Farewell To The East End

husband to Liverpool. It was not difficult to find poverty in Liverpool in the 1850s. The workhouse alone housed 5,000 souls. She visited and worked in the oakum sheds: ‘vast underground cellars, unfurnished, with damp floors and oozing walls, where women sat on the floor all day picking their allotted portion of oakum. Yet they came voluntarily, driven by hunger and destitution, begging for a few nights’ shelter and a piece of bread.’
    In 1864 their little daughter Eva, aged five, fell downstairs and was killed. Josephine was paralysed with grief. She had always been deeply religious, but now she turned in on herself, rejecting all comfort, all consolation.
    Unknown to Josephine, and indeed to most people in Britain, 1864 was the year in which the Contagious Diseases (Women) Act was passed in Parliament. When she did learn about it two years later it came as a shock and was the catharsis needed to rouse her from deepening depression.
    The Contagious Diseases (Women) Act of 1864, intended ‘for the prevention of contagious diseases at certain naval and military stations’, was profoundly immoral. Venereal disease was spreading rapidly among the armed forces and was thought likely to undermine military strength. It was widely assumed in those days that women spread the diseases, and that to curtail the spread of infection prostitution must be controlled. So far, so good – in theory. But there were not, and never had been, legalised brothels in England. Women touted for their customers in the streets, and so the Act empowered the police to find their victims in the streets.
    The Contagious Diseases Act was administered by a special unit of volunteers from the Metropolitan Police who were known as ‘the Spy Police’. These men had the power to arrest on suspicion only any woman found alone in the streets whom they thought might be soliciting, confine her in a cell and call a doctor to examine her vaginally for evidence of venereal disease (Josephine Butler called this ‘surgical rape’). There were no female police officers or doctors in those days so the women were handled entirely by men who had volunteered for the job in the first place , and no witnesses were required. If evidence of venereal disease was found the woman would be confined to a lock hospital 11 for treatment. If no evidence was found, she would be given a certificate saying that she was ‘clean’, but her name would be kept on a special police register and she could be arrested and re-examined at any time. In theory the woman had to give written consent for the first examination, but this was a cynical farce because the Act stated that a woman who refused to sign should be confined indefinitely until she did consent to be examined.
    Any woman of any age could be subjected to this horrifying treatment. At the time the age of consent was thirteen, so a child of that age could legally be regarded as a woman. The Contagious Diseases Act affected only working-class women, because upper-class women never walked in the streets alone, but would be accompanied or in a carriage. Men of any age or class were exempt from arrest and examination, even if caught in the act of soliciting, because the Act of 1864 was specifically designed for the control of women.
    Josephine was stirred to the depths of her soul by the injustice and the immorality of the Act. She saw at once that the floodgate had been opened for the police to abuse women with impunity, and she vowed to God, and to her husband, that she would devote all her strength to getting it repealed. George was the perfect husband for her. In those days men controlled their wives absolutely. A respectable woman was not supposed to know about things like prostitution and syphilis, still less to talk about them publicly. George could have forbidden Josephine to take any action; instead he supported her.
    Josephine addressed meetings all over the country, she wrote articles and pamphlets, she lobbied Parliament. She shocked and scandalised Victorian Society with her outspoken language at public meetings, describing ‘the surgical violation of women’. She not only insisted that the medical examination of women by the speculum was a form of rape, but also made public accusations against the police, doctors, magistrates and Members of Parliament, saying, in the strongest language, ‘There is such a thing as the medical lust of indecently handling women, as well as the legislative desire to rule