Policing Prostitution, 1856-1886

Deviance, Surveillance and Morality

Catherine Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138661844
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317321484
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Focusing on the ports, dockyards and garrison towns of Kent, this study examines the social and economic factors that could cause a woman to turn to prostitution, and how such women were policed.

1 PROSTITUTION, POVERTY AND THE MAKESHIFT ECONOMY

Emma Goodhall was brought before the Rochester bench of magistrates in June 1861, on a charge of drunkenness and using obscene language in a public place. Identified in court as a prostitute (though this had no bearing on the charges that had brought her to court that day), Goodhall publicly acknowledged that she earned a living in this way. She offered, by way of explanation, that ‘she had no other means of obtaining a livelihood’, before being convicted and imprisoned for fourteen days with hard labour.¹

The supplementary details exposed by newspaper reports of courtroom hearings of cases like this one shed light on the difficulties negotiated by single or abandoned women living in the Kentish ports and dockyards to support themselves in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Finding themselves in similar circumstances to Goodhall, other women pursued alternative courses of action. Thirty-six-year-old Mary Ann Jones, charged with breaking three panes of glass in Week Street, Maidstone, explained to the bench that she had committed the offence because she was ‘hard up and had nowhere to go’. She was rewarded with fourteen days’ accommodation at the county gaol.² When Georgina Cotsell, a twenty-nine-year-old single woman, found herself in a similarly destitute situation, she attempted to drown herself in the River Medway. Questioned afterwards as to her motive, Cotsell said that she had been ‘thoroughly driven to it by want’; she owed three shillings and sixpence rent on her lodgings in Manor Street, Brompton, but had no means of paying it.³ She volunteered that she ‘had struggled on for two years and was determined not to struggle any longer’. Women with dependants were additionally vulnerable when they found themselves in similarly tightened financial circumstances. Gravesend widow Jane Collins, whose husband had died in the workhouse, was refused outdoor relief for herself and her two children in 1872 by Poor Law Guardians on the grounds that she was ‘under the age’. Determined not to enter the workhouse where her husband had died because she believed the experience had contributed to his death, and unable to support her children, she abandoned them.⁴

It is clearly not possible, from the surviving evidence, to ascertain with any degree of certainty what might have prompted some women of the labouring poor, such as Emma Goodhall, to resort to prostitution when they found themselves in situations of exceptional hardship, whilst others, as demonstrated by these examples, pursued alternative strategies. Not all destitute women turned to prostitution, and yet, as this chapter will show, both the weight of evidence and the consensus of contemporary opinion suggest an associational link between material want and prostitution as practised at the margins. Commentators as profoundly divided on policy as Josephine Butler and Dr William Acton were united in the conviction that ‘cruel, biting poverty … the lowness of the wages paid to working women in various trades’ was a significant causal factor in women’s resort to prostitution in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵ Butler, with a characteristically rhetorical flourish, warned of women forced to ‘embrace the career, the avenues to which stand ever wide open, yawning like the gates of hell, when all other doors are closed’.⁶ Emma Goodhall was therefore not unusual in the course of action she adopted when faced with ‘no other means of obtaining a livelihood’. Kentish philanthropist E. Buckhurst Taylor reflected the contemporary recognition of this causal link between prostitution and economic need in observing that: ‘the once fair daughters of our poorer brethren resort to prostitution as a means to obtain their daily bread!’⁷

The Victorian state, in an expression of its faith in the power of statistics to reflect social reality, published yearly calculations of the number of women identified by the police as prostitutes, per head of population. The limitations of these statistics are numerous and have been rehearsed at length by historians of crime, yet they consistently show that the numbers of women who were believed to be earning a livelihood in this way were lowest in the manufacturing and textile districts (which offered alternative employment opportunities to women) and highest in the commercial ports and pleasure towns.⁸ At the beginning of our period, for example, aggregates for the cotton, woollen and worsted manufacturing districts were one in 531, against one in 169 in the commercial ports.⁹ The specific nature of the local economies of the Kentish districts under consideration here, as this discussion will show, was a key determining factor in limiting women’s earning power. With no substantial textile production, little light manufacturing and numerous ports and pleasure towns, employment choices were restricted whereas opportunities to earn money from prostitution were plentiful.

