Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914 (review)

In Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914, Paula Bartley documents the ways that Victorian and Edwardian society attempted to address the issue of prostitution. To do so, Bartley casts her net quite widely. Rather than re-examine legislative measures to mitigate against the effects of prostitution like the Contagious Diseases Acts or those that attempted to curtail vice like the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885, Bartley documents the development of methods to keep girls from engaging in the trade and to reform those already involved. The range of preventative and reform attempts made in England—from penitentiaries to reform homes, moral education, skill training, attacks on the double standard, and segregation of the feeble-minded—demonstrates that Victorians saw prostitution as a multifaceted problem. The variety of methods also shows the commitment of British society to getting rid of the this much-discussed social evil. However, as Bartley makes clear, these measures ultimately failed because of Victorian gender standards. The problem of too many women, too little skilled employment, and too great a stigma for women’s sexuality impeded any specific reform venue. Although individual women left prostitution, the trade remained formidable until well into the twentieth century. The inability to rid society of prostitution became a blight on the Victorian world’s sense of itself as a moral community, and one that marked the world with a frightening implications. Documenting the measures that Victorians developed to combat the problem remains central to an understanding of gender, sexuality, morality, and politics in nineteenth-century British society even if the measures did not work to end prostitution as a social practice.

Bartley begins her work by raising the statistical uncertainties about the extent of the problem; estimates of prostitutes range from between 5,000 and 220,000 for London alone at mid-century. The uncertainty about numbers demonstrates the ways that prostitution loomed large at least symbolically if not practically. The notoriously low wages for female workers in the nineteenth century meant that a person could not support herself without additional funds. The problem of prostitution was exacerbated by the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 which made prostitution a compelling alternative to the workhouse. How working-class women supported themselves in the nineteenth century and what separated working-class women from prostitutes remained a sub-text of discussion of women through much of the century. While the incidence, causes and cultural meanings of prostitution remain quite fascinating, Bentley relegates them to background material to examine changing models of prevention and reform.

While many studies of prostitution examine early religious responses to prostitution or later progressive attempts to deal with the problem, Bentley provides a synthetic account that moves from early nineteenth-century Magdalen homes to later, state-centered methods. This shift follows the slow growth of the welfare state over the nineteenth century as the state began to supplement philanthropic institutions’ attempts to alleviate miseries and so save society from more comprehensive changes. The differences that Bartley finds between various religious institutions are subtle but telling; Catholic organizations tended to be more welcoming than institutions established by the Church of England, though both types of establishments stressed morality, hard work, and regimentation. By the late nineteenth century, non-conformist institutions like the Salvation Army began to canvass the streets looking for girls to reform, and the competition for candidates encouraged the growth of educational classes, activities, and skill training—appropriately gendered of course—that shifted the framework from renouncing an old life to building a new one. The continued religiosity of reformers and the continued repressiveness, both physical and psychological, of the institutions they created can be seen through the brief glimpses one can catch of individual women as they hatched plots to escape, engaged in fights and arguments, and countered attempts at control. These women have a vibrancy that even the Victorian reform community could not dim. By the late nineteenth century, eugenicists and race...