Feminists who still sleep with the man are delivering their most vital energies to the oppressor.
Jill Johnson, Lesbian Nation (1973)
The double moral standard
Female sexuality has been subjected to particular scientific and moral scrutiny throughout modernity. It has also constituted a central concern in feminist struggles. While the first women’s movement that emerged in the last decades of the 19th century prioritized the fight for civic and political equality for women, sexuality constituted nevertheless an important area for the critique of existing gender relations. Drawing on biological justifications of the double moral standard which saw men as naturally promiscuous and women as passive and chaste, feminists built upon such views of gender to argue that women’s morals were consequently by nature superior to those of men. Occupying the moral high ground, they developed a critique of male sexuality which pointed at the natural lustful drives of men and male sexual freedom as the origin of the sexual oppression of women. Reflecting wider social concerns of the time about the expansion of prostitution in the 19th century across Europe and the US, and the attendant increase in venereal disease, political
activism centred especially on these areas. The ‘real’ reason why men did not wish to give women the vote, some feminists argued, was to protect male sexual exploitation of women.
Female activists from mostly upper-middle-class backgrounds played important roles in the numerous social movements promoting greater moral purity and ‘social hygiene’ that emerged both from the political Left and from conservative and religious organizations across the Western world. Campaigns against prostitution called for an end to the ‘white slavery’ which forced innocent, impoverished young working-class girls into sexual exploitation by unscrupulous middle-class men. Instead, they promoted ‘rescue work’ for ‘fallen women’. The moralist view was that prostitution was a vice; it was also considered a major public health problem. Prostitutes were seen as the main vehicles of the contamination of men with venereal diseases such as gonorrhoea and syphilis, echoing traditional associations in Western culture between the female body and disease. As Shakespeare’s mad King Lear put it:
Down from the waist they are all Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s; there’s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit — burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!
Venereal disease itself came to be culturally represented as female in the modern age, as ‘Dame Syphilis’ as the French called it. Syphilis had appeared in Europe from the late 15th century, possibly spread by sailors returning from the Americas, and led to an epidemic across the continent. Collective anxieties about syphilis portrayed it as coming from the ‘outside’, in particular from foreigners, reflecting wider cultural meanings around sexual disease which tended to see the healthy, male bodies of the nation
as polluted by diseased female and foreign bodies. As the medical author Llewellyn-Jones has pointed out:
As the people of each country became infected, each tried to put the blame for the new and terrifying disease on its neighbour. The Italians called it the Spanish disease. The French, who were first infected in 1495, called it the Italian or Neapolitan disease… It reached England in 1497, where it was called the French disease … It reached China in 1505 and Japan a year later where it was called ‘manka bassam’ or the Portuguese disease.
Sexually transmitted disease carried associations of foreign invasion and treason. During the First and Second World Wars, prostitutes were thus routinely portrayed as ‘helping the enemy’ by contaminating patriotic soldiers. A widely diffused British Second World War poster carried a picture of a skull-faced prostitute linking arms with Hitler and Hirohito, accompanied by the caption ‘VD worst of the three’. Thousands of suspected prostitutes were jailed in internment camps in the US during the First World War, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s The Sexual History of the World War (1941) reports that the German army issued edicts in several occupied territories in 1915 punishing women who had sex with soldiers while knowingly infected with VD with sentences of up to a year in prison.
Driven by fears that venereal disease would make male bodies too weak for military purposes, many national states started to regulate prostitution in the 19th century in order to limit the spread of sexual infections. No efforts were made to prevent customers from contaminating prostitutes, but the latter were targeted with compulsory medical inspection, and, if contamination was diagnosed, incarceration and forced hospital treatment ensued. Folk beliefs circulated in 19th-century Europe that intercourse with a child virgin could cure venereal disease. More generally, child prostitution was widespread across Europe
and elsewhere, though it was common for virginity to be faked so that a girl could be sold at a higher price several times over. An international scandal was caused by the publication of a series of highly graphic accounts of the entrapment and sale of young girls in London brothels by the journalist W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885. The series, published under the name ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, uncovered a sexual underworld where upper-class gentlemen could revel in the ‘cries of tortured victims of lust and brutality’. It led, in the UK, to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act which criminalized procurement and raised the age of sexual consent for girls from 13 to 16.
In alliance with Christian organizations, 19th-century feminist anti-prostitution campaigners called upon national states not to regulate but to ban prostitution altogether. State regulation meant, they argued, that the state ‘acted like a pimp’ by maintaining the institution of prostitution. In 1875, a major international movement was founded in the shape of the British and Continental Federation for the Abolition of Government Regulation of Vice, which called for the abolition of prostitution. High on its political agenda was the fight against the international traffic in women for the purposes of prostitution, reflecting wider social panics of the time concerning the effects on society of increasing immigration patterns. In 1904, the first ‘International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic’ was agreed upon, giving rise to a gradual process of legal prohibition of brothels across most Western countries.
First-wave feminist campaigns mobilized both the moral and the biological model of sexuality to argue for the need to protect women from the dire consequences of male lust. They placed women in the role of guardians of public and private morality, thereby reproducing the prevalent social models of femininity of the time, which based female respectability on virginal purity or married chastity, while the immoral, ‘depraved’ behaviour of
sexually promiscuous women defined them as ‘whores’ either metaphorically or literally.