Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

by Laura María Agustín

  Natalie Zemon Davis lists women’s jobs in sixteenth-century France, apart from domestic service, as ferrying people across rivers, attending in bath-houses, digging ditches and carrying loads at construction sites.76 Joan Landes writes of French women’s widespread desire to go on the stage, this being ‘one of the few professions in which a woman could hope to earn a living, practice a craft and achieve some measure of social acclaim’.77 In 1836, when Parent-Duchâtelet published his survey of ‘prostitutes’, they told him they had worked in over 600 different occu-pations: couturières, seamstresses, breeches makers, coat makers, hairdressers, glove makers, lace makers, artificial flower makers, day labourers, dairymaids, workers in farms and vineyards, shop clerks, street peddlers, acrobats, gauze makers, fringe makers, furriers, hatters, helmet makers, shoemakers, bootmakers, brush makers, laundresses, ironers, jewellers, clockmakers, enamellers, burnishers and polishers, engravers, stage actresses and extras, music teachers and, of course, servants.

  The literary and historical writings of many middle-class men scarcely mention working women unless they sold sex. For Paris Police Prefect F. F-A. Béraud, in a book on ‘public women’, it did not ‘take much acuteness to recognize that a girl who at eight o’clock may be seen sumptuously dressed in an elegant costume is the same who appears as a shop girl at nine o’clock and as a peasant girl at ten’.78 Siegfried Kracauer’s nineteenth-century Paris seems to be a great open-air theatre for men, against whose backdrop carefree women romp, referred to affectionately as vedettes, lorettes, cocottes and grisettes.79 Weeks explains the male prejudice:

  Two factors were of particular symbolic importance and concern to these bourgeois intellectuals, both relating to women: their sexuality and their economic autonomy. Because of the developing ideology of woman’s role in the family and her very special responsibility for society’s well being, it was women working outside the home who received the most attention from the parliamentary commissioners in the 1830s and 40s. Moreover, most attention was paid not to the conditions of work as such but to the moral and spiritual degradation said to accompany female employment.80

  Corbin argues that the woman seeking middle-class clients in Paris did participate in the new, modern, public spectacle, ‘parad[ing] or exhibit[ing] herself on the terraces of the high-class cafés, in the brasseries, in the cafés-concerts, and on the sidewalk’.81 But all women in public were not selling sex; a diversity of women shared the same spaces as their patrons, friends, harassers, potential targets and boyfriends: parks, taverns, markets, theatres and streets. Women also liked to dance, drink, take walks, make money and have sex.‘Although the male ruling class did all it could to restrict the movement of women in cities, it proved impossible to banish them from public spaces. Women continued to crowd into the city centres and the factory districts.’82 Elizabeth Wilson discusses the contradictions between ideology and the possible reality of women’s confinement to the domestic sphere, and disputes, as I did in Chapter 2, the argument that female flâneurs (itinerant urban observers) were impossible. Bourgeois women may not have been ‘permitted’ to spend time in public until special areas with shops were built (the Arcades) and shopping became an acceptable activity,83 but working women were already there when the respectable arrived: working, not working class. There were women of middle-class status working to support themselves, women of the lower class skilled enough to improve their financial and social status,84 and women from a higher class who did jobs considered beneath them.

  Chance, serendipity and personal desire entered into the search for jobs. In many late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels written in Northern Europe, the story depicts individuals’ attempts to break out of oppressive destinies and improve their lives. The classic Bildungs-roman85 described a young, familyless man from the country arriving in Paris or London to make his fortune, learning, loving and in some way triumphing at the end; the familyless young woman trying to do the same was often doomed to disaster and death. Not safely ensconced in a home, she encountered enemies everywhere, some of the fiercest being members of polite society who preferred to see a woman dead rather than unmarried and pregnant, or married but realising herself outside the home. Nevertheless, many significant novels from this time reveal that another plot was waxing, in which marriage was not enough for a bourgeois women and a woman who worked was not punished or doomed to lose respectability.86

  Superficially, women were not considered working class if they presented a genteel image, but in histories of the Contagious Diseases Acts, over and over we are told that researchers erred when trying to identify ‘prostitutes’ and that police officers kept mistakenly arresting ‘decent’women. The sole fact of standing on a notorious street corner, a bare head, ‘garish’ dress, a loud voice or ‘rowdy’ behaviour could incriminate. Olive Schreiner, a writer and exponent of women’s rights, drew attention by not wearing gloves while out walking with a male friend.87 Patriarchy’s desire to distinguish between good and bad women is as old as written history: those who engage in pre- or extramarital sexual activity have to be detectable. The problem for those charged with ferreting out vice arose when ‘the way women dress today they all look like prostitutes’, a policeman’s complaint.88 In fact, mainstream fashions are often initiated by women who sell sex, a phenomenon particularly lamented during the social period.89

