"Industry in Distress": Reconfiguring Femininity and Labor in the Magdalen House

Relieving Industry in Distress, preserving the Deserted, and reforming the Wicked and the Penitent, are the acceptable Employments, the favourite and advantageous Delights of those Minds, which are happy enough to have a good Heart for their Prompter.

—John Fielding, A Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory for the Benefit of Deserted Girls and Penitent Prostitutes

Fielding's Plan was one of several proposals considered in the competition that led to the building of the Magdalen House. His utilitarian scheme to build a public laundry staffed by "Girls of the Poor" and reformed prostitutes differed from the sentimental plans forged by Robert Dingley, Jonas Hanway, Joseph Massie, and Saunders Welch¹ and which indelibly shaped the day-to-day running of the institution when it was founded later that year. Unlike his fellow philanthropists who strategically portrayed the prostitute as a genteel victim of aristocratic libertinism, Fielding asserted that the majority of harlots were laboring-class women, driven into whoredom by economic need.² Though Fielding's Plan differed both in its analysis of the cause and cure of prostitution, his reconceptualization of the prostitution narrative through a reworking of notions of gender, labor, and class resonated widely, though with different effects, throughout Magdalen literature.³ This rewriting of the harlot's progress is evocatively encapsulated in Fielding's phrase, "Industry in Distress," which attempts to efface, even while it evokes, the sentimental trope of "Virtue in Distress." In its attempt to overwrite a familiar narrative of moral decline with the decline in industry, Fielding's Plan fundamentally reconfigured contemporary conceptions of gender and work.

Critics and historians of this period have pointed to the persistence with which the discourses of prostitution inflected those surrounding female labor. Taking its lead from Fielding's Plan and the constellation of texts that clustered around the Magdalen House, this essay points instead to the ways in which that charity's strategic recasting of labor worked to redefine conceptions of gender and sexuality in complex and surprising ways. The prostitute has, of course, always provoked multiple anxieties. As Vivien Jones suggests, her "trade" called into question the "boundaries between the public world of commerce and the private sphere of sexuality and domesticity" within which femininity was constructed.⁴ Amid the economic and political upheaval of the Seven Years' War (1756-63), the prostitute provoked a spectrum of moral and economic concerns about labor, population growth, productivity, and the national wealth; but while all Magdalen pamphleteers were united in their claims that the rehabilitated prostitute might be made to serve rather than threaten the tasks of nation and empire building, their analyses of how best to address the socioeconomic problems that produced her differed widely. Fielding's notion of "Industry in Distress" seeks to locate the prostitute within a self-destructive cycle that blights the existence of laboring-class men and women alike. The allure of extramarital sex, like gambling and drinking, weakens the mind and body of the laboring man, while a lack of mental and physical employment leads him to the brothel or gambling house in the first place. Anticipating the works of late-eighteenth-century feminists, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Priscilla Wakefield, Fielding suggests that women are still further disadvantaged by a labor market that offers few opportunities for employment, while those apprenticeships open to them frequently demand prohibitive "Premiums" (19).

The Plan's emphasis upon the inaccessibility of various trades to laboring-class women sets it apart from the sentimentalized Magdalen pamphlets that variously ascribed the problem of prostitution to the over-education of young women of the "next sphere of life," to "the laborious Poor," or to the under-education of those "brought up in affluence, and reduced to poverty, without any means of support from their own skill and industry" (Hanway, 29). Despite their canny bid to sentimentalize the prostitute as a genteel or semi-genteel figure...