AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

Nineteenth century Western responses to venereal disease reveal a complex mix of pervasive ideas about gender, class and race. Historians have located these responses in a culture alarmed about the lower classes and subsequently attempting to assert moral, geographic and occupational control over their traditional subordinates. These responses were additionally premised around the concept that venereal diseases were passed from women to men, who were often portrayed as innocent victims in the transaction. The core attitudes about gender that lie at the heart of this assumption relate both to masculinity and femininity. Victorians regarded men as incapable of controlling their sexual urges and as needing an appropriate outlet for their voracious passion, which worked against holding men culpable for infection. The consequent gender bias against women that lay at the heart of the responses to venereal disease is underpinned with nineteenth century belief in the lack of a legitimate female sexuality, the moral purity that women were expected to possess and the subsequent role of prostitutes in this worldview. These gender beliefs, when coupled with a colonial context, were interlaced by powerful attitudes to race. Ideas of racial inferiority were hugely influential, with colonial responses being far more coercive, nuanced with ideas of the extremes of the tropics, the moral ineptitude and presumed beliefs of the ‘natives’ and the need for Europeans to retain racial superiority in all facets of life. The entanglement of race, class and gender attitudes evident in these responses creates a fascinating area of study.

The infamous Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 are the most obvious Western response to venereal disease in the nineteenth century. Preceded in the colonies by a coercive system of ‘lock hospitals’ for women suspected of being infected, both approaches were a formal and systematic attempt to control syphilis and gonorrhoea in Britain and throughout the empire. In Britain, the acts applied to eighteen ‘protected districts’ where navy or military regiments were posted, and gave ever increasing powers to special police to locate and compulsorily vaginally examine any (loosely defined) ‘common prostitute’.[1] If the woman was deemed infected, she was forcibly detained and treated for up to nine months. Throughout the empire, these powers were even broader: unlike England, where the legislative powers were confined to certain seaports, the Indian Contagious Diseases Act applied to major towns throughout the subcontinent. It had the additional requirement of the compulsory registration of all prostitutes, empowered the ejection of infected women from any area near military cantonments, and led to the removal of all manner of vulnerable women from their military-associated livelihoods.[2]

Undoubtedly, to the modern eye - and to the contemporary eye, too, as was soon evident by the protest - this response seems flawed by a series of insurmountable problems, which were rooted in the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of the time. Contextually, the responses to venereal disease occurred at a time where the British elite were increasingly concerned with the ‘Great Unwashed’, and felt it ever more necessary to intercede in the lives of the vaguely threatening lower classes.[3] In this sense, intervening in the lives of largely powerless and apparently self-evident prostitutes, authorities symbolically exerted some control over the largely unreachable but enormous mass of urban poor.[4] Prostitutes’ vulnerable status offered an opportunity for general surveillance of the class that they represented.  Tellingly, the ‘protected areas’ to which the Acts applied were populated largely by the chronically under-employed, who continued to practice seasonal migration and petty theft alongside prostitution, which contrasted jarringly with the nineteenth century social pillars of occupational and social order, place and stability.[5] The impositions inherent in the acts were the symptoms of a growing inflexibility in Western social norms, and a more rigid pressure enforced from above upon the poor to adhere to ‘respectable’ urban lifestyles.[6]

This interventionism was particularly common when undertaken on medical or sanitary grounds. Mid-century Victorians closely associated lower-class health with public order, and this justified a whole range of state intervention on the grounds of public health.[7] The first British Contagious Diseases Act was passed in a wave of concern about the ‘foul streams’ of disease flowing through ‘humanity in the mass’ which was believed would undoubtedly lead to moral and social decay.[8] This ideology of health-based regulation is part of what Walkowitz deemed the governing metaphor for the perils of the lower class: the threat of pollution which could morally and physically contaminate respectable society.[9] In this way, regulation of the health of a group that was symbolic of the lower classes fits neatly into the prevailing class attitudes of the time.

