The Marking of an Outcast Group

This essay is an exploratory venture into the social history of an outcast group in Victorian England. It focuses on working-class prostitutes in the 1870’s and 1880’s, who were subjected to a police and medical registration system established under the Contagious Diseases Acts, and who, with middle-class reformist support, forcibly resisted the requirements of the Acts. These Acts ¹ were ostensibly passed as sanitary measures to control the spread of venereal disease among the military stationed in garrison and dock towns; in actual practice, however, their administration extended well beyond the sanitary supervision of common prostitutes. As single women residing outside their families, registered women were perhaps the most vulnerable members of their community; consequently, official intervention into their lives offered police an easy opportunity for general surveillance of the poor neighborhoods in which they resided. These women were used as a leverage on the working-class community, not simply because of their marginal status within that community, but also in good part because they shared certain social characteristics with the mass of the urban poor. Their temporary move into prostitution reflected the fluid social identity among the casual laboring poor who so violated Victorian society’s sense of order and place. In the districts where the Acts were enforced prostitution, petty theft, and the seasonal migration of the poor into the countryside to pick hops and strawberries were all means by which the chronically underemployed endured through hard times. The Contagious Diseases Acts were part of the institutional and legal efforts to contain this occupational and geographic mobility. ² The Acts represented an attempt to clarify the relationship between the unrespectable and respectable poor. They were designed to force prostitutes to accept their status as public women by destroying their private identities and associations with the poor working-class community.