stringent admittance policies - 24 or under, not pregnant, drunk or syphilitic, not ‘hardened’ prostitutes (believed it to be too late to save them). although supposedly voluntary admission, most of the inmates (“young female misdemeanants, paupers and vagrants”) brought to the Institution …show more content…
Socialists proffered economic solutions which were rejected by the masculine majority. King recognises prostitution was a “necessary evil” of “economic survival for many working-class women”. growing dissatisfaction with “police, prisons, and poorhouses” control and discipline of working class women’s sexuality; resulted in moral reformers who were critical of institutions which ‘hardened’ female offenders (c.1860); growth of Magdas can be seen to stem from the original line of thought, emphasis on Bible.
“Behind the nineteenth-century definition of the ‘prostitute’ was a contemporary vision of the ideal type of working-class woman; in the process of defining the ‘prostitute’, reformers also defined her antithesis, the ideal working class daughter, wife and worker. This definition was not a direct copy of the middle class feminine ideal, but was designed distinctly for the working class. The ideal working class woman was pious, subservient and …show more content…
Although working- and middle-class women were separated by a vast economic and social gulf, the middle class women who entered the medical profession or became social reformers were as threatening to the social order as the mill girls and ‘prostitutes’ were. The symbol of the ‘magdalene’, therefore, was also used as a threat to all women who dared to deny established class and gender roles.”
“Furthermore, the deployment of discourses in this case is most significantly embedded in material practices, in the establishment and operation of the Glasgow system. This system represents a moment in which one out of several competing accounts of the ‘prostitute’, and one strategy to control and reform her, became