  In the lower classes, sexual relations between engaged couples and common law marriages were conventional, but in this epoch distinguishing between pure and impure women became extremely important to the bourgeoisie. Good women were seen as biologically capable of sexual abstinence, morally superior to men and naturally domestic, while men were thought to have an inborn need for frequent sexual relations and a predisposition to vice, which led them to leave home for bars, streets, gaming houses, brothels and theatres. Girls were assumed to have no need for sex, and married women to want it only with their husbands (and, some thought, only in order to have children). ‘Suffer and be still’ may have represented the most extreme vision of proper womanhood, but in a myriad of other ways society told respectable women that sexual desire should be overcome. Women were expected to sexually wait until men were in a position to marry and provide for a family, but men were expected neither to wait until marriage nor to inhibit their desire after it. In order for some women to remain ‘pure’, then, other women had to behave ‘impurely’, whether they were married (‘adulteresses’), servant girls (‘seduced virgins’) or professionals (‘prostitutes’). Later, morally fervent crusades on behalf of purity recognised these contradictions about sexuality and proposed that men assume a ‘woman-like’ chastity, which they linked also to the eradication of syphilis and the vote for women. New waves of evangelical Protestanism reinforced these ideas. In France, the term femmes isolées (isolated, or stranded, women) was used for both women wage earners living alone in furnished rooms and for women selling sex without being registered at a brothel. The authors of the Paris Chamber of Commerce’s Statistique de l’Industrie (1847–8) associated ‘dissipation’ and ‘disorderly conduct’ with workers, in the same way that ParentDuchâtelet targeted ‘vanity and the desire to glitter’ as causing women to sell sex.90 Issues of gender and class are inextricably intertwined in the story of how bourgeois women came to occupy a new sphere in the labour economy.91

  The Creation of Suitable Jobs for Women

  Social investigators, statisticians, police, missionaries, hospital and penitentiary staff, teachers, lecturers, members of committees, tract writers, clergy, campaign activists, clerical workers, doctors, nurses, civil servants: jobs for those engaged in stamping out immorality and imposing virtue abounded, and though many worked as volunteers, as time went on more came to be paid. ‘Social’ work carried a certain prestige and began to be considered a dignified, suitable job for middle-class women; the highest posts were usually assigned to father figures, but the very nature of the project meant there had to be mother figures as well.92 The middle class’s certaint
y of their ability to help may be understood as part of the period’s belief in social evolution:

  All living societies were irrevocably placed on ... a stream of Time – some upstream, others downstream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization ... are all terms whose conceptual content derives ... from evolutionary Time.93

  During the Rise of the Social, a theory of self-government also arose, but it was thought only possible for people with sufficient capacity for rational thinking and, where that was lacking, other people had to govern. Considered ‘as an aggregate’, ‘the poor’ were to be treated differently from individuals capable of ‘specular morality’, the ability to reflect on one’s own moral character.94 The bourgeois way of life was considered advanced, and the poor’s like primitive tribes’, backward. Women were considered inherently inferior to men, but bourgeois women were seen as naturally superior to poor women.95

  Whereas eighteenth-century salon hostesses, a prestigious social group of intellectual women, had moral authority because of their ‘disinterestedness and generosity, an eloquent concern for the public welfare’, virtue was now defined by respectability.96 Middle-class women were seen to have a natural duty to care for the incapable poor, a ‘civilising mission’, which,

  when appropriately applied, not only would give the family a happier and better life, but also would help to eliminate the most grievous wrongs of society. Philanthropy had traditionally been women’s particular concern, and its definition during the ... century ... was broadened to include virtually every major social problem. It is from the narrow base of woman’s special duties and obligations that women in the nineteenth century came to expand their fields of action and their personal horizons.97

  The virtuous domestic woman came to be accepted as knowing what was best for everyone;98 at the same time, anxiety grew about women working outside the home, potential ‘prostitutes’. To the social sector, there was ‘only one cure for sexual licence and that was control’.99

  As superintendents of the domestic sphere, (middle-class) women were represented as protecting and, increasingly, incarnating virtue ... their economic support tended to be translated into a language of morality and affection; their most important work was increasingly represented as the emotional labor motivated (and guaranteed) by maternal instinct.100

  Women wanting to work outside the home could claim a vocation, ‘lifting up’ the poor: reclaiming, restoring, rehabilitating, redeeming and (re)integrating them into society. They would inculcate protestant principles of thrift, individual responsibility and domesticity.101

  The moral decay of the working class was seen above all in terms of its deficient pattern of family life, the apparently absent values of domesticity, family responsibility, thrift and accumulation. Hence the growth of the paradoxical phenomena of leisured middle-class ladies encouraging the education of working-class women in the virtues of housewifery, with the development of sewing schools, cooking classes and so on.102

  A phrase of the time,‘woman’s mission to women’, contradicted the masculine idea that pure women should not know about the ‘vile’ things that happened to less fortunate ones.103 It was argued that women magistrates and women police should be introduced to work with women104 and that workhouses should be supervised by women, who would inject ‘the law of love’.105 For some women it was important that the rescue project be called a ‘home’, and its inmates located through house-to-house visits by women.106

  It has been felt that no efforts on behalf of the fallen were likely to be so successful as those which were made by their own sex. They are able better to enter into their feelings, to sympathise with them, to receive from them their tale of sorrow, and to advise them for their present and eternal welfare.107