Yet, whilst contemporary commentators evidently recognized this strong causal link between economics and prostitution, debates about the perceived problem and proposed remedies were dominated by moral rather than economic discourse. In the sixteenth Annual Report of the Dover Home for Young Women, for example, Honourable Secretary Caroline Hyde wrote of ‘our present efforts to rescue the lost and fallen ones from a state of sin and misery’ (original emphasis).¹⁰ This emphasis served to create an overly simplistic dichotomy between the ‘pure’ and the ‘fallen’, and to obscure the complexities of the survival strategies pursued by women at the margins. In place of the dominant moralizing lens through which much Victorian commentary attempted to understand prostitution, the strategies adopted by many women in the Kentish dockyards suggest that an alternative interpretive framework might be more usefully applied. The concept of the economy of makeshifts has gained widening currency amongst historians since it was first coined in the 1970s, and is used to describe what have been called the ‘patchy, desperate and sometimes failing strategies of the poor for material survival’.¹¹ Viewed in this way, prostitution becomes, in contrast to the conceptualization of contemporary moralizing discourse, less a necessarily discrete lifestyle or identity, than one resource amongst many within a flexible and mixed individual economy (alongside, for example, theft and applications for poor relief) by which women of the marginal poor sought to survive.

Previous studies have pointed to the ways in which underemployment, depressed living conditions and the large-scale displacement of populations from traditional communities into rapidly-expanding urban centres created material conditions in which many women turned to prostitution as part of mixed strategies of survival.¹² Under these circumstances, the prostitute figure became, as Judith Walkowitz has described, a ‘highly visible symbol of the social dislocation attendant upon the new industrial era’.¹³ More recently, the relationship between prostitution and other resources within makeshift economies have been explored in greater detail. Patterns of alternating applications for poor relief and charity with earning money from prostitution have been uncovered in Ireland and in eighteenth-century London, for example.¹⁴

Furthermore, as this and the following chapter will show, both contemporary and modern debates about the nature of nineteenth-century prostitution have questioned whether it represented a transitory phase in the lives of some women of the working or casual poor on the one hand, or the first step on the descent towards destitution, disease and early death on the other.¹⁵ This dichotomy has taken on new meaning in the context of feminist readings of women’s history that emphasize agency and eschew one-dimensional explanatory models of victimization. Each of these approaches, however, carries the risk of overlooking the heterogeneous character of prostitution. As practised in the port, garrison and dockyard towns of Kent, each of the models of prostitution offered by contemporaries and by historians can be shown to have been founded in some facet of the reality of the lived experience.

Reconstructions of the life histories of the casual poor are not without methodological difficulty since, by definition, this social group went largely undocumented except at moments of exceptional crisis. Survival rates of official records reflecting these crises, such as the minutes of petty court sessions, are variable, and local newspaper reportage of these proceedings, whilst contributing invaluable detail missing from the official record, involved a process of selection. These difficulties may explain why top-down approaches have been common in the field, since, as has been seen in the previous chapter, literary and documentary sources related to nineteenth-century prostitution were extensive. Nominal record linkage, based on a range of documentary sources generated as a result of routine, everyday administration and bureaucracy such as Poor Law Union records and census materials, goes some way to address these difficulties. Whereas single documents rarely provide more than a snapshot, a fuller picture can be constructed by tracing individuals between multiple sources. This methodology yields both quantitative and qualitative data, allowing statistical analyses to be illuminated by personal life-stories, and individuals to be tracked over time. The discussion that follows and the narratives throughout this study are partially based on this methodology. References to over 500 named women identified as having been involved in prostitution in the port and garrison towns of Kent between 1856 and 1886 have been uncovered in a range of records generated by the criminal justice and poor law systems, of whom some 200 can be linked between two or more sources. These women would otherwise have largely remained absent from the historical record. It is not possible to know with any degree of certainty how representative this 200 women were of all those who practised prostitution in Kent at this period. However, in the absence of alternative detailed documentary evidence, the methodology employed here allows the story to be told of a group of women who, by definition, had a vested interest in remaining as far as possible beyond the reach of officialdom and therefore might otherwise have remained largely unrecorded. These reconstructed life histories throw some light on the way of life and working practices of a number of women engaged in prostitution in the port and garrison towns of Kent in the second half of the nineteenth century, and on the regimes of surveillance and control brought to bear upon them. This chapter, then, turns firstly to the unravelling of the complexities of the economics of prostitution in the ports and garrison towns of Kent in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Life-Cycle Poverty

