Seven reasons for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases (Women's) Acts 1866-1869 / issued by the City of London Committee for obtaining the repeal of those Acts.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seven reasons for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases (Women's) Acts 1866-1869 / issued by the City of London Committee for obtaining the repeal of those Acts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    11/18 (page 9)
    that evidence to rebut becomes an impossibility, and upon the testimony (which maybe malicious, mistaken, or corrupt, or based on anonymous slander) of a single police officer—all those safeguards which the law pro- vides against misconduct or mistake for 'persons charged ivith the vilest crimes being denied her. This is no fancy picture, as hundreds of women can testify, who have shrunk from the infamy of registration as pros- tiiutes, and have suffered imprisonment as the preferable alternative. There is not to be found on the statute books of any country, however despotic, so disgraceful an enactment, so utterly opposed to that first principle of English freedom—that a subject should be considered innocent and entitled to liberty, until proved by evidence to be unworthy of it.* Who can wonder that women, driven to despera- tion, should have, again and again, terminated their lives when confronted with such a tribunal; and that maidens, innocent of a knowledge of the very terms used for their entanglement, have been placed on the registers, deprived of their natural liberty, and subjected to the outrage sanctioned by the Acts.f # Even in France, where vice is directly licensed as well as protected, a woman must he proved to be a prostitute before she can be registered and treated as such (vide Evidence before Royal Commission, No. 367). Mr. Batchelor truly remarks, “Our (Metropolitan) police are armed with an amount of arbitrary power which is certain to be injurious to the State, and is subversive of our civil liberties. It is directed now against women—virtuous, unfortunate, or abandoned. It is impossible to confine it to them, even were it righteous to deprive females of equal rights with men. Despotic laws against special classes always bring in their wake despotic laws against the whole community. The nation that tramples on women shall itself he trampled on'1 t Vide reference to the case of C. W., at p. 7. Mr. C. J. Tarring, Barrister-at- Law, writing to The Protest, under date April 16, 1878, states :— “ I am frequently myself informed of women being positively hunted about by the spy police; and being £ deterred,’ not from entering upon or pursuing an evil calling, but from succeeding in their efforts to avoid or escape from it. For in all large towns there is many a poor woman shuddering on the brink of the abyss, to whom the suspicion of the policeman, followed by his prompt order to ‘ go up to the examination house,’ is the last push which sends her over the edge. There are many, too, who have, alas ! succumbed in their hour of weakness to dire temptation, who yet are struggling to return; but whose struggles grow fainter under the leer of the detective, with his £ Come, now, you know you are no better than you ought to be,’ and receive the coup de grace from his sharp order to £ go up to the examination house, or it will be the worse for you.’ It is not surprising that there are well authenticated instances of women, in their wretchedness and despair, having sought relief even in death from the cruel