The Victorian Era

What Was the Contagious Diseases Act

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 established a system of compulsory, police-supervised medical examination of women suspected of prostitution in a list of garrison and naval-port towns in England and Ireland, and, by 1869, in certain imperial stations abroad. The Acts applied only to the women; the soldier or sailor who infected them was not subjected to a comparable examination, and the system was widely seen as a piece of class-and-sex partial legislation. It provoked one of the great Victorian reform campaigns: the repeal movement led by Josephine Butler, which eventually forced the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury to suspend the Acts in 1883 and to repeal them outright in 1886. The repeal linked the law of public health to the law of the family, and it cleared the ground for the campaign of W. T. Stead, the “Maiden Tribute” exposé of 1885, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 that raised the age of consent from 13 to 16.

The Passing of the Acts

The first Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 was a short, almost technical measure. It applied to a small number of garrison and naval stations — Chatham, Colchester, Devonport, Dover, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheerness, Shorncliffe, Southampton, Windsor, and Woolwich — and it allowed a special visiting surgeon, with the authority of the local magistrate, to require any woman who came before him as a suspected common prostitute to submit to a periodical medical examination. A woman found to be suffering from a venereal disease could be detained in a certified hospital until cured, and was then placed on a register and required to present herself for re-examination at intervals of up to a year. The Act was extended in 1866 to a longer list of stations and a wider range of diseases, and in 1869 to a still longer list, with the addition of a number of imperial stations — Malta, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bombay.

The Acts were promoted by the medical officers of the army and navy, who were alarmed at the volume of venereal disease among the troops (one Army Medical Department return of 1864 put the proportion of effective strength constantly in hospital with venereal disease at well over a tenth of the garrison at some home stations); by a group of sanitary reformers led by William Acton, a surgeon who argued that the regulation of prostitution was a necessary part of the new public health; and by a small but vocal section of the feminist press, which saw the Acts as a measure of protection for the soldier and the wife. The campaign was given a scientific gloss by the reports of the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease, and the Acts were carried through a House of Commons that, in the 1860s, was largely indifferent to questions of women’s civil liberties.

The Operation of the Acts

In practice the Acts were administered by a small medical-police apparatus. A woman could be required to submit to examination if a police constable charged her before a magistrate with being a common prostitute; if she refused, she could be imprisoned. A woman who was examined and found diseased could be detained for up to nine months in a special hospital — the Dreadnought hospital ship at Greenwich, the Lock hospital at Paddington, the Westbourne Grove refuge, and a handful of similar institutions in the garrison towns. If she was found healthy, she was placed on the register and required to present herself at intervals of up to a fortnight. The system touched at most a few thousand women in any one year, and its official effect on the rate of venereal disease in the army and navy was modest, but its symbolic effect on the politics of Victorian respectability was enormous.

The Royal Commission on the Contagious Diseases Acts, appointed in 1870 under the chairmanship of the Liberal politician and physician Lord Hampton (W. P. Law), reported in 1871. The report concluded that the Acts had been of use in reducing the level of venereal disease in the protected stations, and recommended their extension to the civilian population of the larger towns. This recommendation, leaked to the press in 1870, was the immediate cause of the national repeal campaign.

The Campaign for Repeal

The campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was one of the most determined extra-parliamentary campaigns of the Victorian period, and it was led by a remarkable coalition of women and men. The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA), founded by Josephine Butler in January 1869, gave the campaign an organisation of its own, and Mrs Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896) is still the central document of the movement. Mrs Butler was a passionate campaigner and a remarkable tactician; she was a Liberal, a Dissenter, a feminist, an evangelist, and a moral purist, and she brought all of these constituencies to the cause.

The campaign’s most conspicuous supporters in the world of letters included Florence Nightingale, who called the Acts a “foul” stain on the law; Harriet Martineau, who denounced them in the Daily News; Elizabeth Garrett, the first English woman to qualify as a doctor; the novelist Charles Kingsley; the Liberal MP James Stuart, who put down the first parliamentary motion for repeal; the rector of St Thomas’s, Portsmouth, the Reverend C. M. Beloe; and a swarm of Nonconformist ministers and women lecturers, who carried the campaign into the chapels and the provincial lecture halls. The agitation was conducted through the petition, the pamphlet, the public meeting, the conference, the ladies’ drawing-room meeting, the public letter to the Times, the parliamentary question, the Royal Commission, and the by-election, and the women’s speeches at the annual congresses of the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts were reported in the London and provincial press.

The campaign’s tactics, and the moral passions it aroused, were not without their violent episodes. The Reverend Henry Ward, a Plymouth priest, was roughly handled in 1870; Mrs Butler was physically assaulted in Liverpool in 1871; and the campaigner Charles Robert Conder was imprisoned in 1876 for obstructing the police in the execution of the Acts. The state trials of 1870–71, in which the principle of the Acts was examined at the bar of public opinion, were a turning point in the history of Victorian liberalism.

The Repeal and Its Aftermath

The Acts were suspended by the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury in 1883, on the recommendation of the majority report of a departmental committee presided over by the Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain; they were formally repealed in 1886 by the Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal Act, against the votes of a substantial body of Conservative, Liberal-Unionist, and even Liberal members who had come to regard the Acts as a regrettable necessity.

The repeal was followed, two years later, by the second great campaign against the regulation of prostitution of the early 1880s, the campaign for the age of consent. The journalist W. T. Stead’s series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” published in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885, exposed the trafficking in young girls for the purposes of prostitution and led directly to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16, made gross indecency between males a criminal offence, and established the new offence of procuring. Mrs Butler and the LNA had played a significant part in preparing the political ground for Stead’s disclosures, and the two campaigns are properly read as a single movement for the reform of the law of sexual morality.

The repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was a major victory for the women’s movement, and it shaped the campaigning methods and the constitutional politics of the women’s suffrage movement of the late Victorian period. It also marked the end of a tradition, going back to the Continental regulationism of the 1830s and 1840s, in which the prostitute was treated as a separate and regulated class of the population; the Victorian compromise, which left prostitution to the ordinary criminal law, has remained the basis of English policy to this day.