Meerut, India, February 8, 1892.
At half-past seven this morning we went down the Sudder Bazaar to the neighbourhood of the Lock Hospital, it being examination day. The building is well placed for observation, being at a point where five streets meet, and several other streets run close by. The hospital is a foreign bungalow with a verandah in front, inclosed in a high brick wall. Already the girls, in gaudy apparel and flashy jewelry, were assembling, and in a few moments we counted thirty girls standing or sitting around, outside the building and outside the gate in the street. They came walking and riding in ekkas (native carts), and two loads came in cabs. Some of them had several miles to come from the Rest Camp. The vehicles waited for them across the street, under the shade trees. The girls went in by twos or threes, as summoned. A tall native policeman stood about, apparently to keep order. The street was one of Meerut’s busiest thoroughfares. Men and boys lounged here and there, and even tiny children looked on with interest and curiosity. At one time we noticed not less than twenty-five men and boys gathered about and discussing the scene. A police station was close by, and an unusual number of men lingered in front of it, discussing the women, as their glances and manners indicated. One Eurasian woman brought a girl, evidently held as a slave to make money for her; she seemed reluctant to even trust her girl to go alone into the hospital, when her turn came; and as soon as she emerged again, seized her and led her away, the policemen shouting after her in derision, “Mem Sahib! Mem Sahib!” (the name for “lady,” applied, as a rule, to white women), to which the Eurasian gave no response.
About a hundred women were examined that morning, waiting their turn on the public street, while the crowd gathered round to discuss the women kept by the Government for British soldiers. No wonder the Commander-in-Chief has decided that the female medical assistants who could be induced to manage such an affair would hardly be “sufficiently good to preclude the possibility of their receiving bribes.” The Lock Hospitals of the Orient, as we studied them in many Cantonments of India, and also in Singapore and Hong Kong, are for the treatment of prostitution rather than for the treatment of disease, for the reason that only those who could be quickly restored to health to go on in their occupation are likely to be retained any length of time for treatment. We have already referred to the practice of turning cases of secondary, or advanced, disease out of the Cantonment. The position at the head of one of these hospitals is not likely to tax one’s scientific resources much beyond instructing the native women how to perform ablutions, so strongly urged by Lord Roberts in his Circular Memorandum, in administering douches, and in diagnosticating and keeping in hospital all cases of catamenia. We do not marvel if male surgeons have grown tired of the monotonous round, and with a seeming burst of generosity propose to give the position to medical women; particularly, if by such “generous” expressions of appreciation for the usefulness of women, they can lead over-credulous fine ladies into the conclusion that at last all the objections to the C. D. Acts have been met.
In spite of holding a degrading position the verdict of the world is “A man’s a man for a’ that”; but not so the woman who connects herself with an Eastern Lock Hospital—her dignity would never sustain the shock. Already the official conclusion is that no woman of intelligence or honesty would accept such a position. Women cannot afford to become the scavengers of the profession. We remember interviewing an Englishwoman in charge of a very large Lock Hospital in an Eastern city; and after this we went directly to the adjoining general hospital. We were welcomed by the nurses and treated most cordially until we mentioned, with design, the Englishwoman at the neighbouring hospital, and that we had been talking with her. A frozen response abruptly ended further sociability, and we learned thus that even underling nurses of other hospitals held themselves as in a position to snub the chief superintendent of a Lock Hospital in the East.
From the time that the abominable nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts of England and India were made known, and the Acts held up to public execration and outlawed, like a condemned criminal, this System has gone seeking a new alias that its identity might be hidden from the inconvenience of exposure. Many times these laws have been unmasked, and they have never been able to survive the exposure of their real name, which was at the first, “Contagious Diseases Acts.”
Over and over again has this criminal Law, when caught sneaking about, denied his real name. Like a fatal birthmark, which no power can eradicate, so this abomination has its birthmark, which, when seen, fixes the identity beyond all question. That birthmark is the compulsory examination of women. This cannot be made to serve the desired purpose without all the essential features of the C. D. Acts. It makes not the slightest difference whether the law is called the Health Act, as in Australia, Getz’s Projet de Loi, as in Norway, the Women’s and Girls’ Protection Ordinance, as at Singapore, the Cantonment Acts or the Cantonments Act, or what not—the test of the law, as to its identity with the old infamous C. D. Acts, is, whether women are obliged to submit to compulsory examination. “In fact, the compulsory examination of women is the C. D. Acts.” Let this one point be put into law, and all the rest goes without saying. The battle has always raged around this one central point.
