Elizabeth W. Andrew

“ England virtually owns a whole nation of slaves in her control of India, and the effect of this fact upon the morals of that country will depend wholly upon whether she rules to redeem her subjects or to enrich herself. The worst feature of all in slavery is the appropriation of women by their masters. And this form of villainy is always excusing itself by slandering the oppressed women. ”

“ It opposes the system in all its forms, because it inevitably becomes, in regard to women, an engine of the most shameful oppression, removing the guarantees of personal liberty which the law has established, and putting their reputation, their freedom, and their persons absolutely in the power of the police; while in respect to those women who come immediately under its action, it cruelly violates the feelings of those whose sense of shame is not wholly lost, and further brutalizes even the most abandoned. ”

“ It makes not the slightest difference whether the law is called the Health Act, as in Australia, Getz’s Projet de Loi, as in Norway, the Women’s and Girls’ Protection Ordinance, as at Singapore, the Cantonment Acts or the Cantonments Act, or what not—the test of the law, as to its identity with the old infamous C. D. Acts, is, whether women are obliged to submit to compulsory examination. “In fact, the compulsory examination of women is the C. D. Acts.” Let this one point be put into law, and all the rest goes without saying. The battle has always raged around this one central point. ”

“ Yes, it is a piece of legislation on the part of the mighty to degrade and rob the daughters of the poor of their most ordinary rights, and it deserves the most extreme execration that human language is capable of, on that very account. The day has passed by when it is safe to try to enunciate such sentiments among a free people. “What are the women making all this row about?” said one of the daily journals of London, during our India work; “no high-born ladies will ever be put to inconvenience by such a law.” ”

“ When men will not yield their dignity one jot, even for the sake of preserving the health of those women of England who are to become their future wives, what insolent hypocrisy for them to persuade deluded women to help them to bring women under practices so “degrading and brutalizing!” What infinite capacity of servility in the nature of women who will advocate such degrading, brutalizing treatment of women! ”

“ By such a system of delivering over the bodies of women as public property, any woman of humble circumstances upon whom any man of lecherous design casts his eyes, could be made to come to his terms of existence by the aid of the police force, if necessary, and magistrates of evil design could condemn any woman to a life of prostitution. And in this hospital all this wicked compulsion was set down in a book, every page of which was headed, “Prostitutes attending Voluntary Inspections.” ”

“ It is impossible not to think of the fathers and mothers of the young Englishmen, mere boys, who go out to India as soldiers, and [60] who are trained in this disgusting manner by the military authorities; not only in the indulgence of their vices, but in cowardly and brutal cruelties towards the weaker sex. It seemed a grand object indeed on the part of Lord Roberts and his subordinates to aim at sending back their discharged soldiers to England free from physical disease, regardless of their manliness, their moral character, their respect for women, and decent habits of life! ”

“ The re-enthronement of faith is the need of the hour. Science we have, and scholarship: but hesitancy and doubt rule the scientific spirit, and timidity is the vice of the scholar. The soldier who hesitates and doubts and grows timid will not win a single battle. ”

“ We have frequently heard in England that the officers sent out in the English towns to secure recruits for the army hold out, as an inducement to young men to enlist, the fact that a licentious life in India is so cheap, and that the Government will see to it that no disease will follow the soldiers’ profligacy. But this last promise is altogether false, for statistics show that with all their efforts diseases increase with the increase of licentiousness, with small regard to the military surgeons’ efforts to make it physically safe. ”

“ The British officials of India have not shown the slightest concern as to the spread of disease, even when [21] introduced by their own race among the natives, but have actually sent these women abroad to scatter disease wherever they go. And what can a poor Army slave-woman do when thus turned out? Her caste is broken, because she has lived with foreigners, and her friends will seldom receive her back; she has been compelled to follow the soldiers on the march; and when dismissed may be hundreds of miles away from any human being who ever saw her face before. ”

“ In view of these facts, we must declare our solemn conviction that the agitation for a return to legalized prostitution in India is not due to any feeling of alarm on account of the spread of contagion in the case of the originators of the agitation, but that an attempt is being made to frighten an unwilling Christian public into a reluctant consent to return to a system which regards the whoremonger as a necessity, the commandments of God a farce, and the slave trade in women an important part of the business of the State. ”

“ While the attempt is being made to create sentiment in favour of protecting the “innocent wives and children” of British soldiers, it might be well to inquire which wives and which children—those that already exist in India, or those that have not yet materialised in England. God knows which are the real wives and the real children of soldiers who have, in many cases in the past, entered into a contract with unsophisticated native women who never dreamed that it was anything less than lawful marriage! ”

“ What does it mean to arrest a suspected case and send her to the segregated quarter for residence, where any man can assume the right to insult her and demand entrance at her door at any hour? It means that the law takes hold of a woman who may have occasionally done wrong and forces her to do wrong habitually; for after segregation no one will give her honest work. That law is radically wicked which confirms a human being into a habitual breaker of one of God’s ten commandments. ”

“ The Regulationists believe that vice is necessary; the Abolitionists believe that vice is not necessary, and that virtue must be demanded. A memorial signed by one hundred and twenty-three British women, of whom over half belong to the titled aristocracy, presented to the British Government April 24, 1897, declares:—
“We feel it is the duty of the State, which of necessity, collects together large numbers of unmarried men in military service, to protect them from the consequences of evils which are, in fact, unavoidable.” ”

