Newsletter No 36 November 2003:
News From National Committees
DENMARK
PUBLICATION
The three-volume
Danish Women’s Biographical Dictionary was published in 2000 and is now
available on-line at www.kvinfo.dk unfortunately only in Danish.
May
25th - 27th: Gender in History, a seminar for invited women historians, was
held at Hindsgavl Castle. This year it was the fourth time such a
seminar was taking place; the first time was in 1994, then in 1997 and last
time was in 1999 the same year as Denmark hosted the Nordic Women Historians’
Meeting. This year the seminar was funded generously by the Danish Institute
for Advanced Studies in the Humanities whose director Birgitte Possing was
part of the organizing committee for the seminar together with Susanne Malchau,
Anette Warring, Marlene Spanger and Karin Lützen. 25 women were invited and
they all presented their ongoing projects and recieved comments from some
of the other participants. The Norwegian professor Gro Hagemann was invited
to give a lecture on feminism and history in the Nordic countries for the
last 30 years. The seminar was very succesful and gave inspiration to all
the participants.
Friday October
3rd Merete Bøge Pedersen defended her Ph.D. dissertation
”The prostitution and the Constitution. Regulation
of prostitution in Denmark, 1860-1906” at the
Department of History at the University of Aarhus. Here
follows the summary of her dissertation:
The subject for this thesis is the regulation
of prostitution in Denmark in the period from approximately 1860 to
1906. The temporal delimitation is made on the grounds that a number of laws
concerning the regulation and control of prostitution were passed in the period
from 1863 to 1874, and this series of laws – collectively referred to
in the thesis as the "regulating Acts on prostitution" – remained
in force until 1906, at which time it was replaced by the "Act on the
Combat of Public Immorality and Venereal Infections of 30 March 1906".
The geographic delimitation is made on the grounds that it is specifically
the Danish legislation on prostitution that is being examined.
Already
towards the end of the 18th century, a certain routine had formed for the
enlistment of women as so-called "common prostitutes". Prostitution
was tolerated, although never officially recognized. The Danish Law of King
Christian V of 1683 was still in force as the nation's penal code, prohibiting
prostitution in any form. Thus, the enlistment of prostitutes, as it was practiced
towards the end of the 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century,
was in a complete lack of legal basis, and the legal position of those enlisted
was not decided by law or regulation, but merely by the discretionary powers
of the police. In Copenhagen, the administrative practice of the police was
given partial legal basis in section 3, 3rd sentence of the "Act
of 11 February 1863 containing certain Amendments to the Provisions on the
Treatment of Common Police Matters in Copenhagen, etc." – outside
of the capital, it was section 6(3) of the "Act of 4 February 1871 containing
Provisions on the Police outside of Copenhagen". These Acts authorised the Commissioner/Chief Constables to determine
by resolution the punishment for women who earned their living as prostitutes
under the supervision of the police.
Yet
it was not until the passing of the "Common Civil Penal Code of 10 February
1866" that
proper legal basis for charging and sentencing by the administrative bodies
was established. Section 180 of the Penal Code laid down that "women who although warned by the police employ
themselves in prostitution shall be punished by imprisonment." It
appears from this that it was for the police to administer the arrangement.
In other words, under the provisions of this Act, the police was awarded authorisation to regulate public prostitution. The Act
did not authorise compulsory enlistment of women as prostitutes
but that was remedied in the "Act on Measures to Combat the Spread of
Venereal Infections" of 10 April 1874, passed on the basis of a growing
fear of the spread of venereal diseases. The makers of the Act had attached
primary importance to the implementation of provisions aiming to suppress
the hidden prostitution, held to be the main source of venereal infections.
The objective of the Act of 1874 was for all women employing themselves in
prostitution to be subject to the control of the police, so that prostitution
would be a profession pursued only by "police-authorised women".
This would be an opportunity to prevent the spread of venereal diseases and,
also, to keep public decency from being offended by the disorderly nuisance
of harlots on the streets.
The
Act of 1874 worked in the way that when a woman was suspected of employing
herself in prostitution, she was to be given a warning in pursuance of section
3 of the Act. If she did not heed to this warning, she was to be punished
in accordance with section 180 of the Penal Code of 1866 and the Act of 1874.
When a woman was found for the second time to be in violation of section 180,
she would – in addition to receiving punishment again – be subject
to the administrative regulations on the supervision of common prostitutes,
meaning that she would be enlisted as a common prostitute in pursuance of
the Act of 1874, subject to weekly regulations and the police’s authority
of punishment.
As
a condition for enlistment to take place, there had to be a set of regulations
under which such enlistment could be made. Otherwise the punishment of prostitutes
was according to section 180 of the Penal Code of 1866. Copenhagen adopted such regulations in the Provisional
Orders of 1877 and maintained them until 1906, while other cities in Denmark either never adopted such regulations or did adopt them
only to abolish them a few years later. It can be argued that in cities with
regulations, prostitution – on certain conditions – was legal, whereas
in cities without regulations, it was not. However, the letter of the law
was one thing and police practice sometimes quite another. We know that some
cities did have some regulation of prostitution, even though no set of regulations
had been adopted. That was the case in Copenhagen between the passing of the Act of 1874 and
the Provisional Orders of 1877.
