Female prostitution in England during the Victorian era was widely treated as a major social concern and issue of national public health from the 1860s to 1880s.

A study of alliances between prostitutes and femminists and their clashes with medical authorities and police.

The 'steel rape' of women is a scandal that is almost forgotten today. In Victorian England, police forces were granted powers to force any woman they suspected of being a 'common prostitute' to undergo compulsory and invasive medical examinations, while women who refused to submit willingly - some as young as 13 - could be arrested and incarcerated. This scandal was exposed by Josephine Butler, a beautiful Evangelical campaigner who did not rest until she had ended the violation and helped repeal the Act that governed it. She went on to campaign against child prostitution, the trafficking of frightened girls from Britain to Europe, and government-sponsored brothels in India. In addition, Josephine was instrumental in raising the age of consent from 13 to 16. This is the poignant tale of a nineteenth-century woman who challenged taboos and conventions in order to campaign for the rights of her gender, no matter what walk of life. Her story is compelling - and unforgettable.

The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

Attwood examines Victorian attitudes to prostitution across a number of sources: medical, literary, pornographic.

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases. The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue', aroused the ire of many reformers, not only women’s rights campaigners. Paul McHugh analyses the social composition of the different repeal and reform movements – the liberal reformists, the passionate struggle of the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Tory reformers whose achievement was in the improvement of preventative medicine, and finally the Social Purity movement of the 1880s which favoured a coercive approach. This is a fascinating study of ideals and principles in action, of pressure-group strategy, and of individual leaders in the repeal movement’s sixteen year progress to victory. The book was originally publised in 1980.

Fascinating excerpts from newspapers, journals, diaries, and letters show that although prostitution was widespread in Victorian Britain, it was not altogether considerd amoral.

Providing a much-needed insight into Victorian attitudes, including that of Christian morality, this book makes a distinctive contribution to the history of crime, sociak welfare and the family.

The 'steel rape' of women is a scandal that is almost forgotten today. In Victorian England, police forces were granted powers to force any woman they suspected of being a 'common prostitute' to undergo compulsory and invasive medical examinations, while women who refused to submit willingly could be arrested and incarcerated. This scandal was exposed by Josephine Butler, an Evangelical campaigner who did not rest until she had ended the violation and helped repeal the Act that governed it. She went on to campaign against child prostitution, the trafficking of girls from Britain to Europe, and government-sponsored brothels in India. In addition, Josephine was instrumental in raising the age of consent from 13 to 16. Josephine Butler is the poignant tale of a nineteenth-century woman who challenged taboos and conventions in order to campaign for the rights of her gender. Her story is compelling – and unforgettable.

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases. The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of ...