Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law

The Fallen Daughters of Eve

Helen J. Self

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135759865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is an examination, from a feminist historian's standpoint, of the background to the present system of regulating prostitution in Britain - which is generally admitted to be not only unjust and discriminatory, but ineffective even in achieving its stated aims. Concentrating on the 1950s, and especially on the Wolfenden Report and the 1959 Street Offences Act, it is a thorough exposure of the sexual double standard and general misogynist assumptions underlying legislation relating to prostitution. In addition to the detailed analysis of the 1950s legislation and the background to it, there is an exposition of the subsequent workings of the Act, and of attempts to amend or repeal it.

PART I

The Regulation of Prostitution: Society and Law

CHAPTER 1
Technologies of Power

What is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an unavoidable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable affliction, a constantly flowing source of tears, a wicked work of nature covered with a shining varnish? (St Chrysostom, 347–407)

Within the grand catalogue of criminal offences, the asking for a reward by a young woman in return for a sexual service must surely rate as a trivial misdemeanour.¹ Yet across the centuries and within many cultures, the female prostitute has been a focus of anxiety for those who wish to regulate society. The study of the prostitute and prostitution engages a variety of disciplines, including theology, medicine, politics, law, social policy, sociology, history, literature, art, and the generalised social observation of human frailty, of which most of us are guilty. Experts and social commentators have catalogued, analysed, pathologised, legislated and fantasised, while the well-meaning have rescued, redeemed, protected and punished. Many anxious observers have looked for causes, and have sought a cure for a presumed malady afflicting women whose behaviour is often seen as a barometer of social ills.

This chapter looks at some of the ways in which female prostitution has been rationalised by social thinkers, theologians and medics, and examines the biblical roots of stigmatisation. It illustrates the ways in which various groups and individuals have sought to define the prostitute's behaviour as different from normal womanly conduct (for example, sinful, pathological, or dangerously contagious), and in so doing, confirm her diminished status and justify the need for regulation and control.

THE THEOLOGY OF CONTROLLING BODIES

During the nineteenth century the state apparatus for controlling deviance developed in a variety of ways. Among the techniques listed by Stanley Cohen² are the centralised and rationalised bureaucratic apparatus, the classification of deviant groups into different types and categories, their separation into purpose-built institutions, and the decline of punishments involving physical pain in favour of influencing the mind of the individual. This transformation, so elegantly described by Michel Foucault,³ is said to have taken place at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. In contrast to this approach, I would suggest that the control of women through a process of classification, segregation and reformation preceded the development of the prison and the asylum by many centuries and had similar objectives. The incarceration of both ‘troublesome’ and ‘compliant’ women in institutions including convents, municipal brothels, reformatories, penitentiaries, Magdalene and Lock hospitals was an established practice well before the nineteenth century. The convent (and the reformatory) served a variety of functions apart from the purely religious or penitential as, for many women, they were places of refuge or retirement free from the perils of repeated pregnancy and of controlling male company.⁴

During the Middle Ages the penitentiary was more common on the continent of Europe than in Britain, and it expanded in importance when the reclamation of prostitutes developed into something of a crusade. Justification for the reformatory focused upon assumptions about the intrinsic sinfulness of women that were supported by Judaeo-Christian theology. Salvation was to be achieved through penitence, and it was to this end that convents under the patronage of Mary Magdalene were established and began to proliferate under the sponsorship of a succession of popes.⁵

The appeal of Mary Magdalene to the early Fathers of the Catholic Church is conveyed by Benedicta Ward,⁶ who interprets the theological reasoning that underpinned the movement. She found that Mary Magdalene was a composite character, created out of several women named ‘Mary’ mentioned in the New Testament, and claimed that, ‘The Middle Ages both contracted her person and expanded her history… Out of several women they made one, and then examined the possibilities open to this composite person.’ The potency of the legend was such that it was impossible to think of her as anything other than what the myth had made her. Ward writes that:

Mary Magdalene has always been one of the most popular of saints, perhaps because of the extremes of her career from prostitute to hermit, from sin to sanctity, from grief to glory. She has been seen from the earliest times in scripture and in liturgy as the one woman who, with the mother of Jesus, shared with the apostles the rare and essential distinction of having been with the Lord. She has been called the ‘apostle to the apostles’, the ‘friend’ and even the beloved of Christ, a sinful woman who loved greatly and was forgiven much.⁷

