Social Classes, Prostitution and Jack the Ripper in the 19th Century England

As a valid occupation, fully legal under the law in the early nineteenth century, prostitution was met with public dismay. However, it was still seen as an occupation, just one that left much to be desired. The fact that it was an occupation was very much built into the figure of the willing prostitute, the one who entered into the profession freely. Abraham Flexner, a contemporary, commented that prostitutes, ones in rural areas in particular, tended to the ‘”unskilled daughters of the unskilled classes”’. Becoming a prostitute does, to some degree, allow economic independence for women outside of male control. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott noted that women often entered into the urban job market in order to help support herself or her family, an accepted circumstance within Victorian society. Increased migration from rural areas to urban areas was due to the declining job market in rural counties due to industrialisation. However, the job market in urban cities was often not as welcoming as rural girls might think, forcing or coercing them into prostitution in order to survive. In fact, as Paula Bartley identifies, ‘prostitutes were considered the archetypal victims of industrialisation’ by the end of the nineteenth century with contemporary feminists claiming that prostitution was the artificial consequence of constraints on women within the social and

Those women of the lower class were considered below the Victorian order and any diversions, of either men or women, from their set societal positions were overlooked as being done because of a lack of refinery. The broad onset of the way the Victorian class felt towards

“These scholars note that Victorians often bowed to conformity, concealing their true natures and tastes and pretending to adhere to social norms. Some Victorians passed themselves off as more pious or moral than they really were. But in reality, pornographic literature and prostitution were common phenomena during the late nineteenth century, showing that some Victorians only pretended to lead chaste lives.”(Joyce Moss)

The problem with the enforcement of the act was that police could arrest and inspect any woman that they suspected of prostitution, whether they were a prostitute or not. Ordinary women were sometimes suspected to degrading inspects by authorities and were humiliated and falsely held. The act were protested by various women’s groups that claimed that the act was attempting to control women’s bodies and that the government should go after the prostitute’s clientele rather than the prostitute. Prostitution was viewed by many of England’s religious and moral as an evil in society. “By 1850 prostitution had become ‘the Great Social Evil,’ not simply an affront to morality, but a vital aspect of the social economy as well.”

During this era men and woman was bound by Victorian codes that were strict on what they can and cannot do. Men

From analyzing this passage, I can see that back then in the Elizabethan Era. There were woman who work as prostitutes to make a living back then. This is based on the facts that Maddux Waller said, “Women in the Elizabethan Era Widows Work/Education Many women in the 16th century became prostitutes, simply to be known as independent. Many cities even had a town brothel” (Waller 1). Here, Waller is providing information that proves that in the Elizabethan Era, prostitution was still present as it is today.

In the Victorian era, the people have to uphold their reputations to be accepted by society. Women, especially have harder expectations to live up to. Women are told to stay home and take care of the family. Women are meant to be at home in the kitchen, waiting to serve their husbands. Society also expects women to follow the

During the 19th century, mid-1800s, working in brothels, or better known as prostitution, was without a doubt illegal. Some of the first women, who settled in the New Americas, also known as New York City, were prostitutes. They were exported from countries such as Asia and France, to board ships, to distract free men- from all colonies- from having sexual relations with Native American women. It was typically expected of women to marry once they arrived and free men treated these women as if they were property. Women were expected to be pious, which meant that they were expected to be deeply spiritual and those women who actually managed to be religious were regarded well and accorded the honor of having a position in a church or in a charitable organization.

“The modest virgin, the prudent wife, and the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than ladies described in romances, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver, or their eyes” (Wakefield.) This quote shows how women were looked at in the nineteenth century. This goes back to the concept during that time that women can not have an urge to have sex. If they so happened to have an urge to have sex they were compared to as prostitutes. In this quote they compared a virgin to the highest of things but the next sentence goes along with making her husband and children happy. Women are always looked at as a caretaker or someone there to make their husbands happy. Never

The role of women in the household and workforce was changing dramatically. Before this time period, women aspired to marry a successful and rich man so that they could live comfortably. Marrying a well-endowed man would ensure the wife with a steady income source and pleasurable life. This idea changed because women were starting to gain independence and strived to make their own money from jobs other than prostitution. Even women 's idea of modesty changed. They would usually dress modestly and wore their hair up as to not look prudish. This idea was thrown out the window, and women started dressing for

“The demand is the result of a simple biological appetite. When all other sources of gratification fail, due to defects of person or circumstance, prostitution can be relied upon to furnish relief” (Davis, 753). Prostitution in a latent sense saves marriages and allows men to fulfill their sexual desires. “Prostitution embraces an economic relation, and is naturally connected with the entire system of economic forces” (Davis, 749). One societal function that prostitution fills is a release for those who desire the prostitute (latent) and a source of income for the prostitute (manifest).

Burstyn highlights that these changes altered the social and economic role of women during the nineteenth-century . She goes on to point out that there were great pressures on middle-class women not to work during this period and explains that ‘leisure women’ were symbols of the economic success of their male relatives . Burstyn suggests that marriage was vital for a woman as it was argued men needed to protect women because of their physical weakness . According to the ideal of womanhood, the home became a place where only women spent their lives and thus the ideal woman was morally pure and a guardian of the home . Burstyn also considers the contemporary issue of education for women by suggesting that if women were to become financially independent, they may no longer have the desire to marry for economic stability . If women remained unmarried, then men would, in theory, be forced to gain sexual gratification from the ‘Social Evil’: prostitutes . In the nineteenth century, the term ‘prostitute’ was used in a much wider context to how we would use it today. Judith Flanders explains that it referred to women who: were living with men outside marriage, had had illegitimate children, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money . It is important to

Prostitution continued to flourish so that by the 1860s Henry Mayhew estimated there to be over 80,000 women working as prostitutes in London - how many men were their clients we have no idea.

Primarily, The Victorian era, during which the novella was published, valued appearance and reputation. The era encouraged and strived for propriety, mainly on the surface. It rejected anything that went against society’s rigid, restraining values. It resisted anything that appeared immoral and corrupt. The era was

The Victorian Age's morality also condemned any kind of sexual reference in literature. Victorian critics demanded from "serious" literature a didactic content and respect to the Victorian conventions which established that sex