9-year-old Annie McGuire and seven-year-old Elizabeth Martin have been amongst hundreds of ladies and women admitted to the Glasgow Lock Hospital for Unlucky Females, certainly one of a community of Lock hospitals constructed throughout Britain and its colonies within the nineteenth century, between 1846 and 1947.
Established to diagnose and deal with ladies and women for venereal illnesses, the hospital lay on the coronary heart of the infamous Glasgow System – the Scottish metropolis’s response to the Contagious Illnesses Act (CDA).
The CDA, applied in garrison cities and naval ports throughout England and Wales within the 1860s, aimed to eradicate sexually transmitted illnesses among the many armed forces. The Glasgow Lock performed a key position within the Glasgow System’s unprecedented coalition of police, courts, prisons, medical authorities and the town’s Magdalene establishments.
Annie and Elizabeth have been admitted to the hospital with gonorrhoea – and died there three years later. They, like all those that died within the Lock, have been buried in unmarked graves. These sparse particulars are all that stay of the brief however brutal lives of those two little women.
Though the hospital’s information reveal little about its sufferers’ private tales, by them, as a part of my analysis on gender-based violence, I’ve been capable of glimpse the social repression of working-class ladies and women in nineteenth century Glasgow.
Right here was a metropolis with a mission to finish ladies’s supposedly evil methods and eradicate the “social evil” of prostitution and venereal illness. Susceptible younger women like Annie and Elizabeth have been victims of those attitudes, and blamed for the sexual violence they’d skilled. As a “therapy”, they have been then subjected to extra abuse – on the establishment that was supposed to guard them.
‘Harmful sexualities’
Alexander Patterson, a surgeon on the Lock within the 1860s, advocated the creation of the Glasgow System to eradicate prostitution and venereal illnesses – by specializing in ladies as the reason for each.
Patterson’s suggestion was properly acquired by the town’s leaders, who regarded prostitution and venereal illnesses as “extremely seen symbols of the social dislocation attendant upon the economic period”. Girls and their “harmful sexualities” have been supposedly accountable for a “social evil which disgraces the land”.
Of their eyes, any lady was a “prostitute” if her behaviour, speech, costume or way of life defied Victorian social or sexual norms. Prostitution included what modern moralists thought to be degenerate working-class tradition, whereby ladies have been free to roam the streets making a “harmful temptation” to males and a risk to public morality and well being.
The Glasgow Police Act 1866 granted officers full discretionary powers to apprehend any ladies or woman they thought was, or risked changing into, a prostitute. In line with Glasgow’s chief constable Alexander McCall, this meant any lady discovered on the road who was unable to account for a way she made her dwelling.
1000’s have been apprehended primarily based on this definition (or on the whim of particular person policemen), together with homeless, destitute or unemployed ladies, separated ladies and single moms, and part-time and informal feminine labourers.
Girls and women have been taken first to the Lock for a obligatory, brutal inner examination. Its registers present ballerinas, actresses, store women, unemployed mill women, home servants, farm employees and the wives of troopers and tradesmen and kids all being admitted.
The ladies entered the Lock’s doorways underneath an indication proclaiming its goals: TREATMENT – KNOWLEDGE – REFORMATION. They have been categorised as one of many following:
“Wanderer” – a homeless, destitute younger woman;
“Fallen” – a younger lady who had turn out to be a recognized prostitute;
“Newly fallen” – a younger lady or woman who had solely not too long ago turn out to be concerned in prostitution; or
“Hardened” – an grownup lady working as a prostitute who was recognized to the police or who had earlier convictions.
By 1910, the Lock was admitting round 300 ladies a 12 months, housing round 50 sufferers at anyone time. With shaved heads and regulation brown uniforms, these sufferers have been extremely seen and stigmatised outdoors the partitions of hospital.
When properly sufficient, the ladies labored within the laundry, kitchens and mortuary, and attended courses supplied by middle-class ladies volunteers, designed to coach sufferers in “acceptable” feminine behaviour.
A (brief) lifetime of incarceration
The Glasgow Lock’s information present many youngsters underneath 13, like Annie and Elizabeth, contracted gonorrhea whereas incarcerated at different establishments and reformatories – probably after being raped by males in search of the “virgin treatment” for venereal illness.
The ladies’ our bodies, already severely broken by sexual violence, usually struggled to outlive the punishing circumstances – and brutal however largely ineffective therapies – inflicted on them within the Lock.
By the late nineteenth century, the Glasgow System, incorporating Duke Avenue ladies’s jail, the Lock, and Glasgow’s Magdalene establishments, was incarcerating, treating and making an attempt to reform hundreds of ladies and women.
As soon as handled, women and younger ladies thought of to be in imminent hazard of changing into prostitutes have been admitted to the Magdalene, the place they have been subjected to a harsh regime of spiritual instruction and laborious labour in its business laundry. Designed to divert them from prostitution and to turn out to be obedient wives and compliant employees, it remained in operation till 1960.
Whereas the scandal of the Magdalene laundries in Eire is infamous, Scotland’s Magdalene asylums are much less well-known. Glasgow’s Magdalene Establishment for the Repression of Vice and Rehabilitation of Penitent Females was intently related to the Glasgow Lock.
The hospital closed its doorways in 1947, following the introduction of Britain’s new Nationwide Well being Service. The Royal School of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow now has a devoted Lock Room, telling its story by highly effective visible shows. Demolished in 1955, the unique Glasgow Lock Hospital websites lie inside the College of Strathclyde’s campus space.
