagnoses they made ‘legitimated all kind of intrusions into women’s lives – observation, classification, supervision – in the name of research’,60 and each form of intrusion provided intruders with employment.
In nineteenth-century Britain, commercial sex was a burning issue, and London was believed to have more women selling sex than any other European capital. ‘From three o’clock in the afternoon, it is impossible for any respectable woman to walk from the top of the Haymarket to Wellington Street, Strand’.61 The reigning image was of a woman who falls into degradation, torturing guilt, drink, failing looks, syphilis and suicide, within just a few years (Nead’s ‘myth’), and various serious texts reproduced it without question.62 William Acton, inspired by Parent-Duchâtelet’s work in Paris, published the first British study, in 1856, aimed at debunking the myth, his chief finding being that ‘prostitution’ was a transitory occupation.63 This led him to advocate regulation as the best way to reduce the harm done to women and to society.
The move toward regulation in Britain came with the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, which mandated the medical examination of ‘prostitutes’ in England’s garrison and port towns, to protect the armed forces.64 Nonuniformed police officers selected women for examination; those found to be suffering from venereal disease were isolated. But Acton’s findings provided ammunition to campaigners against the Acts, since if ‘prostitution’ was not a predestined tragedy, then it could be done away with.
Occupied by Women: Cross-class Accounts
The vast surge of proposals and actions on behalf of problem groups was often motivated by a desire to prevent unhappiness and injustice. Women and men often took up the social banner because they were in sympathy with or angry about the lot of the poor; they spent time theorising, debating ideas, forming associations, as well as doing practical work.65 While middle-class women were seen as helping the working class, histories of philanthropic movements show that the benefits were questionable or nonexistent for the people they aimed to help. The benefits to the helpers, on the other hand, in terms of experience, satisfaction and future prospects, were significant, both for themselves as individuals and for capitalism. The moral reformation of the working class encouraged workers to spend time at home, where they would eat, sleep and bathe at certain hours in certain ways, in order to be fresh and able to perform in the workplace. Nancy Armstrong notes how ‘the notion of charity was inexorably linked to the female role of household overseer’.66
For a complex of demographic and social reasons, there were now more educated women with time to spare and/or the desire or need to work for a living: widows, unmarried daughters, wives without access to their own property, and leisured women. At mid-century in Britain, women with money to pay an attorney could denounce violent husbands, but only through laws passed in 1870 and 1882 did they get the right to keep their own earnings after marriage.67 In France,‘women who wished to improve their position in society through work were obliged to sacrifice their private lives’, and an 1880 study of female postal workers showed a majority had chosen financial and professional independence rather than marriage.68 Perhaps the most famous such woman was Florence Nightingale, who defied her upper-class parents and became a nurse. The museum dedicated to her honour says that her greatest achievement was the raising of nursing to respectability; she was awarded the Order of Merit and herself never married. Some extremists said such ‘redundant’ women should be shipped to the colonies.69 The supply of women needing or wanting to earn a living was growing, but how could they maintain respectability?
It is risky to impose contemporary ideas about class on the past. In the nineteenth century, women’s relationships
with men mostly determined their class status,70 but once a woman went out to work, she confused categories. The only occupations long considered compatible with respectability were lady’s companion, governess, teacher – jobs carried out by living inside a real home, by the side of real respectable ladies. Governesses were ideally meant to be gentlewomen. At the same time, they shared the taint of forbidden sexuality the bourgeoisie ascribed to all house servants,71 which means that even the respectable occupations were considered dubious.72 One middle-class lady considered engraving, drawing patterns and needlework to be suitable tasks; another said her work was running a household, writing letters and seeing callers; while a third believed her work was crocheting bonnets for friends.73 These ideas reflect what the bourgeoisie considered correct.74
The jobs widely available for women in the nineteenth century were in textile manufacturing and domestic service, but women worked in a wide array of other jobs. In England, they were dressmakers, needlewomen, milliners,washerwomen, charwomen, milkmaids, nursemaids, circus women, shoebinders, mantua makers, satinstitch workers, glove makers, straw bonnet makers, stay trimmers, hat binders and chambermaids. Women worked in the jute industry, as machinists in mills and as hawkers, flower sellers, message girls and match girls. They brewed and sold beer; they managed lodging houses and brothels; they tended silkworms. Outside the cities they kept vegetable gardens and animals, carried loads on their backs and picked strawberries and hops. Flither girls gathered limpets and birds’ eggs, and women hauled coal in the mines. Later in the century, more women did ‘white blouse’ work (school teaching, shop assistance, office work and nursing) and were waitresses and attendants in toilets. Many jobs became available because of the rise of social projects: cleaning, maintenance and policing. Some women in all jobs also sold sexual favours at some time, to tide themselves over or to supplement income.75 Petty theft and picking pockets were other sources of income.