Abstract
Mourey, the first known prosecution of a woman for indecent assault upon another woman, did not directly involve lesbianism. The accused midwife had carried out a ‘virginity test’ on a girl in 1885. She was prosecuted alongside journalist W. T. Stead, who had ‘purchased’ the girl, apparently for the purposes of prostitution but in fact to expose child abuse. The resulting case was highly publicised, although Mourez’s role and conviction attracted relatively little attention.
This chapter locates Mourey within nineteenth-century social, medical, and legal changes. The policy of silencing lesbianism reached its height as new discourses around women’s sexuality, rooted in gender, race, and imperialism, gave fresh significance to the ‘harms’ of sex between women. Sexual offences law was developing within an increasingly professionalised criminal justice system while the broader societal context included both medical regulation of lesbian sexuality and women’s movement campaigns against the sexual double standard.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Although Stead later claimed that Armstrong’s parents were not legally married and so her father’s consent should not have been required after all (Stead 2018), her legitimacy was not challenged at trial.
- 3.
Offences involving sexual intercourse with a woman or girl over twelve continued to focus upon the protection of heiresses from undesirable marriages : it was a crime if it was procured by false pretences (section 49) or involved abduction of a girl under sixteen, or abduction ‘from motives of lucre’ where the victim was an heiress or had interests in property (section 53), or abduction by force with intent to marry her (section 54).
- 4.
While the term ‘feminism’ was not yet in common use, it is used here as a helpful way of identifying the concerns of the women’s movement.
- 5.
- 6.
Lynda Nead (2000) has discussed not only the ways in which women were discouraged from negotiating London’s streets alone, but also the pleasures they nonetheless achieved in doing so. Note that of the 4.5 million women working in 1891, almost half were in domestic service and thus still firmly in the domestic sphere (Richardson 2003, p. 37).
- 7.
- 8.
The most famous legal example of this attitude came at the end of this period: the Punishment of Incest Act 1908, with its language of men having sexual intercourse and women permitting sexual intercourse .
- 9.
This did leave space for a rich range of familial and friendship bonds between women, as explored in Marcus (2007).
- 10.
For an overview of Butler’s life and activism, see Walkowitz (2004).
- 11.
And the upper classes , as seen in the treatment of Lady Harriet Mordaunt who was declared insane in 1870 following her confessions of infidelity including with the Prince of Wales (Souhami 1996, chap. 4).
- 12.
- 13.
Scull and Favreau highlight in particular ‘the newly emerging specialism of neurology … [and] another new group of specialists, gynecologists’ (1986, p. 246).
- 14.
Brown-Séquard did important work on sensory pathways in the spinal cord (the area of his research connected to Baker Brown’s work) as well as work which led to his being considered the father of endocrinology. He enjoyed many distinctions including election to the FRS and FRCP, and an honorary LLD awarded by Cambridge University. Unfortunately for his reputation, outside medical circles his best-known experiment was when, aged 72, he injected himself with extracts from animal testes and claimed to feel rejuvenated in consequence (Gosden 2004).
- 15.
Jones was a histologist but also published clinical observations on paralysis, anaesthesia, and neuralgia. In 1888 he became a vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons (N. Moore 2004).
- 16.
Brown would later describe clitoridectomy as ‘neither more nor less than circumcision of the female’ (Medical Times and Gazette 1867, n. (a)).
- 17.
He showed a similar attitude to his patients when he began performing ovariotomies: his first three patients died, but he nonetheless performed a fourth procedure, on his own sister, who did survive (Roy 2004).
- 18.
Despite that aim, the police never achieved a monopoly over criminal justice, with informal sanctions remaining important (Churchill 2014, p. 135).
- 19.
For example, the Gaol Act 1823 and the establishment of a prison inspectorate in 1835.
- 20.
A series of Acts of the same name were passed in 1864, 1866, and 1869. They were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886.
- 21.
Stead, its instigator, received three months’ imprisonment , while Jarrett, who was responsible for taking Armstrong, received six months without hard labour.
- 22.
Butler herself wrote to Stead that ‘the rich and aristocratic culprits in this matter should be judged by the people’ (quoted in Wendelin 2012, p. 389).
- 23.
Male homosexuality had been similarly treated as a French vice fifteen years earlier in Boulton and Park, where the British medical witnesses had to turn for extensive experience of male sodomy to the Frenchman Tardieu, to whose work witness Dr Paul had been alerted by an anonymous letter (Weeks 1981).
- 24.
Sherlock Holmes identified the vital clue in The Adventure of Silver Blaze as the silence of a dog which did nothing in the night-time (Doyle 1894).
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Derry, C. (2020). Louise Mourey and the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. In: Lesbianism and the Criminal Law . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_3
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