For the religious, rescue work could be explained with the parable of the lost sheep.
Significantly, the privilege and responsibility of seeking to bring those termed wandering sheep home to the Good Shepherd’s flock was seen to be immeasurable. By returning the lost sheep ... to the heavenly fold the redeemers not only saved a soul but also notched up a point for themselves on some heavenly tally.125
So a whole sphere of tasks came to be considered not only appropriate and dignified work, but also particularly suitable and natural to women. These were respectable, paid occupations, something that had not existed before. There was now employment for women in charitable, educational and correctional institutions. New jobs included social investigator, district visitor, rent collector, sanitary inspector, Poor Law guardian, fundraiser, public speaker, settlement house worker, superintendent, matron, manager, probation officer and adult education teacher. Some women worked as unpaid career administrators and planners; affluent women undertook roles of patronage126 (in France called dames patronesse). In convents, routine tasks were carried out by paid female employees.127
These kinds of posts multiplied as social causes did. Later, there would be a move to professionalise, train and struggle for recognition, but at the beginning, amateurs were the rule. Many women began as volunteers, defying ideas that their only place was the home. Charity work, especially the rescue of victimised children and women, was a way to move into the public world. F. K. Prochaska documents the significant rise in numbers of women on charity subscription lists, in women’s financial contributions to charities, in women’s district visiting to the poor, in women’s participation on management committees and in women as managers and volunteer helpers in a variety of situations from lying-in hospitals to village bazaars.128
In London, 279 charities were founded before 1850, and 144 more during the following decade alone.129 In Aberdeen, with a population of fewer than 70,000 in the 1840s, rescue organisations included local branches of the Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences, the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners, and the Association for the Promotion of Social Purity, as well as the Aberdeen Association for Reclaiming Fallen Females and the Aberdeenshire Association of Ladies for the Rescue of Fallen Women.130 In France, groups campaigning for the end of regulation proliferated from the 1870s, and by the turn of the century, there were at least 1,300 associations devoted to the ‘raising up’ of girls.131
In terms of religious institutions, in the early 1840s there were few penitentiaries for fallen women, but the first Anglican sisterhood was founded in 1845, after which the number increased quickly (there were places for 400 women in 1840 and 7,000 by 1893).
Two needs coincided in the 1840s: the number of former prostitutes desiring some form of institutional care was growing rapidly, and the newly established Anglican sisterhoods, seeking a means of justifying and defending their vulnerable institutions, saw the provision of refuges for fallen women as an irrefutable vindication of their own existence.132
New theories emerged, such as the concept of prevention: ‘The work of the reformer is not with the outcast, the Magdalen, but with the causes that make outcasts – better save future generations than twenty fallen women.’133 The evolution of theories and the maturing of discourses meant the creation of new projects and increasing numbers of workers. The movement was diversifying, and, as societies expanded, some homes became specialised. The Rescue Society ran a home for the fallen, another for invalids and a third for girls in danger. The Female Mission to the Fallen, which sent out lady missioners to approach women who sold sex in the streets and workhouses, also helped those who attempted suicide and sponsored two homes for unmarried mothers and their babies.134
The Work of Helping ‘Prostitutes’
Foucault suggests we examine how ‘forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them’.135 Here I show how helping played out on the ground day to day. Both the English and the French responses to ‘prostitution’ used the principle of incarceration: brothel, hospital,‘home’ and prison were all institutions to which women were to be confined, providing a structure for women believed to lack one. The French system envisaged four distinct spaces for the surveillance and discipline of ‘prostitutes’: the house (where sex was sold), the hospital (where venereal diseases were treated), the prison (where wrongdoers were kept) and the refuge (where repentant women were rehabilitated). Some specialists advocated concentration of these activities in a panopticon system: prison, dispensary and hospital in one enclosure next to a red-light district.136 In 1822, a Female Factory was opened in Parramatta, Australia, which functioned as both prison and workplace. Women were divided into three classes according to their moral and immigration status. Incarceration was meant to spare them the ‘enforced whoredom’ that was the fate of so many women arriving in Australia, yet the factory operated openly as both brothel and marriage market.137
Many people laboured inside the institutions where women were kept,138 and much of the work was maintenance (cleaning floors, preparing food). But most of the interned women did not want to be there; escape attempts were rife (and often successful), so policing had to be carried out. Locking the door on people who want to get out is a concrete task. Requiring people to have a particular appearance means taking their own clothes away, cutting their hair. Forcing people to do laundry (the standard work imposed on inmates) means supervising it. Reading Bible lessons and other improving texts to people who didn’t ask to hear them is a chore, as is teaching one kind of domestic economy to people who already know another.
