Prostitution in Victorian Era Society: Women and Gender in Whitechapel Alleys Often called the worlds oldest profession,

prostitution is a taboo subject even in the more open-minded twenty-first century where the idea of sex is for sale in every advertisement and magazine page. In the Victorian world, where women were held to exacting standards, the idea of selling ones physical body was tantamount to committing murder. Prostitution was seen as a cancer upon good, moral, Victorian society and the women who took to it as a career were demonized. The point of this paper is to explore the harsh realities of the life of a female prostitute from streetwalkers in Whitechapel to the women in brothels that catered to the whims of wealthy men. By the end of the paper, the plight of the prostitute in the Victorian era and some of the reform methods that British politicians tried to use to cull the women that made their living selling their bodies will be discussed properly. Although common belief places prostitution as a career for women that has existed openly since the earliest parts of time, in the Victorian Era, it isnt the best path for a woman. The Victorian Era is synonymous with staid and frankly boring respectability. To scholars and historians, the period of time when Queen Victoria ruled over England and its territories is one of great progress for the way that the British Empire expanded to India and Australia as well as other territories. The period is also one of countless advances in fields from technology, to medicine, and to the arts. However, where morality and social mores are concerned, the period harkened back to a time where women were second class citizens and even more frequently seen as subhuman. In the 1800s, there was a distinct difference between people

that were men and women. Where men were free to be as licentious as they wanted, there was an obvious line that women could not cross and still be treated humanely. Paula Bartley writes in her book, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 18601914 that, sexual impurity and its corollary, prostitution, certainly caused concern.1 Concern for whom, a curious historian might ask. Certainly male heterosexuality gained in precedence and prominence even in the staid and solemn Victorian era, but no panic ever occurred over excess amounts of male heterosexuality. Women were held up to exacting standards on all ends, from motherhood to household management to sexuality. The idea of womanhood in that period was for members of the fairer sex to be wholly submissive to their husbands. They had roles to respect and remain in and to step out of line would be tantamount to destroying the sanctity of societal norms. According to Professor John C. Fout in the documentary The History of Sex: Part Two, men were to be breadwinners and go out into the world, and that was the public world. And the private world was the world of women, a domestic sphere, where they were to be housewives and mothers and angels in the household, which was a common Victorian ideology.2 This is an example of the inescapable roles that women were placed into as a thriving middle-class took precedence over the aristocracy that had ruled in the previous era.3 Good women were the ones that were silent in the face of a husbands infidelities, who held themselves above the need for sexual congress. Even when wed, their virtue was to be protected and their minds were to be
1 2

Bartley, Paula. Prostitution: prevention and reform in England, 1860-1914. London: Routledge, 2000. p 1 Peltier, Melissa J. "From Don Juan to Queen Victoria." The History of Sex. Dir. Mark Hufnail. The History Channel. 18 Sept. 1999. Television. 3 Ibid.

sheltered. Bad women, in contrast, were any that didnt fit the standards of morality and who dared to exercise any sort of autonomy over their bodies. The types of women that were considered to be bad were myriad, with sex workers, feminists, and spinsters among the worst regarded. In Victoria times, the woman was to be the heart of the household: something kept within, safe and sheltered. However, when women stepped out from their roles and took to the streets and alleyways of England, it was looked upon in a way similar to the way that deserters from the armed forces were. By abandoning propriety even when they had no other avenues to turn to, these women were turning away from the backbone of British society. What caused a woman in the Victorian era to engage in prostitution? There are several different ideas on the matter from calling the prostitute, an innocent victim of middle-class seduction and betrayal,4 to suggesting that, most prostitutes began life as factory women.5 In the Victorian era, the tides had changed so that the middle class was gaining prominence, and the working class was overworked. With Londons population increasing and people migrating into the cities to look for work in factories by the thousands, honest and well-paying work certainly would have been hard to find. For those women who were working fifty-eight hour workweeks in the textile factories and only bringing in a few shillings for back-breaking, finger crushing labor. Such horrors in the workplace are described in explicit details in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 where Friedrich Engels writes in a description of the terrifying conditions that occur in factories:
4

Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. p3. 5 Work, Gender, and Family in Victorian England pg152

Between June 12th and August 3rd, 1844, the Manchester Guardian reported the following serious accidents (the trifling ones it does not notice): June 12th, a boy died in Manchester of lockjaw, caused by his hand being crushed between wheels. June 15th, a youth in Saddleworth seized by a wheel and carried away with it; died, utterly mangled. June 29th, a young man at Green Acres Moor, near Manchester, at work in a machine shop, fell under the grindstone, which broke two of his ribs and lacerated him terribly. July 24th, a girl in Oldham died, carried around fifty times by a strap; no bone unbroken. July 27th, a girl in Manchester seized by the blower (the first machine that receives the raw cotton), and died of injuries received.6 The list of injuries is nearly endless. What could factory life offer women who had mouths at home to feed aside from injuries that threatened to leave them unable to bear children or worse, take their lives? Prostitution was a career choice that many women were forced to engage in so that they could afford to feed themselves and their families. In addition to the weight that many working-class Victorian women had on their shoulders to take up providing for their families, there are a great many causes that would lead a woman towards a life of prostitution or the occasional practice of selling her body for cash. One of them that is discussed extensively in the research books is liquor dependency. In the case of alcoholic beverages, liquor was seen as a gateway drug with no good results coming from it. One quote from The Southwell Diocesan Magazine describes the effect: Love of drink is the worst enemy these poor girls have to fight, often falling into sin at first when under the influence of alcohol, they drink again from misery, until the craving so gets the mastery over them, that humanly speaking, they are beyond help.7 The point of the quote is to illustrate how for a young woman, starting to drink even in minuscule amounts, will be susceptible to committing a moral crime that ruins her for life. And afterwards the young woman finds herself swept away to drinking. It is pictured as a circle, a
6 7