To prove that the compulsory examination of women necessitates the regulations that always attend it, let us suppose that in a community this one point is provided for by law, and that the officers of the law are left to enforce the measure, by whatever regulations are necessary:—
The law demands merely that impure women must be examined regularly for the protection of the public health.
But the police officer sees at once that to secure this point a list must be kept of the women, when examined, that notice of requirement can be sent to those not coming voluntarily. Thus registration of prostitutes comes to pass.
But after examination, those found diseased must be placed by themselves for treatment. Thus a hospital for prostitutes is established.
Then provision must be made to compel those who are unwilling to attend the examinations to do so, for it has been the invariable experience that few women will go regularly for examination unless compelled to do so, and also there must be means of enforcing them to remain in hospital. Thus the hospital becomes a Lock Hospital, and fines and imprisonments are imposed on delinquents.
But compulsion cannot be secured without the aid of the police and the magistrate, and it is most difficult to follow up women, prove their identity, hale them to examination and to Lock Hospital without being able to keep them located in one tolerated quarter or house where they may be found—hence segregation is introduced; and this is also done to keep women with whom association is supposed to be safe—because under constant medical and police surveillance—separate from those with whom it is supposed to be a risk to associate.
Now we discover that the compulsory periodical examination of women of impure life, when carried out in actual operation, creates a necessity for all the essential features of every C. D. Act that has ever been known, namely: Compulsory examination; Registration; Lock Hospitals; Fines and Imprisonments; Police Surveillance; Segregation.
Yet another thing is needful for the operation of this law requiring compulsory periodical examination, namely, measures for extending the operation of the law, so that, as new women are likely to become a source of contamination, they also may be brought under its operation, and for the practical and easy operation of the measure, compelled to take up their residence in segregated quarters. This is the special field of activity in the operation of the law, and is a deadly menace to the most ordinary liberties of women. People will loudly advocate that “something must be done” to confine the houses of ill-fame to certain quarters of a city, without the slightest care as to how it is done, so long as they need not become intimately acquainted with a disagreeable subject; they will advocate measures of the most deadly consequences to others more defenceless than themselves, and to the ultimate moral tone of the very society in which they move, and yet heartlessly refuse to consider the responsibility that rests upon them for their conduct. “Something must be done,” they say, and the police force must attend to the details; they are too loathsome even to be considered, yet they refuse to understand that these very loathsome details which they require the police to work out must utterly ruin the character of the police into whose hands they have betrayed all the decent rights of womanhood.
What does it mean to women for men to assume the right to arrest all suspicious characters and oblige them to live in a certain house or street, and to appear at the examinations at the Lock Hospitals? Let the banker sitting in his bank, or the merchant in his shop, consider what it would mean for him to be accosted in his own place of business, taken off immediately to the Lock Hospital, examined, and if the doctor so ordered, sent immediately into exile in a hospital for libertines, with no chance to set his house in order or to defend his character from the charge of being a libertine! And even if the charge were true would he not think the punishment too severe? And then, suppose it were the case that, at the end of the imprisonment in the hospital, he were required to reside for the rest of his days in a certain street? This is exactly what is done with women when once the principle is set up that compulsory periodical examinations must take place. But the reply is, No women of property or consequence would ever be so treated. Very true; yet are not these often utterly profligate? Certainly. So this is a law which will be operated only in the case of the lowly. Yes, it is a piece of legislation on the part of the mighty to degrade and rob the daughters of the poor of their most ordinary rights, and it deserves the most extreme execration that human language is capable of, on that very account. The day has passed by when it is safe to try to enunciate such sentiments among a free people. “What are the women making all this row about?” said one of the daily journals of London, during our India work; “no high-born ladies will ever be put to inconvenience by such a law.” Ah! that was one of the principal reasons why such a row was made.