The prejudice of the British upper classes was also an element in the approach taken to the troops whom the interventions were designed to protect. Upper class officers had the utmost contempt for their soldiers, who they saw as ‘the scum of the earth’.[10] Their actions towards stemming venereal disease amongst their troops reflect their self-conscious attempts to reaffirm their superior status above the rank and file through their ‘innate’ ability to control their sexual desire which resulted from their class refinement.[11]

These class attitudes were, in the Contagious Diseases Acts, inextricably linked with the deep seated gender attitudes of the time. The control of venereal disease through policing women reflects that it was never an option to curb or interfere with the sexuality of infected males. Restrictions or genital examinations of soldiers would undoubtedly have been easier to enforce than those of civilian women, but the strength of these gender ideas ensured that this was thought of as a deeply inappropriate response.[12] Masculinity was presumed as encompassing a physiologically based sexual drive that was intrinsic to masculine temperament.[13] To alter this element of Victorian manhood, especially in the hyper-masculine environment of the military, was seen to be both impossible and dangerous – without legitimate outlet for their desires, men would turn to rape or the ever-present (but barely discussed) threat of homosexuality.[14] With such dangers apparently imminent, the vast mass of single men in the army were allowed an unrestricted vent for their sexuality in the form of prostitutes, who were subsequently blamed for the spread of venereal disease.[15]

This blame was institutionalised through the lock-hospitals and the Contagious Diseases Acts, which in essence portrayed men as innocent of all responsibility, and punished women as those guilty of transmitting and spreading disease.[16] This view was propelled by wild statistics spread throughout British society about the swarms of ‘fallen women’ that patrolled urban areas, and their position as the origin of venereal affliction.[17] By the end of the nineteenth century, common perceptions of venereal diseases were coloured by pervasive ideology of young men seduced by crafty prostitutes and falling victim to the female’s infection.[18] These ideas reinforced the well-established line between ‘pure’ and acceptable women and ‘impure’ women of disrepute, symbolised by the subjection of infected women in Britain to an invasive programme of moral discipline, lessons in personal hygiene and enforced relearning of femininity and deference.[19] The entire system of venereal disease control and prevention in the British Empire was thus premised around a sole focus on women, and especially prostitutes, believed to be the reservoir of sexually transmitted infection.[20]

At the heart of this response was the dominant Western view of feminine sexuality, which was simply that proper women should have no active sexuality. Even the proto-feminist reformers who campaigned tirelessly for years against the Contagious Diseases Act firmly believed that both British and ‘native’ prostitutes and promiscuous women could be ‘reformed’ given appropriate moral intervention: a rescue aimed at restoring these women to their pre-fallen position as an asexually pure standard of virtue.[21] Nineteenth century British women were allowed no concession by general society to any positive representation of active female sexuality, and this is reflected clearly in the moral responses to those women who were seen to be immersed in sexual deviancy.[22]

Tellingly, however, these ‘moral’ treatments of infected British women did not extend to Indian prostitutes in the nineteenth century. General theories of morality attached to British beliefs about their Asiatic colonies included a notion that prostitution was a socially acceptable profession for Hindu women, prescribed to individuals through the hereditary caste system.[23] Due to this, there is almost none of the dogged attachment to moral redemption that British prostitutes were subjected to in the Indian context: Indian women were conceptualised as critically different to British women due to their race.[24] This was more or less repeated in other colonial contexts, with the commissioners in Hong Kong declaring that “Chinese prostitution is essentially a bargain for money... whilst European prostitution is more or less a matter of passion, based on the national respect for the liberty of the subject.”[25]

Western responses to venereal diseases are thus imbued with an additional component of Victorian British ideology – that of the exceptionally powerful classifier of race. Indeed, Levine indicates that the use of sexual politics in the empire was constantly evoked to secure authority predicated on a potent mix of whiteness and masculinity.[26] As such, colonial authorities across almost every state in the empire imposed similar legislation and lock hospital systems as those in place in Britain, but in contrast to the territorial acts, the colonial versions were typically more coercive, widespread and had far greater impact on the urban civilian population.[27]