The Condition of the working class 169-70 The Southwell Diocesan Magazine (July 1888) p. 139

cycle where drinking leads to sexual excess which leads to even more drinking until the unassuming young woman is mired in a life of her own making. This theory blames drink and drink alone, ignoring any extenuating circumstances aside from the weakness that alcohol is said to cause. Different types of women become different types of prostitutes. In the Victorian era, there was a hierarchy of prostitutes that went hand in hand with the social stratification that was common.8 In Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914, Paula Bartley describes one version of the hierarchy of prostitutes by interpreting and expanding upon the words of Henry Mayhew: Henry Mayhew identifies six main categories: kept mistresses; demi-mondains; low lodging house women; sailors and soldiers women; park women; and thieves women. This, as with most categorisations, oversimplifies the composition of the nineteenthcentury prostitute population even though it does indicate the diversity of the male social groups they serviced. Moreover, Henry Mayhew defines the prostitutes in relation to the men who used them rather than to their own social class.9 In this classification, prostitutes were not even given the right to be defined on their own merits. Their worth, already said to be diminished due to their profession, was related only to the men that bought and sold their services. However, as bleak and sexist it may seem, classifying prostitutes by their clientele along with the locations that they frequent is one of the easiest ways to classify them while placing them in the bounds of a relatively normal class system. Kept-mistresses and demi-mondains were women of means who depended on the patronage of one or more upper-class men for their livelihood. Kept-mistresses were often set up in a household of their own separate from that of their lovers own so that the wealthy man that
8 9

Linda Nead, Myths of Sexuality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p.96 Bartley, p3

frequented them would not be seen in poor East End neighbourhoods. In the case of the demimondain, their primary income came from gifts from the men that surrounded them. According to modern times, the two would not have been lumped in as prostitutes, but in the Victorian era, they would hardly be considered anything else. Low lodging house women were the next step down on the hierarchy from mistresses and the demi-mondains and from the name, one infers that these are the women of brothels. In relation to the next tier of prostitution, Maria Luddy writes in her book Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1940, that: The Rev. Maguire, in evidence given to a commission on the CDAs in 1871, noted the class distinctions which existed. In Furzes Alley in Cork he described women of the most abandoned and low class who generally went with soldiers and sailors.10 Where modern society would deem streetwalkers as a whole as a rather disreputable lot, the way that the author and her source pinpoint those specific types of prostitutes as a particularly class is intriguing. In other books and reference materials, the streetwalker is definitely the lowest on the hierarchy regardless of her clientele. In fact, in William Actons Prostitution, the author actually refers to them in rather harsh terms. He refers to the streetwalkers in one sentence that says, The low prostitute, infesting low neighbourhoods, is a phrase that speaks for itself.11 Acton does not even attempt to define these women or give them a description in the way that he had done for the other prostitutes in his hierarchy. Such an oversight shows that in the eyes of the people of the Victorian era, the lower levels of prostitutes were barely given even a fraction of the regard that they deserved as people.

10 11

Luddy, Maria. Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. pgs 41-2 Acton, William, and Peter Fryer. Prostitution. New York: Praeger, 1969. pg 35

There were a great many risks and dangers that prostitutes in the Victorian era had to face. Most professions in that era that were undertaken by the working-class entailed many risks and frequently the factory jobs were dangerous enough to cost workers their lives, but prostitution had an added danger. That danger was the risk of these women catching communicable of venereal diseases from their clients and then passing them on. William Action actually writes that, the prostitute almost inevitably contracts some form of the dangerousdiseases, which in medicine we term venereal.12 In the course of a lifetime, even members of the highest class of prostitutes would come into contact with gentlemen (and here the term is used loosely) that were infected with communicable diseases. Unfortunately, the spread of disease was not properly documented and blame for the spread of diseases such as syphilis landed squarely on the heads of the prostitutes. The clients were never blamed and whenever regulation systems were imposed, it was due to the fact that the government pinned everything on the women involved in the sex trade instead of the men. Judith Walkowitz uses her book Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, to talk about the prevailing medical opinion of the day, saying that: The medical rationale for a regulation system was predicated on three assumptions: that syphilis was spread through promiscuous sexual contact with diseased prostitutes ; that existing voluntary facilities for treating female venereal patients were ineffective as preventive and therapeutic institutions; that available diagnostic and therapeutic methods were adequate to carry out the medical provisions of a regulation system.13 In the same way that haemophilia was passed through the blood of the mother, sexually transmitted diseases were said to pass from the woman to the man, without any consideration for
12 13

