Hydra: sexual reform in Britain, 1870-1885

Abstract

Social purity is the subject of scholarly disagreement. In addition to the interpretive difficulties caused by the number of groups that promoted social purity, engagement has been complicated by the entanglement of historical analysis with fraught debates about sexuality and feminism. This thesis offers a new perspective by reversing a common pattern in the scholarship. Instead of viewing social purity from the 1880s, this thesis begins in 1870 with the first full year of the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869. These laws, which provided for the compulsory medical inspection and treatment of women believed to be prostitutes, have received considerable attention. Previous historical analysis has focused on the development of the campaign to repeal the Acts, the demographics of its members, the Parliamentary progress of repeal, and the roles of gender and libertarianism in the debate. This thesis views the campaign for repeal through a different lens: as part of a surge in Christian sexual reform activity. From 1870, Christian leaders in the repeal campaign used the term “social purity” to describe the type of chaste community threatened by the Acts. By following the rising popularity of the term “social purity” alongside the development of other reforming projects, this thesis suggests that social purity is best understood as an organizing ideology shared by reformers working across campaigns. Together, the chapters demonstrate the integration of important reforming projects during this period and challenge historical narratives that underestimate the importance of Christian sexual reformers to the repeal campaign.

This thesis considers five important campaigns that operated from 1870 to 1885: agitation for the repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts; promotion of social purity by Christian propagandists; efforts to “rescue” women who sold sex; advocacy of a higher age of sexual consent; and opposition to “white slavery,” or coerced prostitution. It gives particular attention to the deep connections between these campaigns; the ways that they fomented and supported each other. The first chapter focuses on ideology, encapsulated and promulgated by Christian repealers in the earliest years of their campaign, 1870–1871. From this foundation, the next chapters explore the ways that repealers adopted various tactics to promote widespread social renewal. The second chapter analyzes the way repealers used the term “social purity,” and the reasons they launched the first independent social purity group in 1873. The third chapter builds on the second, exploring sermons and publications published between 1874 and 1884 that presented social purity to Christian audiences. After mapping the meaning of social purity, and highlighting the way that it reinforced repeal narratives, the next chapters detail repealers’ involvement in related campaigns. Chapters four and five demonstrate the strong, and previously underestimated, links between the repeal campaign and efforts to rescue women who sold sex and to oppose sex trafficking. Finally, chapters six and seven investigate characteristics that historians have used to separate reformers and their campaigns. These chapters argue that openness to coercive state suppression of the sex trade and the publication of incendiary unverified information were common enough among reformers working between 1870 and 1885 that they cannot serve as distinguishing characteristics for a social purity movement. In different ways, each chapter contributes to an interpretation of sexual reform as practically integrated and driven by shared moral assumptions.