For the good influence of the dame patronesse to have an effect, the prostitute must be prevented from keeping up any relationships with her family and friends. The madam, the policeman and the police doctor, and the dame patronesse are the only people with whom the imprisoned prostitute is to be allowed to communicate.139
Employees kept women from their families and friends through surveillance, locked doors and a deaf ear to pleas. Consider the posted ‘Rules for the conduct of the women’ in York Female Penitentiary at mid-century:
I. The directions and orders of the Matron shall at all times be promptly obeyed.
II. The women shall preserve a decent deportment, and a becoming silence, especially while at work. Reproaches for past irregularities, railing, and all angry expressions, are strictly forbidden; and if repeated after admonition from the Matron, shall be reported to the committee, and punished at their discretion.
III. Lying, swearing, dishonesty, repeated disobedience, and gross misbehaviour, shall be punished by the Committee with expulsion, unless circumstances should induce them to mitigate the punishment.
IV. No woman shall leave her employment without the Matron’s permission.
V. The father, mother, or other near relation, (being known to be such,) may be permitted to see and converse with any of the women, at the discretion and in the presence of the Matron, between the hours of eleven and twelve in the morning, and two and three in the afternoon (Sundays excepted.) – But no such person, whether male or female, shall be admitted into the wards.
VI. No letter shall be conveyed to or from the house, without the inspection of the Matron.140
The rationale for this treatment rested on the conviction that working-class women would be improved by their incarceration: these were reformatories aiming to transform offenders, not punish wrong acts. Reformers need to get access to wrongdoers first, establish a relationship through coercion and constraint.
Time-tables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits ... ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is ... the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him.141
Concern was often expressed that the staff in some institutions exercised their authority in an inappropriate tyrannical manner, and managers were urged ‘not to imagine that the dulcet tones used to them (by the matrons and other staff) are the same as the penitents experience’.142
The use of penitentiaries for ‘prostitutes’ belongs to the new kind of discipline and punishment Foucault identified in prisons, asylums and other institutions from the eighteenth century onwards. The object was not to requalify inmates as subjects with rights but to turn them into docile domestic servants or wives – not the autonomous subjects that educated women were themselves struggling to become.
In asserting a particular feminine point of view, women philanthropists made an indirect contribution towards the emancipation of women of their own class. However, their philanthropic initiatives were often diametrically opposed to the emancipation of women in the social classes beneath them.143
In 1851, 42 per cent of British women aged 20 to 40 were unmarried, and two million of a total six million women were self-supporting: one third of the female population.144 Ladies who had to work for a living were pitied. By 1861, women represented more than one third of the labour force, one fourth of these being married women.145 By 1914, middle-class working women, a respected and self-respecting group,were an essential part of the country’s labour force.146 The opening up of the social sector for women played a large part in this change.
Through their work with the poor, the reformers discovered many of the elements from which they would forge their own class and sexual identity, still ill-defined and diffuse in 1850; women, particularly, strengthened their role as dictators of domestic and familial standards for all classes ...147
Our contemporary interest in the voice of the subject had no place in this scheme.
The Voice of the Subject
In my account of the Rise of the Social, I focus on how the construction of the slippery category ‘prostitution’ provided work for those intent on eradicating it. A central irony of this story is that these middle-class women’s occupations aimed at doing away with many working-class women’s means of support. While formulating their own desire for independence and participation in the culture of individual work, many joined campaigns to repress and limit opportunities for other women.
Social investigators and morals police looking for ‘prostitutes’ ignored them when they said they did not see themselves as immoral or did not wish to be rescued. In the testimonies of social agents, one rarely encounters the actual words of working-class women, yet those could be compelling.
I was a servant gal away down in Birmingham. I got tired of workin’ and slavin’ to make a living, and getting a ____ bad one at that; what o’ five pun’ a year and yer grub, I’d sooner starve, I would. After a bit I went to Coventry, cut brummagem, as we calls it in those parts, and took up with soldiers as was quartered there. I soon got tired of them. Soldiers is good – soldiers is – to walk with and that, but they don’t pay ’cos why they ain’t got no money; so I says to myself, I’ll go to Lunnon and I did. I soon found my level there.148
This voice demonstrates several points. First, that the pay and working conditions of respectable domestic service were considered insulting. Second, that women made their own decisions about how to improve their lives. Third, that selling sex was not seen as different from other jobs. Fourth, that money was important. Fifth, that personal enjoyment was important. Sixth, that risks were taken to find one’s personal ‘level’.
The issue of remuneration was supremely important.
The standard of living of prostitutes was perceptibly higher than other working women. A prostitute, even a sailor’s woman, could earn the weekly wages of a respectable working woman in a day, at a shilling a ‘shot’. Prostitutes had a room of their own; they dressed better; they had spending money and access to the pub, the principal facility in the working-class neighborhood that provided heat, light, cooked food, and conviviality.149
For social agents of the servant-employing class, the only truly approved job for regenerate ‘prostitutes’ was domestic service. Anne McClintock relates how the colonial middle class in South Africa expressed outrage at the fact that women were allowed to work in the mines, while servants in their own houses often worked longer, more exhausting hours for a tiny wage, were isolated from family and community, and ‘emotionally and physically at the mercy of the men of the household’. 150 The effort to turn interned women into domestic servants, however, succeeded in few cases.151
Since the ‘prostitute’ of middle-class imagination didn’t actually exist, it shouldn’t surprise us to find that, for helpers and savers, the centre of the discourse was themselves. They believed their help was intrinsically different and better than the policeman’s or the judge’s because of their class, education and sex. But like the work of the policeman and the judge, theirs depended on defining others as wrongdoing, mistaken, misled, deviant. When reformers refused to accept the information, obtained in social research, that women who sold sex did not find the life uncongenial, they paid no attention. This refusal was self-serving; after all, without people to rescue, they could be out of a job.