“ The surgeon said he wondered that people did not, from the moral and religious point of view, see the injury that the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was doing, not only to the soldiers but to the whole country; “and,” he added, “we can do nothing.” We asked, “Is there, then, no form of regulation now?” He answered emphatically, “None whatever.” He said, “We can do nothing about the women outside the Cantonment, and there is the trouble.” He added, “Those inside go on as they used to, and go to the hospital for treatment when diseased. ”

“ The very fact that the slave was a rather [102] scarce article and a good price paid for him in America, made it to the interest of his owner to look after his health and comfort to a certain extent. We are not defending slavery—it is an abomination in the sight of God, whether it exists under the disguise of abnormally low wages or shows itself openly; and slavery is always a greater moral curse to the master than to the oppressed. ”

“ Everywhere we went among the degraded women of India, we found children in the chaklas, these Government-regulated brothels, with their ever-present guards, so that Englishmen knew perfectly that children were being trained under Government regulation for prostitution. The advocates of licensed prostitution for India are fond of insisting as an excuse for licensing the evil, that it does no great harm because the recruits come from “the prostitute caste.” ”

“ Some day this wife of the officer or soldier will be turned out to perish of the disease her system could no longer throw off, and the children will either be retained as soldiers’ prostitutes or sent out to share the fate of the diseased mother. The women of England are being besought to turn their eyes on the future wives of British officers and soldiers; it would be for England’s lasting good would they but persistently keep their eyes on the British officers’ and soldiers’ present wives and children in the far-off East. ”

“ Yet it is these very men who are directly responsible for bringing disease back to England; for the native women do not go to England. The argument is, that since it brutalizes and degrades men to cause them to be examined, that they may not propagate disease in England, therefore the native women of India must be brutalized and degraded. It is useless to assert that the practice will not degrade women; we know that the moral nature of a woman is at least as susceptible of being injured by enforced immodesty as that of a man ”

“ A policeman comes to your door and reads a warrant for your arrest as a common prostitute; you ask on what authority; you are informed that the name of the informant is not made public, because if a man can be induced to help trace out diseases—it being regarded as a “point of honour” to inform other men where danger lurks—his confession must not be made known, it would injure his reputation. (We are now describing the exact conditions always existent where there is compulsory examination of women.) ”

“ It detracts nothing from the peril of girls and women when the uncorroborated testimony of a self-confessed libertine can be used against them, and the frequency with which evil men will combine to utterly break down the testimony of a young woman in case of seduction, and the unblushing testimony of these men to their own shameful conduct, which is often treated as a joke by the magistrate, shows that the reputation of a woman is no safer in the hands of a combination of libertines. ”

“ In spite of holding a degrading position the verdict of the world is “A man’s a man for a’ that”; but not so the woman who connects herself with an Eastern Lock Hospital—her dignity would never sustain the shock. Already the official conclusion is that no woman of intelligence or honesty would accept such a position. Women cannot afford to become the scavengers of the profession. We remember interviewing an Englishwoman in charge of a very large Lock Hospital in an Eastern city; and after this we went directly to the adjoining general hospital. ”

“ Life in India does not tend to the elevation of British morals, and this not because of the climate, as some contend. The industrial conditions are all against good morals, and are closely analogous to the conditions that prevailed in the Southern States of America before the Civil War. Wages are so low in India as to constitute the native the virtual slave of the Anglo-Saxon. ”

“ But turning from the physical injury inflicted on these poor women, we wish to present a view of their mental sufferings. It has been urged by many advocates of the regulation of vice that the whole nature of a woman was changed by her sinful life—that she had no sensitiveness and no deep sense of the degradation of her position. We utterly deny this on behalf of the scores of women with whom we have talked in India—whether of high or of low caste, Hindoo or Mohammedan, and of whatever nationality ”

“ Most of these women are prostitutes by caste and can feel no desire to give it up,” says the Report of the Special Commission of 1893. “They are accepted as safeguards to society, and are not themselves ashamed of their calling,” says a high military officer. “They feel no shame about this; they are never recruited from seduced girls, as in England,” says another of these high and mighty officers, who know so much better how these girls feel and what they desire than do the poor slaves themselves. ”

“ We have said before repeatedly, and say again, that there is no real evidence that prostitution has been made safer by the periodical examination of women, because the false security in vice greatly increases the amount of vice, which is itself the cause of the diseases in question. ”

“ By graphic gesture and with the help of the few English words she knew, another told of the agonies of slow starvation until at last her courage gave way, and she came to the British soldiers, who were willing to feed her starving body for the sake of its worth as an instrument of self-indulgence. This is the only right to existence accorded to many women, even in so-called Christian countries, where labour is hard to obtain. ”

“ She had a sweet, plaintive voice, and sang the native songs with touching effect on the poor women whom we visited; one we always recall as having been a wonderful instrument through God of moving their hearts. ”

“ To mitigate the evil now experienced, it is not only necessary to deal with the cases of troops in hospitals, but to arrange for a wider-spread effort which may reach the large centres of population, and, in this view, His Excellency has suggested to the Government of India the desirability of establishing a Medical School from which native practitioners trained in the treatment of venereal disease may be sent to the various towns throughout the country. ”

“ No one would give us work.” And again, “Every one under this Government is treated well but ourselves; we only are despised.”
We do not present these facts with any thought of taking our position with those who argue that the better regulation of vice implies a better protection of the degraded women; but rather to show that in the working out of such regulations the woman is absolutely lost sight of, and only the prostitute is considered. Every interest in the woman’s character, happiness, [57] health, life itself, is made subservient to the health and convenience of the British soldier. ”