The Origins of Sex by Faramerz Dabhoiwa

Author:Faramerz Dabhoiwa [Dabhoiwa, Faramerz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, non.fiction
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13. The London Magdalen House: the first refuge for penitent prostitutes to be founded in the English-speaking world.

The foundation of charities to rescue poor women from sexual suffering was thus one instance of a more general movement to improve the health and numbers of the labouring classes, and thereby increase national strength and prosperity. However, the prominence of sexual philanthropies also illustrates the advance of new sentiments about female innocence and culpability. The older view had always been that providing for bastards and sexual sinners would simply encourage fornication. As Defoe summarized the arguments against a Foundling Hospital in 1728, it would ‘set up a nursery for lewdness, and encourage fornication … Who would be afraid of sinning, if they can so easily get rid of their bastards? We shall soon be over-run with foundlings when there is such encouragement given to whoredom.’ But by the middle of the eighteenth century, for the first time, the contrary opinion had begun to hold sway. It is true that the application of sympathy was easier in some cases than in others. To argue, for example, that sufferers from venereal disease were deserving victims, rather than foul and culpable sinners, involved the early propagandists of the Lock Hospital in some revealingly defensive rhetoric. No, they were forced to stress, diseased whores (and others ‘who voluntarily draw this misery on themselves’) were not ‘improper objects’; no, they should not ‘be left to rot alive’; no, they continued in their trade, spreading disease, not willingly but only out of ‘a kind of necessity’. The hospital’s main problem in attracting fashionable backing was that its practical benefits appeared to be comparatively limited. The sheer repulsiveness of the subject did not help. At no other charity would the chaplain himself, far from rushing in to rescue souls, frankly admit to his patients that he could not bear to stay long in the ward, or ‘converse with you in private’, because of their repugnant state.12

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