The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

‘HENPECKING’
wanting to raise the age of consent to the menopause. 8 Another
aim of the NVA was to take the custody of children away from
the person against whom proceedings were taken for indecent
assault, such as father or guardian. The draft bill of 1892 omitted
the raising of the general age of consent because the NVA thought
that public opinion was not yet ripe for such a move. It included
raising the age for indecent assault from 13 to 16, severer
penalties for offenders in positions of authority, making incest
a crime, providing for the taking of children’s evidence without
oath, extending the time limit clause to 12 months. When it
became clear that all but the incest clauses were meeting with
tough opposition in the House, a separate Incest Bill was
constructed and the other clauses were turned into Bills which
did not find sponsors and had to wait until after the Incest Bill
was passed in 1908 to be reintroduced.
Two of the NVA’s aims were realised as parts of other Acts
before the concerted campaign that led up to the 1922 Criminal
Law Amendment Act. In the Children’s Act of 1904, the time
limit was increased from 3 to 6 months, an improvement, but
by no means all that the reformers wanted and the campaign
for further extension continued. The Children’s Act of 1913
allowed children to give evidence without taking the oath and
the jury was left to decide how useful such evidence was.
Incest
Up to the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act there was no penalty
for incest in civil law in England. In Scotland incest was
punishable by death up to 1887 and the same punishment applied
in several American states. Cromwellian England had imposed
the death penalty for incest but this was swept away at the
Restoration. Thereafter incestuous marriage but not incestuous
sexual intercourse was punishable only under canon law, by
penance, until the church courts were virtually abolished in
1857.
Throughout the nineteenth century the subject of incest among
the poor was referred to directly and obliquely by medical
officers of health, evidence to Royal Comissions and private
investigations, but ignored by the legislators. Whenever the
housing of the poor was described, a connection was made
between overcrowding and incest. It was mentioned by Engels,
Mayhew, Sir John Simons, Shaftesbury, the Association of
Medical Officers of Health meeting in 1868, the Reverend
Andrew Mearns in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. Mearns’s
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