Culturally and geographically specific medico-moral discourse evolved in the colonies that asserted that the general state of female morality was far worse than that of European women.[28] In such a view, it was perfectly feasible that almost all of the non-European women in Hong Kong were prostitutes, or at the very least, due to the peculiarities of the Chinese race, sexually aberrant.[29] Similarly, in India, a central point of imperial policy was the firm belief that every Indian women had a propensity towards prostitution, and that it could be taken for granted that “any native woman who solicits... attention is, or has been [venereally] infected.”[30] The role of the colonised woman as nothing more than a sexual object within British imperialism is similarly noted in the African context.[31] As Levine notes, in the colonial project, ‘prostitute’ and ‘woman’ were often one and the same.[32] This positioning of colonised women was linked to the general idea that ‘natives’ were inherently unable to control their sexuality, which the medical establishment confirmed was in part a result of their tropical environment.[33]

This conception of environmental factors impacting on physical and mental characteristics had further influence on the responses to venereal disease. It was one of the major factors used to explain the differences in rates of infection between European and indigenous men: indigenous men consistently had far lower rates of venereal infection than their European counterparts, and the effects of the sicknesses seemed milder, both of which caused considerable resentment.[34] This was partially explained by the “peculiarly hostile effects of the environment” on European constitutions.[35] Further reasoning is given by medical experts in India and colonial New Zealand that indigenous men had a hereditary heightened immunity to sexually transmitted disease.[36] Very little weight is given to any consideration that local men were less inclined to visit prostitutes or have multiple sexual partners, in a conscious attempt to promote the colonial ideology that the disease attacked the more civilised constitution with greater viciousness.[37]

All of these approaches to the increasingly serious rates of venereal infection in the British colonies coalesced to a large extent around ideas of racial hierarchy.  As remarked by Kehoe, in the Japanese context, the British were not represented as the ‘external other’ who purveyed disease to Japan, rather, portrayals positioned the prostitute as ‘internal other’, and British medicine as capable of exerting control over the threat: in this way, the approach to sexually transmitted diseases “upheld the rhetoric of British superiority, and fostered British cultural imperialism.”[38] Similarly, throughout the empire, the imperial authority consistently sought to use the discourse around and response to venereal disease as a site for condemnation of the immorality of the colonized and more firmly embed British ruling values.[39]

In a context of such forceful contested attitudes, venereal disease became a powerfully loaded concept. As Weeks has convincingly argued, disease is always imbued with social and political dimensions, and is culturally and historically important due to the way meanings and interpretations of it are refracted though social possibilities.[40] Sex related diseases are particularly powerful in this way.[41] In the colonial context, venereal disease became more and more a convenient metaphor for savagery and primitiveness, and underscored the connection between race and ‘unacceptable’ sexual behaviour.[42] Lord Kitchener’s statements on venereal disease in India, rife with imagery of ulceration and leprosy, are representative of this layering of significance, in their symbolism of the contaminating threat that India poses to the white colonialist, both in the contraction of sexually transmitted illnesses and, more ominously, the degenerative process of ‘orientalisation.’[43]

This symbolism and importance given to venereal disease in the nineteenth century is a result of the deeply held views of the West which could not be isolated from their reactions to social problems. The attempts to prevent, control and treat venereal infections are therefore coloured hugely by attitudes to race, class and gender. Women’s sexuality, lower class morals, masculine urges and racial inferiority are all quintessential elements in the decision to implement lock hospital systems and the Contagious Diseases Acts and their equivalents throughout the empire. Western ideology undeniably undermined all attempts throughout the empire to respond effectively to this scourge of disease due to the fundamental inequalities that were institutionalised within its approaches.

Bryder, L., ‘Sex Race and Colonialism: An Historiographical Review’, The International History Review, 20, 4, 1998, pp. 806-22.

Busia, A., ‘Miscegenation as Metonymy: Sexuality and Power in the Colonial Novel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9, 3, 1986, pp. 360-72.

Dunsford, D., ‘Principle versus Expediency: A Rejoinder to F.B. Smith’, Social History of Medicine, 5, 3, 1992, pp. 505-14.

Gilman, S., Sexuality: An Illustrated History: Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Age of AIDS, New York, 1989.

van Heyningen, E., ‘The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 2, 1984, pp. 170-97.

Howell, P., ‘Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong’, Urban History, 31, 2, 2004, pp.229-48.

Levine, P., ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, 1994, pp. 579-602.