Ibid pg. 77 Walkowitz, p48

the way that men frequented prostitutes. It was said that there was little that the Victorian man could do to disrupt his social standing, as long as the brothels that he frequented and the lovers that he kept on the side were all female.14 No matter what manner of disease the male patron of a prostitute is infected with, Victorian society would always blame the women that he laid with rather than place responsibility on the men that were bringing sickness home to their doting wives. Aside from the threat of illness, prostitute also faced violence from their patrons as well as from the other sex workers that shared the same East End alleys. In the latter half of 1888, a series of unsolved murders was committed in the east end of London that were so brutal that they have continued to shock and captivate public minds for over a century. With the perpetrators name coming from the signature on a letter sent to a postbox in London, the murderer known as Jack the Ripper became infamous for his crimes committed against female sex workers in the area. The notoriety that these crimes achieved owed their prominent place in Victorian culture and crime history due to several leading factors. In an essay, Judith R. Walkowitz lists three things that may have contributed. She suggests that the sexual mutilation, the naming of the murderer with the Ripper name, as well as the fact that the story of the murders seemed to make up a particularly bloody morality tale are reasons as to why the name Jack the Ripper is still synonymous with crimes against women.15 The five murders in the Ripper case left Whitechapel stunned as prostitutes and their patrons worried about the chances that they would be butchered like animals. In Prostitution and
14 15

Peltier Walkowitz, Judith. "Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence." Feminist Studies 8.3 (1982): 542-74.

the Victorians, Trevor Fisher actually links the Whitechapel Ripper murders with recent campaigns undertaken. In fact, he writes that, The Ripper murders in 1888 were directly attributable to Vigilance campaigns in the East End, which had driven the poorest and most degraded prostitutes to take their clients into dark and dangerous backyards.16 In this, the author firmly places the weight of the blame on the committees and campaigns that were formed to lessen the spread of prostitution and disease through London. He makes a valid point. Without government crackdowns on the moral cancer that was prostitution in that era, one can infer that streetwalkers would have made more of an effort to stay safe and in well-lit areas. The moment that the threat of crackdowns on prostitutes occurred, concern for safety lessened. These women had to make a living somehow, and pandering to government policies and neighborhood campaigns created by many of the men that partake of their wares by hiding away in alleyways and back pathways was the only way that they could survive. The Ripper murders are directly related to the topic of social reform. During the 1880s, serious efforts were made in order to curb or suppress prostitution in the city of London. Several institutions and associations sprang up around the beginning of that decade, calling for a higher standard of society and reform for the fallen women in the streets17. One of the more notable of these associations was the White Cross Army that was founded for, the protection of women and children from prostitution and degradation.18 Organizations like the White Cross Army were instrumental in getting acts and laws passed that affected the ways that prostitutes in
16 17

Fisher, Trevor. Prostitution and the Victorians. New York: St. Martin's, 1997. p145 Bartley, pg 155 18 Ibid. p 156

London could ply their trade. They raised the age of consent,19 20closed down brothels21, and criminalized the process of taking a young woman from the United Kingdom to the mainland to work as a prostitute.22 While these acts and attempts at enforcing a moral blanket over the women that made their living selling sex as their trade certainly made matters difficult for prostitutes, they never quite managed to curb the spread of the sex industry in England in the Victorian Era even when the Ripper murders caused a furor over public outrage. In conclusion, prostitution in the Victorian era of England was as common as child labor in the country in the early 1800s. Despite the risks, many women took to the streets of London in order to supplement or completely replace the income that they were making while toiling for long hours in the citys factories. Even more so, while the idea of sexuality being embraced and used as a product for sale seems at odd with the image of the Victorian era put out by conservatives and historians of the time, it was quite nearly a staple in life as the soldiers and sailors took their turn in the East End with the same women that statesmen and politicians were also entertaining. Neither death nor disease could keep prostitutes and their clientele from coming together and no matter how historians try to paint a picture of the Victorian era as one where sexuality is too taboo to be referenced, the women of the East End certainly knew better.

19 20

Ibid. p 156 Fisher, p134 21 Bartley, p 157 22 Fisher, p133

Works Cited Acton, William, and Peter Fryer. Prostitution. New York: Praeger, 1969. Print. Bartley, Paula. Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. Engels, Friedrich, and David McLellan. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford [England: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Fisher, Trevor. Prostitution and the Victorians. New York: St. Martin's, 1997. Print. Luddy, Maria. Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. McHugh, Paul. Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform. New York, NY: St. Martin's, 1980. Print. Nead, Linda. Myths of Sexuality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p.96 Peltier, Melissa J. "From Don Juan to Queen Victoria." The History of Sex. Dir. Mark Hufnail. The History Channel. 18 Sept. 1999. Television. Walkowitz, Judith R. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Print. Walkowitz, Judith. "Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence." Feminist Studies 8.3 (1982): 542-74. Print. The Southwell Diocesan Magazine (July 1888) p. 139