"One Law for Men . ."
By R. H. CECIL IT may have been the New England colonists who dis- covered that "all men are created equal," and Alexander Woolcott who added that some are more equal than others ; but in this country for centuries the Common Law, at least, has held all men to be equal before it. To women this has always seemed a patriarchal dogma ; and its masculine complacency has seemed to survive the numerous statutory and judicial concessions that ' the masculine shall be deemed to include the feminine unless the contrary shall appear." For one thing, these have had a slightly unpalatable flavour of admitting tolerantly that the greater includes the less. For another, they leave it open to an overwhelmingly masculine legislature to arrange that "the contrary shall appear ", as often as possible.
This is nowhere so blatantly apparent as in the law relating to prostitution, which selects a special class of women, calls them "common prostitutes," and provides punishment solely for them, leaving their clients alone. The Public Morality Council was recently reported. in the Press as having said in its Annual Report for 1949 that "the men should be punished, too " ; actually what the Council said was that" if there were no customers there would be no prostitutes, and to seek to punish the prostitute while the man is uncondemned is the negation of justice " ; which is rather different from demand- ing punishment for both.
The simple truth that punishment, and, in particular, the punishment of one sex only, will never eliminate prostitution was first presented to modern European moralists by Josephine Butler. Her campaign against the persecution of "fallen women" led to the foundation, in 1875, of the rather inaptly- named International Abolitionist Federation. (What this sought to abolish was not prostitution, whose abolition has eluded mankind for thousands of years and is likely to so do in monogamous societies for thousands more, but all systems by which men openly penalised women in relation to the sex- life arrangements that they secretly condoned.) This year, its "jubilee year," the Federation is holding its eighteenth World Conference in Rome, from October 28th to 30th, when its delegates will hear reports and addresses from many countries on the Governmental " regulation " of prostitution (still in operation in forty States), on the psychological and social causes of it, and on the health problems to which it gives rise. The British branch of the Federation is the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, also founded by Josephine Butler at a moment when our legislators, in a determined effort to "regulate " prostitution for the first time in modern English history, had set up a system so tyrannical as to be almost beyond belief.
The very furtiveness and outlawry to which the prostitute had for many years been condemned provided the conditions exactly suitable to the spread of venereal disease. The rapid growth of industry had concentrated working people in huge and growing urban communities, with a high proportion of itinerant labourers, while providing little or no recreation for their brief and illiterate leisure ; and it was in the naval and military garrison towns that the disease was found, in the eighteen-sixties, to be at its worst. In the urgent, righteous panic of men who will set up fever hospitals rather than exam- ine the drains, England adopted the Napoleonic system of ,, regulation," minus only the maisons tolerees. The Con- tagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, which applied only to certain garrison towns, provided for the registration and police supervision of prostitutes, their regular medical , examination, and their compulsory detention (if diseased) in what were politely known as "hospitals." Any woman could be arrested without warrant by any member of a specially-established body of prain-clothes. police who had what he thought was "good cause to believe that she was a prostitute. If she was not, she must prove it to the magis- trate. Failing in this (and it is notdriously difficult to prove a negative) she would be ordered to be medically examined at regular intervals for the next twelve months—or go to prison with hard labour. Many women who were falsely accused consented, rather than argue their cases in the publicity of open court, to sign what was called a" voluntary submission" to surgical examination for the 12-month period ; and they thus acquired prostitute status as a life-long stigma.
During the 22 years that this iniquitous system lasted, Josephine -Butler worked strenuously for its abolition. She incurred the utmost opprobrium among respectable Victorian obscurantists, was intimidated and attacked at her meetings by the organised mobs which were the contemporary instru- ments of democracy, and was a source of acute embarrassment to many of her fair-weather friends. She may have made tactical errors. She certainly misunderstood the structure of the English legislative system and the sovereignty of Parlia- ment when she declared; in her passionate book The .Consti- tution Violated, that the Contagious Diseases Acts were "a distinct violation of English law. ' She has left to the Asso- ciation which she founded a legacy of misunderstanding about this, which bases the "equality of the sexes" on a supposedly immutable Common Law, and does not perceive that the entire Common Law can be constitutionally and lawfully changed overnight by every Parliamentary majority. But she knew how to use Parliament and the franchise to get what she wanted, and she destroyed the Contagious Diseases Acts.
Today she would be attacking the " solicitation " laws, by which a woman becomes a" common prostitute " on the word of one policeman that an unknown man in the street has "appeared annoyed," and is thereafter fined repeatedly (for "soliciting ") by magistrates who are told what her chatacter is'before her trial begins. She would be demanding, with the International Abolitionist Federation, that "personal and private prostitution" be regarded universally as a matter which concerns the conscience but does not constitute an offence at law, regarded, that is to say, as a social evil to be combated by the promotion of social security, education, and happiness. She would insist that the intervention of Govern- ments in matters of sexual morality should be limited to the punishment of immoral acts against minors, of indecency practised in public, and of the whole machinery of " procu- ration," including all who may conceivably profit by it. She would be proclaiming that the immoral traffic in women, which still goes on throughout the world, will always go on while prostitutes are registered, certificated, and grouped in recognised houses, since the very grouping postulates a filthy hierarchy of eager traders. Above all she would be demand- ing the repeal of certain clauses in the Criminal Law Amend- ment- Act, 1885, which seem especially designed to facilitate the lodgement of English girls in brothels. These clauses are so insane that they invite re-examination. 6ection 2 (1) of ,this strange enactment penalises anyone who procures a girl under 21 for immoral purposes, that girl "not being a common prostitute or of known immoral char- acter." And section 3 (2) provides a penalty for anyone who, by means of any deception, procures the submissiok of "any woman or girl, not being a common prostitute . ." etc. Now why, in an Act expressly intended to stamp out the procurer, should our legislators deliberately give him a fre" hand with the very women most likely to come under his influence ? Unless this was a calculated decision to outlaw the prostitute and the "kept woman" on the ground that sin permanently disqualifies for citizenship, I do not know th” answer. Presumably it still represents the -wishes of con. temporary Governments, since all attempts to get it repeale: have failed. (A further attempt is to be made as soon as legislative opportunity offers). But no one is interested. Perhaps the ocasion calls for another W. T. Stead, who/when he was editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, went to prison after a thirteen-day Old Bailey trial because he took part in the " abduction " of a twelve-year-old girl merely to show that, in 1885, children could be bought in London and sent abroad as "white slaves." (He produced medical evidence to show that the girl, whom he restored to her parents, had not been harmed). Is it still true, in this country, that social com- passion can only be stirred to militancy by gladiatorial feats of this kind ? If so, there is scope arnbng the prostitutes, whom Schopenhauer called "human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy, for some eccentric martyrdoms.
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