Women’s recourse to prostitution within economies of makeshift was driven by a combination of circumstances, amongst which, as has already been seen, the difficulties they encountered in supporting themselves within particular local economic structures was a significant factor. As was suggested by the testimonies of Emma Goodhall and Georgina Cotsell with which this chapter opened, the earning capacity of single women in Kent in the second half of the nineteenth century was restricted on a number of counts. Long-term depression of wages, loss of economic status, occupational segregation under industrialism and the seasonal nature of agricultural employment were underlying factors.¹⁶ Moreover, the development of the concept of the family wage, whereby women’s and children’s incomes were seen as supplementary to that of the main wage-earner, had a disadvantageous impact on women’s earning power and particularly on the ability of single, widowed and abandoned women to support themselves and their children.

The material security of unsupported women of the labouring poor in Kent was put under additional stress by the structure of local economies. The cycle of the agricultural year, and particularly the growing of hops, continued to play an important part in local economies in Kent into the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1870s, 11 per cent of the Kentish workforce was still employed in agriculture, compared with a national figure of 7.9 per cent.¹⁷ Some 45,000 of the county’s acreage was devoted to hops at the mid-century, and an estimated workforce of between 80,000 and 150,000 was required each year for the harvest. Women and juveniles were valued for their speed and dexterousness, and thousands of migrant workers were attracted into the county each year during the hopping season. However, the seasonal nature of the work drove the hoppers into the towns during the winter months, thus contributing considerably to the vagrancy problem.¹⁸ Under these conditions, prostitution may have offered temporary relief from financial hardship, since, according to one contemporary observer, ‘formidable and rampant was the vice commonly practised by the hop-pickers’.¹⁹

Occupational opportunities for women were little better in industry. Kent’s wealth and population shifted over the second half of the nineteenth century from the rural southeast towards the industrial northwest of the county. Here the principal industrial activity was based around the Thames coastline and the Medway basin and consisted predominantly of heavy industry such as shipbuilding, armaments, munitions and building materials, sectors that offered employment opportunities predominantly to men. There was little light manufacturing industry. Where the county’s small light industrial sector, such as Maidstone’s well-established paper-making industry, did offer employment to women, this was restricted to poorly remunerated tasks. Maidstone’s Turkey Paper Mill, for example, employed 263 women and twenty-six girls in 1865 (70 per cent and 7 per cent respectively of the total workforce). These statistics, however, mask the fact that processes such as sorting, cutting, macerating and boiling rags were defined as women’s work, poorly paid and carried out in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. Those tasks demarcated as skilled work, on the other hand, were performed by a small number of well-paid adult males working fifteen-hour shifts.²⁰ Such was the paucity of women’s earnings in the mills that Stephen Rimbault, who worked as a missionary in a Maidstone, maintained that ‘many of those mill girls are clandestine prostitutes; they have very small wages and they increase their income by a common life’.²¹ The case of twenty-two-year old Harriet King, charged in 1860 with being drunk and disorderly, exemplifies Rimbault’s contention. Described in the newspaper report of the court hearing as ‘belonging to what is termed the unfortunate class’, King was recorded in the following year’s census as being employed at the paper factory. The fact that she was able to pay the ten shillings fine she incurred on conviction of the drunk and disorderly charge (see the following case for a discussion of monetary values) suggests that her wages at the factory were not her only means of income.²²

Within this economic structure, adult female employment opportunities were restricted largely to domestic service, garment manufacture and laundry work. In the absence of a substantial indust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Prostitution, Poverty and the Makeshift Economy
• 2 Prostitution, Lifestyle and Life Cycle
• 3 Representations of Prostitution
• 4 Geographies of Prostitution
• 5 Policing Prostitution
• 6 The Contagious Diseases Acts in Kent
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index