Compulsion, voluntarism, and venereal disease: Governing sexual health in England after the contagious diseases acts

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 91-115

  Cox, Pamela ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949873083     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/508400     Document Type: Review

References (88)

1. Arthur W. Towne, "Compulsory versus Voluntary Methods of Venereal Disease Control in Scandinavia, Holland and Great Britain," American Journal of Syphilis, Gonorrhea, ana Venereal Diseases 23, no. 3 (1939): 27
2. Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall, "Introduction," in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall (London, 2001), 1-14
3. Lesley Hall, "Venereal Diseases and Society in Britain, from the Contagious Diseases Acts to the National Health Service," in ibid., 120-36
4. and Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London, 2000)
5. David Evans, "Sexually Transmitted Disease Policy in the English National Health Service, 1948-2000: Continuity and Social Change," in Davidson and Hall, Sex, Sin and Suffering, 237-52
6. and "Tackling the Hideous Scourge - the Creation of the Venerea -Disease Treatment Centers in Early 20th-century Britain," Social History of Medicine 5, no. 3 (1992): 413-33
7. Evans, "Sexually Transmitted Disease Policy," 240
8. Roger Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons: A Social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Amsterdam, 2000)
9. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003)
10. Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, 1999), 487-96
11. Pamela Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare: Bad Girls in Britain, 1900-1950 (Basingstoke, UK, 2003)
12. and "Girls in Trouble: Defining Female Delinquency, Britain, 1900-1950," in Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960, ed. Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Soland, and Christina Benninghaus (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 192-205
13. and "Girls, Deficiency and Delinquency," in From Idiocy to Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities, ed. David Wright and Anne Digby (London, 1996), 184-206
14. See Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London, 1999), for an outline of how these concepts are identified and examined by theorists of governmentality
15. The term "mixed economy of welfare" generally refers to the interplay among the state, the voluntary sector, the private sector, and the family in shaping provision of and demand for welfare services. See Jane Lewis, "Voluntary and Informal Welfare," in British Social Welfare in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert M. Page and Richard Silburn (London, 1999), 249
16. Jane Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work in Britain: The Charity Organisation Society/Family Welfare Association since 1869 (Aldershot, UK, 1995)
17. Gerry Mooney, "'Remoralizing' the Poor? Gender, Class and Philanthropy in Victorian Britain," in Forming Nation, Framing Welfare, ed. Gail Lewis (London, 1998), 51
18. J. Scott, "The Management of Venereal Disease in New South Wales, 1871 to 1916," Venereology-the Interdisciplinary International Journal of Sexual Health 14, no. 2 (2001): 69-79
19. Mariana Valverde, "Targeted Governance and the Problem of Desire," in Risk and Morality, ed. Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle (Toronto, 2003), 438-58
20. See also Mariana Valverde, Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge, 1998)
21. Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (London, 1995)
22. and "'Cleansing the Portals of Life': The Venereal Disease Campaign in the Early Twentieth Century," in Crises in the. "British State, 1880-1930, ed. Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (London, 1985), 192-208
23. Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons
24. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830, 2nd ed. (London, 2000)
25. On the workings of the CD Acts and the repeal campaign, see Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Women and the State (Cambridge, 1980)
26. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change; Baldwin, Contagion and the State, chap. 5
27. On imperial legislation, see Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics
28. In 1860, the infection rate among soldiers was estimated at 309 per thousand. This did fall to 201 in 1870 and to 139 in 1875, although the fact that, between 1873 and 1879, soldiers who reported their condition while undergoing treatment forfeited their pay led to much underreporting as evidenced by the rise in the infection rate to 245 per thousand in 1880. After 1900 (and long after the repeal of the CD Acts), rates fell more dramatica ly, to ninety in 1905 and fifty in 1913. See Sir Neil Cantlie, A History of the Army Medical Department, vol. 2 (London, 1974), 374
29. On the workings of Regulation 33B, see Hall, "Venereal Diseases and Society." See also Lesley Hall, "'War Always Brings It On': War, STDs, the Military and the Civilian Population in Britain, 1850-1950," in Medicine and Modern Warfare, ed. Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy (Amsterdam, 2000), 205-33
30. and "'The Reserved Occupation'? Prostitution in the Second World War," Women's History Magazine 41 (2002): 4-9
31. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 385, 15 December 1942 (1942-43), 1807-88
32. On contact tracing, see H. Wilson, "History of Sexual Health Advising," in The Manual for Sexual Health Advisers, ed. Society of Sexual Health Advisers (London, 2004), 188-93, 192
33. and Virginia Berridge, AIDS in the UK: The Making of Policy, 1981-1994 (Oxford, 1996)
34. The Lancet 1 (1944): 167
35. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999), 41
