456Chapter 23
40,000 at the turn-of-the-century. Similar estimates for
Germany range from 100,000 to 330,000 women in
- All such numbers must be treated with caution:
Some Victorian moralists counted any unmarried
woman living with a man as a prostitute.
Britain, France, and Italy all enacted state-regulated
prostitution. Most German states permitted municipal
brothels, although after 1871 Berlin tried to eliminate
them. Governments accepted regulated prostitution be-
cause it helped to control venereal diseases in naval
bases and army garrisons. Prostitutes were required to
have regular medical examinations and receive treat-
ment for VD. Laws such as the British Contagious Dis-
eases Acts of 1864 and 1866 gave the police exceptional
powers to arrest any woman who was unescorted in
public and to order her to have a medical examination.
This abuse of women, combined with the moral opposi-
tion to prostitution and the desire to help prostitutes,
led to abolitionist campaigns, such as Josephine Butler’s,
which won the suspension of the Contagious Diseases
Acts in 1883 and their repeal in 1886. Women, typically
Protestant reformers who linked moral reforms with
feminism, launched abolitionist campaigns in many
countries, as Avril de Sainte Croix did in France and Em-
ilie de Morsier did in Switzerland.
Governments were right to worry about VD rates.
The rate of infection and the death rate for syphilis in
the 1890s were both higher than the rates for AIDS in
the 1990s (see illustration 23.5). One French study
found that the leading cause of death in Europe was tu-
berculosis (which killed 150,000 per year) but syphilis
was a close second (140,000), killing three times as
many people as cancer did (40,000). In Britain, where
Lord Randolph Churchill demonstrated the universality
of VD by slowly dying from syphilis in public, nearly
7,000 people died of VD in 1901—a death rate of 16.4
per 100,000 population (the death rate for AIDS in the
United States was 8.6 per 100,000 in 1989). A German
medical study of 1900 estimated even higher rates of
infection there and asserted that 50 percent of German
men had a venereal disease, usually gonorrhea, and 20
percent had syphilis.
European laws to regulate prostitution or to control
VD were mild compared with the draconian laws
against homosexuality. All sexual acts between men
were illegal in most countries, and sexual intercourse
between men (usually called buggery or sodomy in the
nineteenth century) was often a capital crime. Dutch
law allowed the execution of convicted homosexuals in
1800, and twenty-two trials had taken place for the
crime in 1798, but imprisonment or banishment was
the usual punishment. There were seventeen convic-
tions for homosexuality at Amsterdam in the decade
1801–10, and none resulted in an execution. Sexual in-
tercourse between men remained a capital crime in
Britain until 1861, and one or two men were hanged for
it annually in the early nineteenth century. Gay men
thus faced extreme dangers from blackmailers, as hap-
pened to Lord Castlereagh; the pressure led to his
suicide in 1822. Others, such as the notoriously bisex-
ual Lord Byron, fled the country.
The nineteenth-century reforms of sexual statutes
typically perpetuated the criminalization of homosexu-
ality but reduced the penalties. The penal code of the
German Empire forbade “unnatural vice” between men,
but sentences ranged from one day to five years. British
law remained more severe. The Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act of 1885 allowed life imprisonment for homo-
sexuality, but it also created the lesser crime of “gross
indecency,” for which men could be sentenced to twoIllustration 23.5
Venereal Disease.Syphilis was an incurable and often fatal
disease throughout the nineteenth century, killing far more Euro-
peans in the 1890s than AIDS killed in the 1990s. There were an
estimated 43,000 AIDS deaths in the United States in 1995,
compared with 140,000 syphilis deaths in Europe in 1895. Euro-
pean alarm in the 1890s produced the engraving entitled “The
Two Faces of Love,” which uses striking imagery to warn of sex-
ual dangers.