ABSTRACT
Victorian morality was premised on a series of ideological separations: between family and society, between the restraint of the domestic circle and the temptations of promiscuity; between the privacy, leisure and comforts of the home and the tensions and competitiveness of work. And these divisions in social organisation and ideology were reflected in gender divisions and sexual attitudes. This was the basis of the dichotomy of 'the private' and 'the public' upon which much sexual regulation rested. The division between the private and the public sphere, which was located both in economic development and in social ideology, was by the end of the nineteenth century at the heart of moral discourse. Major political groupings themselves had different attitudes towards moral regulation in that century. The fragile social equilibrium between the toleration and segregation of marginal social behaviour which was necessary to the survival of the very poor in the working-class community was upset by the enforcement of the Contagious Diseases Acts.
