The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘HENPECKING’
The servants were likely to have been young teenage girls. An
entry for 1904 records that the help of the Association was
asked by a clergyman for Annie Cleverley, a Sunday school
teacher, who was pestered by a man on the way to and fro. An
NVA officer warned the man off.
From its inception the NVA was anxious to have soliciting
by men made an offence. The very first set of minutes records
that some members were in favour of applying the solicitation
laws to men. 2 The entry mentions the activities of a ‘well-known
barrister in Westbourne Grove’ and the ‘action of soldiers at
the entrance to Hyde Park’. The NVA proposals for 1886 for
the amendment of the criminal law included making it an offence
‘for a man or woman to molest or annoy any person in a public
place’. The NVA saw the solicitation laws as discriminating
against women as a petition heading shows:
That your petitioners are deeply impressed by the inefficiency,
inequality and injustice of the law as regards the sexes in
matters relating to morals, and that in particular the law
with regard to solicitation and molestation needs considerable
amendment. 3
There was a recognition by the NVA in its early years that
sexual exploitation of women and especially young girls was
facilitated by the positions of economic power and authority
which men often held. One of the proposals suggested that to
amend the criminal law was to ‘make provision to meet the
case of immoral offences committed by persons in authority’. It
was the NVA’s Mrs Percy Bunting who, at a conference of women
workers at Nottingham in 1895, demanded a law to protect
girls from sexual exploitation by Guardians, schoolmasters and
employers as well as fathers. The NVA’s concern was founded
upon their own experience of innumerable cases of servants
impregnated by their masters and then abandoned, and of men
abusing other positions of trust and authority, such as clergymen,
the US Vice Consul, the steward of the Liberal Club, Kilburn,
and the chaplain of a Dublin Maternity Hospital.
The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene took up the
campaign against sexual abuse in the later period from the
First World War onwards. It was founded in 1913 from the
amalgamation of the Ladies National Association for the
Abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the Men’s
National Association. The two earlier associations were set up
by Josephine Butler in 1870 to launch the Contagious Diseases
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