ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century segments of the Scottish bour responded to what they called the ‘Great Social Evil’ – the prostitution problem – by exerting pressure through a number of material practices and key institutions, both statutory and non-statutory, which targeted and attempted to control and reform the ‘dangerous’ urban proletariate. The resulting social control apparatuses constitute what Foucault calls ‘technologies of power’: in this case, institutions for the surveillance, sexual and vocational control, and moral reform of a segment of the female working-class population (chiefly women whose dress, behaviour, or vocation, rather than their criminal records, led to their being labelled as ‘prostitutes’). It is significant, therefore, that in the debate around the causes of prostitution it was mainly working-class women who were scrutinized and stigmatized. For a brief period the directors of the Glasgow Magdalene attempted to reach a ‘better’ class of girl, whom they believed catered to upper-class men, but they abandoned this after a notable lack of success. Similarly, there was no suggestion that ‘prostitutes’ might ever be male. There was no functional equivalent of a magdalene asylum for working-class men. When men were arrested for the same petty offences and for vagrancy which indirectly led women to penitentiaries, they were either fined or sentenced to short prison terms, just as women had been before penitentiaries were established. 2 If philanthropy was in fact an effort to remake working-class culture, then reformers saw the fastest path to reformation in working-class women.