36. Kathryn Ellis, "Welfare and Bodily Order: Theorizing Transitions in Corporeal Discourse," in Social Policy and the Body: Transitions in Corporeal Discourse, ed. Kathryn Ellis and Hartley Dean (Basingstoke, UK, 2000), 1-22
37. Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease (London, 1916), 10-11
38. Evans, "Tackling the Hideous Scourge," 431
39. Hall, "Venereal Diseases and Society," 128
40. For these and more general examples of opposing views, see Dr. Douglas White, "The Case against Notification of Venereal Diseases," in The Venereal Clinic, ed. Ernest R. T. Clarkson (London, 1922), 387-91
41. and Towne, "Compulsory versus Voluntary Methods."
42. Baldwin, Contagion and the State, 475, 487
43. Davidson, Dangerous Liaison , 325, 10-11
44. Evans, "Tackling the Hideous Scourge," 433
45. Soon after the publication of this report, the hospital became a designated VD clinic, changing its name to St. Luke's. It is not clear when its inpatient admissions patterns changed. See also T. Wyke, "The Manchester and Salford Lock Hospital, 1818-1917," Medical History 19 (1975): 73-86
46. For reference to the Bristol institution, see Mrs. M. Pendlebury, The Ratepayer and the Lockward (London, 1918; reprinted from The Nineteenth Century [September 1918 ])
47. and Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1990)
48. See David Williams, The London Lock: A Charitable Hospital for Venereal Disease, 1746-1952 (London, 1995)
49. For its earlier history, see Donna Andrew, "Two Medical Charities in Eighteenth-Century London: The Lock Hospital and the Lying-in Charity for Married Women," in Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State, ed. Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (London, 1991), 82-97
50. Linda E. Merians, "The London Lock Hospital and the Lock Asylum for Women," in The Secret Malady; Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, ed. Linda E. Merians (Lexington, KY, 1996), 128-45
51. Williams, The London Lock, 96, 114, 120-21. Admissions had fallen to 340 in 1912
52. Scharlieb, Venereal Diseases in Children, 17. Scharlieb discusses the findings of Dr. R. W. Johnstone, commissioned by the Local Government Board to investigate poor law lock wards. See R. W. Johnstone, Report on Venereal Diseases, Command Paper no. 7029 (London, 1913)
53. Pendlebury, The Ratepayer and the Lockward, 5. Other references in this piece suggest that the lockward described was in Bristol
54. Royal College of Surgeons Archives (RCSA), London, London Lock Hospital, Board of Management Report, 1926
55. See Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, chap. 3, for a longer discussion of the work of the twentieth-century rescue sector
56. Valverde, Diseases of the Will
57. TNA: PRO, MH79/274, London Lock Hospital, "Report of the Committee of Inquiry" (1928-29), 3
58. See also Beverley Blythe, "The Borstal System for Girls, 1908-1948" (MA thesis, University of Essex, 1998), 10, 53
59. RCSA, London, London Lock Hospital, Board of Management Report, 1926, 7
60. A. F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency in Relation to Venereal Disease (London, 1918), 17
61. Clive Unsworth, The Politics of Mental Health Legislation (Oxford, 1987), 288, 323-25
62. F. G. Crookshank, "The Medico-Legal Relations of Venereal Disease," in L. W. Harrison, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Venereal Disease in General Practice, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1931), 452-506
63. See also H. S. Q. Henriques, "Legislation and the Practitioner," in Clarkson, The Venereal Clinic, 410-15
64. Clarkson, The Venereal Clinic, 381
65. Manchée, Social Service in the Clinic, 32-33
66. See Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000), for discussion of broader responses to sexual abuse
67. TNA: PRO, MH55/177, Congenital Syphilis, Discontinuance of attendance of children and pregnant women at clinics
68. Towne, "Compulsory versus Voluntary Methods," 17
69. See also Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change, for a discussion of men and VD
70. Hall, "War Always Brings It On."
71. National Council for Combatting Venereal Diseases, The Speakers' Handbook - Compiled for the Use of Lecturers Representing the NCCVD (London, 1917), 27
72. "Inter-departmental Committee n Infectious Diseases in Connection with Demobilisation," appendix, Command Paper no. 322 (London, 1917)
73. National Council for Combatting Venereal Diseases, The Speakers' Handbook, 20
74. "Inter-departmental Committee on Infectious Diseases in Connection with Demobilisation," 11
75. Lesley Hall, "What Shall We Do with the Poxy Sailor? Venereal Diseases in the British Mercantile Marine, 1860-1950," Journal of Maritime Research (October 2004), http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/
76. Sally Sheard, "Mixed Motives: Improving the Health of Seamen in Liverpool, 1875-1939" (unpublished manuscript, Department of History, University of Liverpool, 2001), 1-19
77. Mrs. C. Neville-Rolfe and Dr. Otto May, The Mercantile Marine and the Problem of Venereal Disease (London, 1924)
78. Sheard, "Mixed Motives," 3
79. Pamela Cox, "Race, Delinquency and Difference in Twentieth Century Britain," in Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950, ed. Pamela Cox and Heather Shore (Aldershot, 2002), 159-77
80. Laura Tabili, "Women 'of a Very Low Type': Crossing Racial Boundaries in Late Imperial Britain," in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonya Rose (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 165-90
81. See Manchée, Social Service in the Clinic, 72, 79, for list of seamen's VD facilities in London
82. Williams, The London Loch, 124, 125-27
83. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 ( Chicago, 2005), chap. 7
84. See, e.g., Rose, Powers of Freedom
85. Dean, Govemmentality
86. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (1974; 2nd ed., Basingstoke, UK, 2005)
87. Manchée, Social Service in the Clinic, appendix
88. Pendlebury, The Ratepayer and the Lockvard, 8