Such irregularities
became the subject of much debate in the discussions that followed the passing
of the regulating Acts on prostitution. Two opposing parties were active in
this debate: those who were against control (the so-called "abolitionists")
and those who supported control (the so-called "regulationists").
Abolitionists promoted equal rights of women, pointing to the unfairness of
an inhuman control being forced upon prostitutes, while men were free to frequent
the very same prostitutes. It was a system, according to the abolitionists,
that was both offensive, immoral, illegal and unjust,
and throughout this period they argued for the unconditional abolition of
the control system. The opposite view was taken by the regulationists, represented
primarily by doctors and the alternating Højre
governments of the 19th century. The system had originally been promoted by
the medical profession, and the legislators had obliged in passing the regulating
Acts on prostitution.
As
time went by, though, the number of convinced regulationists decreased. This
was due first and foremost to the recognition that public health and morality
were not significantly improved by the control system, and when – around
the turn of the century – even doctors were compelled to admit that the
time had come to respect the rights of prostitutes, there was little sense
in maintaining the system. The first restriction of the system was made in
1895 when it was decided that women could not be held in a brothel against
their will. The next was made in 1901 with the cancellation of the permission
to operate brothels. And final culmination came in 1906 when the entire control
system was abolished.
This thesis reveals
firstly the contents of the regulating Acts on prostitution and the motivation
for their passing. Secondly, it presents the themes discussed in the prostitution
debate and the causes of the eventual abolition of the regulating Acts on
prostitution. The objective of the first of the thesis’ two sections
is to show the extent of the rights afforded to prostitutes, and to determine
whether these rights were respected in the regulating Acts on prostitution.
The analysis is linked to the Constitution of the Kingdom of Denmark, i.a. in relation to its provision for the
protection of personal freedom. The thesis shows a lack of legal basis in
the authorities’ approach to prostitution prior to the passing of the
regulating Acts on prostitution, and constitutional problems in respect of
the regulation prostitution laws that were eventually passed. The main problem
was that once enlisted, the prostitutes were prevented from having their case
tried by the courts. Enlisted prostitutes were subject to
the authority of the Commissioner/Chief Constables and not, as the Constitution
requires, that of the courts.
Parliamentary debates
at the time document that there was concern for the laws’ consistency
with constitutional law, and they are also proof that there was doubt as to
the interpretation of the Constitution. In the first section of the thesis
it is demonstrated how the concern for consistency with constitutional law
was set aside by emphasizing the sanitary motivation for the regulating prostitution
law. In justifying these laws by claiming it was a matter of life or death,
any possible violation of constitutional rights was also defended. Applying
a motive analysis, based i.a. on statistics on the development of the spread
of venereal diseases prior to the passing of the Act of 1874, it is demonstrated
that the makers of the Act defended a possibly unconstitutional law by arguing
that these women had put themselves outside of the law and also represented
a lethal threat to society.
The prostitution
debate itself is the subject for the second section of the thesis. There were
no critical voices to be heard prior to the passing of the regulating Acts
on prostitution, but that had changed by the late 1870’s. The majority
of abolitionists united in the “Organisation against the Statutory Protection
of Immorality”, campaigning fiercely for the abolition of the control
system. The second section of the thesis examines the role played by this
organisation in the abolition of the regulating Acts on prostitution and establishes
the overall causes of the abolition. The point is made that for a long time
there was uncertainty about the interpretation of the Constitution, and that
the question of a possible conflict between the regulating Acts on prostitution
and the Constitution was never formally considered by the courts. This underlines
the most significant conclusion reached in the second section of the thesis,
namely that judging by the regulating Acts on prostitution,
the Danish society was not ready for democracy until some 50 years after the
formal introduction of it.
The
thesis is set apart from previous research on the period of the regulating
Acts on prostitution by the fact that it does not apply a distinct sociohistorical
perspective, analyzing instead the connection between the regulating Acts
on prostitution and the fundamental freedoms provided by the Constitution.
Aims, motives and knowledge are brought to the foreground rather than an examination
of the prostitution environment and the prostitutes’ conditions of life.”
MEETING
August 22nd - 23rd:
Meeting for Danish Historians (the last one was held in 1998). University of Copenhagen. One of the 18 workshops was called: "Women's
history - state of affairs" and was arranged by Bente Rosenbeck who has
been a professor of gender studies at the University of Lund in Sweden for
some years but who is now back again at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Nanna
Damsholt, Ning de Coninck-Smith, Anette Jensen and Nina Koefoed gave papers.
Compiled by Karin Lützen
