The Queen's Daughters in IndiaBushnell, Katharine C. (Katharine Caroline)
History
The Queen's Daughters in India
Bushnell, Katharine C. (Katharine Caroline)
Prostitution -- India; Women -- India -- Conduct of life; Women -- India -- Social conditions
The scheme proposed by Lady Henry Somerset is here given in her own
words:
"1. A quarter of each Cantonment should be reserved for such women
as are permitted to remain in camp, and all such women should be
compelled to remain in houses or rooms specifically reserved to each
by a registered number. The admission of men to this quarter should be
strictly supervised.
"2. No woman should be allowed to remain in this quarter unless
periodically examined by properly qualified women doctors.
"3. No soldier should be allowed to enter this quarter without having
undergone a like examination and having the same report.
"4. A register should be kept recording the name of each soldier
entering the quarter, the number of the house to which he goes, and
the date of such entry.
"5. On any woman being found to be diseased in this quarter, or on
any soldier found to be suffering in like manner, all such persons
that the registered visits show to have rendered themselves liable
to contagion should be put in quarantine until such time as their
immunity can be verified.
"6. All consorting with women outside this quarter should render the
offender liable to severe penalty."[10]
The _Shield_, official organ of the British Committee for the Abolition
of State Regulated Vice, in its issue of May, 1897, comments as follows
upon this scheme:
"The suggestions above quoted embody the most complete State
Regulation of prostitution which we have ever seen described, in
its baldest and most absolute form, and imply the most complete
identification of the State with the purely animal side of the
matter which has ever been proposed. They seem to emanate from a mind
influenced for the time solely by the idea of equality between man and
woman, to the exclusion of other considerations. Such proposals seem
indeed to make the sexes equal, but it is an equality of unspeakable
degradation for both."
On May 14 and 17 occurred a debate in the House of Lords on the
question of a return to legalized prostitution in India, in which
reference was made to Lady Henry Somerset's letter in _The Times_,
and to another memorial which was shortly "to be made public," and
which was signed by a very large number of ladies, as an indication
that women were no longer, as formerly, opposed to the system of State
Regulation of Vice.[11]
On May 25 _The Times_ published the text of this Memorial, which
is signed by ladies of the aristocracy, together with a few other
prominent women, numbering in all one hundred and twenty-three.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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