Although her name became synonymous with prostitute, her status as such is not confirmed in the Gospels. She was described variously as a woman out of whom Jesus had cast several devils, a woman of the city who was a sinner and a woman who loved much. The story of Mary Magdalene is of central importance to the Christian message. Her strength lies in the provision of an icon for the redemption of original sin (and therefore redemption of women), which complements the purity of the Virgin Mary, whose sanctity and chastity the majority of women cannot hope to emulate. The two Marys are described by Marina Warner⁸ as ‘a diptych of Christian patriarchy's idea of woman’, the two female figures being seen in the opposing sexual terms of virgin and whore. She argues that Magdalene, like Eve, was brought into existence by the powerful undertow of misogyny in Christianity which associated women with the dangers and degradation of the flesh. The purity of the Virgin made Mary Magdalene an essential contrast: she became the new ‘Eve’ and represented the first signs of the possibility for a reversal of the fall of Adam, which had separated man from the love of God. Mary Magdalene's role in discovering the empty tomb and proclaiming the resurrection became critical to the story of the New Testament, because it extended the possibility of redemption to women. In the words of St Gregory the Great, ‘Lo, the guilt of the human race is cut off whence it proceeded. For in paradise a woman gave death to man; now from the tomb a woman announces life to men and tells the words of the Life-giver, just as a woman (Eve) told the words of the death-bearing serpent.’⁹

And of Peter Chrysolougus:

On this latter day, a woman runs to grace who earlier ran to guilt. In the evening she seeks Christ who in the morning knew she had lost Adam. Then cometh Mary and the other Mary to the sepulchre'. Matthew (28. 1). She who had taken perfidy from paradise hastens to take faith from the sepulchre; she hastens to snatch life from death who has snatched death from life.¹⁰

The theological significance of Mary Magdalene stretches far beyond her presumed promiscuity, and she became synonymous with the image of unfaithful Israel that is found in the imagery of sin throughout the scriptures.

Ward considers this mystery:

Mary Magdalene takes to herself the image of unfaithful Israel, so graphically described by the prophets as a prostitute in relation to God. This image was transferred by the New Testament writers to the whole of humanity in the new covenant and therefore each soul in sin can be described as a prostitute. Just as the sin of Eve was described as lust because that image best describes the disobedience of the fall, so the sins of Mary of Magdella were seen as prostitution; that is, unfaithfulness to the love which is the name of God. ¹¹

The view of the prostitute as the embodiment of sin was encapsulated by St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians (1 C 6:15–17) in which he equates sex with spirituality. ¹²

Know ye not that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them the members of a harlot? God forbid. What? know ye not he who is joined to a harlot is one body? For two, saith he, shall be one flesh. But he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.

St Paul laid down the foundations of the belief that celibacy was superior to marriage, thereby increasing the significance of women's responsibility for sexual incontinence and making sex with a harlot inadmissible. He also bequeathed to the world a view of womanhood which was elaborated upon by later theologians, including St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas,¹³ largely to the detriment of women. The dogma of original sin has remained at the heart of the doctrinal contradictions that, according to Karen Armstrong,¹⁴ are an invention of Christianity that has been used by the Church to condemn any natural human enjoyment of sex.¹⁵

Every flicker of desire is an experience of essential sin and a reminder of our sinful nature. Augustine bequeathed to the West a terror of sin as a raging and ungovernable force. And there at the heart of each formulation of the doctrine is the woman, Eve, the ‘cause of all the misery, all that burden of guilt and evil, all that human wallowing in sin. Sin, sex and women are bound together in an unholy trinity.¹⁶

The power of the Catholic Church meant that theological teaching was translated into dogma, and from dogma into policy and action. However, the contradictions presented by the potency of the sexual drive, the sanctity of marriage and the fear of damnation made the institution of prostitution inevitable. It became the ‘lesser’ or the ‘necessary’ evil permitted in order to safeguard more cherished institutions and to prevent men from committing graver sins. Justifications multiplied. ‘If you eliminate prostitutes from society,’ declared St Augustine, ‘you disrupt everything with lust.’¹⁷

Jacques Rossiaud¹⁸ describes the situation in the south-east region of France in the medieval period. The municipal brothel was seen to fulfil a dual function of servicing the needs of young unmarried men and of protecting the virtue of wives and daughters. ‘No-one went to the brothel furtively. For young men whoring was a way of life…and proof of physiological normality.’¹⁹ Prostitution developed into an organised and institutionalised way of life. A similar situation in Reformation Augsburg is described b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I The Regulation of Prostitution: Society and Law
• PART II The Wolfenden Committee: Regulating Prostitution in the 1950s
• PART III The Law and Society
• PART IV Change and Continuity: The Consequences of Legal Reform
• Appendix 1. List of Statutes
• Appendix 2. List of Regulations, Statutory Instruments and Home Office Circulars
• Appendix 3. List of Bills
• Appendix 4. List of Cases
• Appendix 5. Wolfenden Committee Final Recommendations
• Bibliography
• Index