Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse

In several works, Sander Gilman highlighted the way that the venereally diseased were feminized, from the earliest representations of the syphilitic as a French fop in the sixteenth century. Ornella Moscucci told us how nineteenth-century gynecology pathologized femininity itself by reducing females to inherently pathological reproductive systems. Now, Mary Spongberg has opened up these issues to further scrutiny by exploring Victorian medical discourses on prostitution. In doing so she adds new dimensions to the subject—namely, the ways in which the pathologization of female promiscuity was bound to ideologies of class and race.

Up to the end of the nineteenth century, medical discourses linked the pathological female reproductive system to aberrant sexual desire in the prostitute. This turned the prostitute herself into a disease that naturally harbored and spread further contagion. Mid-nineteenth-century miasmatic models of disease were creatively interwoven into this model by identifying the prostitute as a form of putrefying organic matter giving off effluvia, making her a public health hazard equivalent to sewers, drains, and swamps. Such discourses legitimated campaigns for the public regulation of prostitution, but they often ended up in a mire of contradictions that were exploited by medical campaigners working for the movement to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Victorian medical ideology extended the pathologization of prostitution to the pathologization of childhood by offering benign explanations for the presence of venereal disease in abused children. Symptoms of gonorrhoea in children were interpreted by some, including the famed William Acton, as either benign discharges or nonvenereal conditions such as the noma pudenda that accompanied typhus fever. Spongberg argues that such explanations allowed the medical authorities employed to testify in trials of child rape to act with exceeding caution in order to avoid offering opinions that would result in the accused being unjustly hanged. When venereal infection was confirmed in a child, however, venereologists would often interpret it as an indication of unnatural lasciviousness, and thus child prostitutes were viewed as seductresses taking up their carnal careers at an early age.

As Spongberg incisively points out, Victorian medical explanations of prostitution, child rape, and venereal disease were determined by analyses based upon ideological beliefs about class as much as gender. Prostitution was perceived by both Victorian physicians and social reformers as a necessary evil for the satisfaction of male lust that could not be contained within the institution of marriage, especially within middle-class marriages of properly passionless angel-wives in the bourgeois house. The prostitute, whether an adult or a child, served a middle-class sexual economy but needed to be policed in order to reduce the threat that she posed to social stability. In Victorian medical discourses the prostitute was a working-class female poison that, as the agent of disease dissemination, could threaten the social order as much as political unrest.

Class ideology took on racial representations as the disease model of the prostitute was replaced by the language of biological degeneracy at end of the century. As medical discourse turned the prostitute from a disease into a hereditary predisposition, female promiscuity became identified as an expression of feeblemindedness. Prostitutes were now born rather than made and were fecund simpletons threatening the quality of population with their future broods. Racial decline could be avoided only by preventing their reproduction, through either institutional sequestration or sterilization.

Spongberg offers the medical ideology of prostitution as a new window onto the relations of class, race, and gender in the Victorian period. She carefully links a detailed analysis of changing medical explanations of venereal disease to broader ideological transformations and provides us with the best history of Victorian prostitution yet written. Although this is a highly scholarly account, it is easily accessible not only to students but also to a broader readership. It is a valuable addition to the existing excellent historiographic material available on these subjects and will be an extremely useful text for teaching.