While bourgeois women’s demands did not talk about pleasure and desire, their own desires did impel them, whether for love, freedom, happiness, tranquillity, independence, money or adventure. They concentrated on gaining liberties and legal rights from the state (their own property, the right to divorce) and on detaching woman’s fate from man’s (the right to work). During this period, these women’s campaigns and moves were also bound up with ideas of their own virtue. The paradox is that the victim they constructed, who needed saving from her fate, already enjoyed a great deal of what middle-class women desired: a looser concept of marriage, more access to public spaces, the right to enjoy common pleasures, and more varied and flexible jobs. All research, beginning with Parent-Duchâtelet’s, shows that those constructed as ‘prostitutes’ were nothing more than poor women taking up the one employment opportunity that offered independence and decent money. They often lived in ordinary lodging houses; they led sociable lives; their neighbours and lovers did not exclude them. Selling sexual services, often an occasional or part-time activity, did not provide an identity. Women who sold sex had a difficult life, but they lived within communities.
By the late nineteenth century, helping projects had isolated these women, given them a totally negative identity and yet failed to achieve what reformers had set out to: the end of commercial sex, the eradication of poverty, the attempt to make women domestic, a regime of chastity rather than promiscuity, the prevention of women’s entrance into increasingly ‘unfeminine’ job spheres. In Britain,‘Nothing had been done for the women who were exploited by prostitution,’152 and in France, ‘Despite the frequency of reregistrations, the high number of disappearances and discrepancies between the strictness of the procedures and actual behavior demonstrates quite clearly the failure of the regulationist project.’153 In other words, what the social said they were doing was not the same as what they were actually accomplishing: ‘The domain of effects in the real cannot be read off the programmes of government themselves.’154
By the end of the nineteenth century, the image of the ‘prostitute’ as vile and disgusting had been replaced by the figure of the victim, an ordinary working-class woman who needed rescuing. Some believe that the imagery and discourse had little influence in the end, since commercial sex remained a problem of public order rather than spiritual damnation.155 It is also true that there was enormous resistance to helpers’ interference. Nevertheless, the damage done was real, since the stigmatising victim discourse remained, as did the machinery of social control that I go on to study in the present.
NOTES
1 Donzelot 1979. The concept is much wider than our modern ‘social work’.
2 Walkowitz 1994: 30
3 Richards 1992; Abrams (1988) on Germany; Corbin (1978/90), Benabou (1987) and Harsin
(1985) on France; Gibson (1986) on Italy; Vázquez García and Moreno Mengíbar (1998) on Spain; Mahood (1990) on Scotland; Luddy (1997) on Ireland and Walkowitz (1980) on England
4 The development of movements for women’s rights and integration in France are usually agreed to have been impeded by the series of social upheavals during this period (1793, 1834, 1850, 1871).
5 The Paris police received requests for copies of the Parisian regulations from all over Europe (Harsin 1985: 80).
6 Butler 1990: ix
7 Scott and Tilly 1975
8 ‘Philanthropic labor filled a vacuum’ in the lives of bourgeois women, writes Platt in The Child-Savers (1969).
9 Vicinus 1985: 211–12
10 Foucault 1979a: 17–18
11 Foucault 1978. We may call these regimes programmes, signifying they are more formal, evolved or institutionalised, or projects, when they are more personal, limited or spontaneous.
12 Concepts of governmentality include government as more than state machinery: all forms of governing (such as of the family, of oneself); the study of government as a way of ruling; and government-mentality.
13Slavery in the Ancient Near East, Mendelsohn 1949: 131–2
14 Lerner 1986: 124
15 Henderson 1999: 77
16 Richards 1992: 116
17 Karras 1996; Otis 1985
18 Otis 1985: 2
19 Perry 1985: 143
20 Karras 1996: 95
21 Rossiaud 1988
22 Richards 1992
23 Bristow 1977: 20
24 Bristow 1977
25A Modest Defence of Public Stews: Or, An Essay Upon Whoring, As it is Now Practis’d in these Kingdoms (Mandeville 1724). On Boswell, see Boswell 1982.
26 Foucault 1979a
27 Foucault did not include the ‘prostitute’ with his identified pathologised subjects of the period (the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, the Malthusian couple and the perverse adult) but this figure operates in the same way.
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