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.

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    registrations, regulations, and examinations of the Acts. Invidious distinctions, thus created between sex and sex, class and class, are calculated to bring the law and its administration into contempt, and to create impressions in the minds of men in the humbler walks of life highly dangerous to the State. (4.) The Acts violate the first principles of English Constitutional liberty.—There occur in the history of nations occasions justifying the suspension of the liberties of the subject on the ground of a supreme necessity or the national safety. The innocuous gratification of men’s lusts forms no such justification. But the Acts in question, in the vain attempt to attain that object, absolutely suspend the most cherished natural rights of every woman without exception in the districts in which they are put in force.* * “ This subject is often discussed as though abandoned, women alone were subjected to the operation of the Acts.—A police constable can summons any woman in the district, can make a general charge of immoral conduct against her before a magistrate, the witness is not required to state any act, time, place, or circumstance in support of his charge—indeed, the Government authorities employ counsel who are accustomed to remind the police, under such circumstances, that they are not required to answer any questions in support of their allegations. A charge thus made and sustained it is all but impossible to disprove; in fact, women are placed absolutely, as it regards their reputation, in the power of any one of the police of immorality employed under the Acts. It is not surprising, therefore, that the grossest injustice and cruelty have been practised, inadvertently or designedly. In hundreds of cases women have been subjected to imprisonment, some with hard labour, for refusing to register themselves as prostitutes, and to submit to periodical examination. Gases have happened of girls yet in their state of maidenhood being subjected to the Acts on the oath of a police constable. Such only can escape the penalties under which women are made subject, for in no other contingency has a woman any answer against the general charge of gross immorality, which these abominable laws sanction {vide the case of C. W., as authenticated on oath before E. R. Coles, Esq., J.P. for Kent, at Chatham, 30th November, 1875).* As a practical and convincing test of the gross cowardice and unfairness of the Acts, let us suppose that our legislators, in their professed anxiety to stay contagion, and to arrest the progress of disease, had generously selected their own sex to be experimented upon, and had passed the Acts, simply substituting the word “ meri9 for “ women.” How would our statesmen, our legislators, our ministers of religion, our church members, and reputable members of society, have fared ? and what would then have been their opinions of the Acts, under such conceivable conditions ? Let us suppose a blundering or a corrupted policeman (such have been, vide page 11) taking his oath that the Member of Parliament, the minister of religion, the City missionary, or the Sunday - * Dyer Brothers, 21, Paternoster Square, E.C.