Levine, P., ‘Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as "Constitutional Crisis" in Britain and British India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55, 3, 1996, pp.585-612.

Macpherson, K., ‘Conspiracy of Silence: A History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Hong Kong’ in M. Lewis et al eds, Sex, Disease and Society: a Comparative History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, Connecticut, 1997.

Mort F., Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, London, 2^nd edn, 2000.

Peers, D., ‘Soldiers, Surgeons and the Campaigns to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial India, 1805-1860’, Medical History, 42, 2, 1998, pp. 137 – 60.

Smith, F. B., ‘The Contagious Diseases Act Reconsidered’, Social History of Medicine, 3, 3, 1990, pp. 197 – 216.

Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, 1995.

Walkowitz, J., Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, London, 1989.

Walkowitz, J. and D. Walkowitz, ‘”We Are Not Beasts of the Field”: Prostitution and the Poor in Plymouth and Southampton Under the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Feminist Studies, 1, 3, 1973, pp.73-106.

Weeks, J., Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity, London, 1991.

Weeks, J., Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, 2nd edn., London, 1989.

Whitehead, J., ‘Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Legislation, and Respectable Femininity in Colonial North India’, Gender & History, 7, 1, 1995, pp. 41-63.

[1] F. B. Smith, ‘The Contagious Diseases Act Reconsidered’, Social History of Medicine, 3, 3, 1990, p. 197.

[2] J. Whitehead, ‘Bodies Clean and Unclean: Prostitution, Sanitary Legislation, and Respectable Femininity in Colonial North India’, Gender & History, 7, 1, 1995, pp. 45-46.

[3] J. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, London, 1989, p. 3.

[4] Ibid p. 192.

[5] J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, 2^nd edn., London, 1989, p. 89.

[6] Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 210.

[7] Ibid, p. 71.

[8] Ibid p. 77.

[9] J. Walkowitz and D. Walkowitz, ‘”We Are Not Beasts of the Field”: Prostitution and the Poor in Plymouth and Southampton Under the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Feminist Studies, 1, 3, 1973, p. 73.

[10] D. Peers, ‘Soldiers, Surgeons and the Campaigns to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial India, 1805-1860’, Medical History, 42, 2, 1998, p. 147

[11] A. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, 1995, p. 179.

[12] P. Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, 1994, p. 597.

[13] F. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, London, 2^nd edn, 2000, p. 65.

[14] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire’, p. 596.

[15] L. Bryder, ‘Sex Race and Colonialism: An Historiographical Review’, The International History Review, 20, 4, 1998, p. 821.

[16] D. Dunsford, ‘Principle versus Expediency: A Rejoinder to F.B. Smith’, Social History of Medicine, 5, 3, 1992, p. 508.

[17] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire’, pp. 580, 584.

[18] S. Gilman, Sexuality : An Illustrated History : Representing the Sexual in Medicine and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Age of AIDS, New York, 1989, p. 238.

[19] Mort, p. 63.

[20] Bryder, p. 820.

[21] Mort, p. 76.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution and the Politics of Empire’, pp. 585-6.

[24] Peers, p. 146.

[25] K. Macpherson, ‘Conspiracy of Silence: A History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Hong Kong’ in M. Lewis et al eds, Sex, Disease and Society: a Comparative History of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, Connecticut, 1997, pp 97-99.

[26] P. Levine, ‘Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as "Constitutional Crisis" in Britain and British India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55, 3, 1996, p. 587.

[27] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,’ p. 581.

[28] Philip Howell, ‘Race, Space and the Regulation of Prostitution in Colonial Hong Kong’, Urban History, 31, 2, 2004, p. 239.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,’ p.590.

[31] A. Busia, ‘Miscegenation as Metonymy: Sexuality and Power in the Colonial Novel’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9, 3, 1986, p. 364.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Peers, p. 149.

[34] Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, ‘The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 2, 1984, p. 179.

[35] Peers, p. 145.

[36] Ibid p. 142.

[37] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire,’ p.592.

[38] Bryder, p. 818.

[39] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire’, p. 601.

[40] J. Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity, London, 1991, p. 114.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire’, p. 591.

[43] Ibid.