Without any parliamentary notice, the disgusting ‘Contagious Diseases Act’ was suddenly passed in 1864. Effectively ‘legalising’ prostitution and placing it under police control, it allowed the stop and search of any woman suspected of being a prostitute. Such a ‘search’ included a bodily examination, totally violating and humiliating anyone forced to participate.
Despite vocal opposition to the act from cultural figureheads and early feminists of the time (including the infamous Florence Nightingale) the act would continue to be applied, due to the Venereal disease spread within British barracks at the time, until its repeal in 1886.
Even prior to its implementation, Nightingale fought the idea of the act, curating and releasing data in her 1862 medical summary, ‘Note of the Supposed Protection Afforded Against Venereal Diseases, by Recognizing Prostitution and Putting it Under Police Regulation’. This showed that there was no correlation between hospital admission rates for sexually transmitted diseases and placing prostitution (or, just women generally) under police control.
When even this failed to prohibit the adoption of the act into law, Nightingale joined forces with the original socialist-feminist icon, Harriet Martineau. Effectively recruited by Nightingale, Harriet published her take on the matter in her 1870 piece ‘The Contagious Diseases Acts, as applied to Garrison Towns and Naval Stations’ which ran as four separate articles on the last days of 1869. The impact made by these articles was immense, leading to the creation of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Disease Act (LNA), the first political movement group of its kind, being made and led purely by women. The LNA centred around its first three signees and main developers: Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau and Josephine Butler, appointed Secretary in 1869.
The fight for women’s rights was desperately needed in this situation, given the severity of how violating and intrusive the act was, and how it targeted the most vulnerable members of Victorian society. The overwhelming majority of prostitutes in Britain were working-class women who were completely uneducated and unskilled; they needed to live and had little-to-no choice in the profession they had to involve themselves in to survive.
The ferocious act not only took any opportunity for financial gain away but also made them much more vulnerable to being physically taken advantage of. In 1861, there were an estimated 7,124 sex workers in London alone, with 28,449 in England and Wales altogether. These figures, however, are only curated from the cases police knew about, meaning there were likely many, many more. The law change gave police the power to complete random checks on anyone ‘suspected’ of prostitution, meaning every single woman was made a possible suspect and target, especially those of lower socio-economic class. Double standards came heavily into play as well, as men were just as responsible for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, yet there were no such similar checks for them.
The result of these checks was even more horrific; if a lady was found to be infected by venereal disease, she could be forcibly detained and sentenced to up to 9 months of ‘treatment’ in what was known as a ‘Lock Hospital”. These stays consisted of bi-weekly, intimate checks in establishments which were known for having terrible conditions and low survival rates. Overall, the act did nothing except unfairly increase the control and surveillance over all women in a society where they already had very little freedom. It also had no effect on infection rates or the number of active prostitutes; in fact, it simply made women in the profession more secretive and even less likely to seek help for possible diseases.
To put an end to this horrific breach of women’s rights, the LNA lobbied relentlessly for years, fighting multiple social and political issues all at once, eventually gaining the unanimous support of a royal commission in 1871. The 1870 articles by Harriet Martineau which discussed the topics of double standards and lock hospital treatment failing to consider the financial, emotional, and social problems women may be facing were undoubtedly effective in garnering support from the masses and growing the movement. This was furthered by her travels around Britain, during which she attended over 90 meetings, many with working-class men. This genius way of targeting the demographic that had more social power and say at the time was highly successful, as they were made aware of the humiliating examinations women were forced to face, sympathizing with the cause that aimed to end what Harriet often referred to as “surgical/steel rape”.
Finally, in 1883, parliament suspended the Act and went on to fully repeal the legalisation three years later. It ended the legalisation on prostitution and brought it out of the hands of the police, no longer giving them the power to search women randomly and forcefully, making the LNA the first-ever movement of its kind to fulfil its aim. It fought on the side of women purely based on social injustices and challenged deeply engrained taboos in Victorian society, an extremely unique and noble thing to do at the time.
This remains an incredibly large success in terms of feminism and was vital in proving that women could indeed create and lead something influential, strong -and above all successful.