  Mary Higgs, for the pamphlet Three Nights in Women’s Lodging Houses, posed as a poor woman in order to find out what went on in places where streetwalkers lived, and proposed that ‘girls such as this should be passed on to some agency that would “mother” them. It is easy to see how a little indecision, and the pressure of hunger, might anchor a girl to sin.’108 Frank Mort, quoting the Reverend Frederick Maurice on the ‘softening, humanising, health-giving influence’ of lady visitors to hospital wards for the poor, notes they

  could supervise and reinforce the medical regime, administering medicines, scrutinising the nurses, reporting their behaviour and above all inquiring into the moral habits of poor patients – factors which were now known to play such a crucial role in the spread of disease.109

  Some believed that religious sisterhoods should take charge so that ordinary women would not lose their respect for men.110

  Even extremists among the moral reformers, the ‘stampers’ and ‘watch committees’, shared a gender concern that Lucy Bland urges us not to lose sight of:‘the evangelical emphasis on personal morality and a moralising role for women within the home gave women a language and a voice with which to demand moral behaviour from those within that home, including their husbands’.111 To understand, Corbin’s comment on men’s attitudes is useful:

  It is important to decipher the meaning of the laughter that rocked the Chamber of Deputies in 1895 when it tried, unsuccessfully, to discuss a legal proposal on prostitution. One can imagine watching a Marshall Sahlins, returned from Tahiti, resting his anthropological gaze on this group of males with bulging bellies, the majority of which were clients of prostitutes, as they shook with irrepressible laughter.112

  Ann Laura Stoler suggests that Foucault insufficiently understood the extent to which European sexualities were formed in, not merely transmitted to, their colonies, and the role that race played in this formation.113 The usual view is that European elites used the colonies as their sexual playground, but

  those same elites were intent to mark the boundaries of a colonizing population, to prevent those men from ‘going native’, to curb a proliferating mixed-race population that compromised their claims to superiority and thus the legitimacy of white rule. In colonial societies as in Europe, ‘racial survival’ was often seen to be precariously predicated on a strict adherence to cultural – and specifically gendered – prescriptions.114

  Europeans may be said to have carried the message about civilising women to the colonies, but this involved, more than colonialism, the creation of ‘a series of hegemonic projects’.115 On her arrival in Sydney in the late 1830s, Caroline Chisholm set out to round up single women immigrants and find them temporary employment and permanent marriage.

  If Her Majesty’s Government be really desirous of seeing a well-conducted community spring up in these Colonies, the social wants of the people must be considered. If the paternal Government wish to entitle itself to that honoured appellation, it must look to the materials it may send as a nucleus for the formation of a good and great people. For all the clergy you can despatch, all the schoolmasters you can appoint, all the churches you can build, and all the books you can export, will never do much good without what a gentleman in that Colony very appropriately called ‘God’s police’ – wives and little children – good and virtuous women.116

  During the French colonising of Shanghai (the ‘Paris of Asia’), systems of regulation, tolerance and eradication of ‘prostitution’ were all tried out and found to fail.117 Tahiti was another site for trying out the French system.118 A system of regulation already existed in Hong Kong when the British exported the Contagious Diseases Acts to India, where Josephine Butler, even while campaigning against them, believed that Britain had a Christian responsibility to protect and civilise. In Vron Ware’s analysis, Butler hoped that Indian women would someday be capable of taking on the role of moral guardian, but first they would have to be freed from the laws and practices that oppressed them. British women were positioned as spiritual mothers, with Indians their daughters.119 When in the late nineteenth century the middle class became aware of large numbers of European women emigrating to seek their fortune in countries such as Argentina, where they worked
in brothels, they called them victims of ‘white slavery’ who should be protected for their own good.120

  Many women reformers also mentioned class and cultural differences in arguing about who was in the best position to implement helping. Ellen Ranyard ran the Female Bible Society on the principle that ‘the poor could best be encouraged to help themselves if they were initially helped by another like themselves’, and helpers supplemented the distribution of bibles by assisting with household tasks.121 Octavia Hill founded a charitable society based on the belief that ‘personal relations between rich and poor would bring the deserving ones out of habits of dependence and thriftlessness’. She bought tenements and sent out female home visitors to collect rents and supervise domesticity.122 Linda Mahood describes the treatment of ‘prostitutes’ in Glasgow’s penitentiaries as

  organized around the premise that inmates could only be reformed if order was put into their lives and a strict regime of ‘mild, wholesome, paternal, and Christian discipline’ was enforced … [W]hat is striking … is the overall ‘gentility’ and similarity to the manner in which middle-class women might spend their evenings. The emphasis on gentility reflects how closely penitentiaries associated middle-class manners with reform.123

  Institutions, including penitentiaries, varied, of course. Those run by Anglican nuns have been called ‘therapeutic communities’ that offered shelter to many types of female victims who entered voluntarily.

  ... penitents were taught instant obedience to orders and to curtsey when passing sisters ... The reformation of the body included cleanliness, ‘modest refined ways,’ and good manners. The sisters’ hope was to render the penitents psychologically unfit for their former lives; success was achieved when formerly acceptable manifestations of working-class speech and behaviour filled reformed penitents with ‘shock and disgust’.124