United Kingdom

From the 1860s to the ’80s, the agitation surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts—an attempt to control venereal disease in the armed forces that involved state regulation and inspection of prostitution—laid the foundations for subsequent feminism. The campaign for the repeal of the acts generated public discussion of the double standard of licence for men and chastity for women. This agitation brought women into the public sphere much more directly than before and in new ways. Moreover, it served to complement changes in education, charity work, political organization, and associational life (which for women expanded considerably in this period), all of which took women outside the home, especially better-off women. This was also the case with the growth of women’s role as consumers, with shopping and the new department stores further increasing women’s involvement in public urban life.

The discussion generated by these acts resulted in a series of feminist responses varying from the more socially, sometimes politically, conservative emphasis on traditional family roles and on maternalism, seen in the “social purity” campaigns of the late 19th century (with their links to “social hygiene” movements espousing hygiene as the gateway to moral betterment), to the more radical, egalitarian political feminism of the early 20th century. The latter form was itself split into radical, socialist, and constitutional variants. In 1903 the women’s suffrage movement split dramatically over the issue of the parliamentary vote, some pursuing the vote as merely one item on a long list of political and extra-political reforms and others concentrating on the single aim of obtaining the vote. These agitations also influenced men’s conception of themselves, notably in response to the social purity movement’s emphasis on the importance of chastity for men as well as women. Male roles were further defined in the 1880s with the consolidation of male homosexuality as a distinct social identity, given legal definition at the time (in the Labouchere amendment of 1885, which criminalized homosexuality as gross indecency), not least in the famous case involving the arrest and imprisonment of Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde. From this time the rise of “scientific” understandings of sexuality, including the science of sexology, also served to redefine gender roles. However, there as in so many other realms, recognition for women lagged behind that for men, and it was not until the 1920s that a similar delineation of lesbian identity became fully apparent.

Mass culture

Class distinctions in cultural life continued to be very important. “Rational recreation” (productive and socially responsible recreation) remained an aim of those who wished to reform the culture of the lower classes. However, it also came to characterize the provision of recreation for the upper classes too. The idea of “playing the game” and “the game for its own sake” represented an extension of rational recreation into the sphere of sports, particularly as developed in the public schools, which in this period were reformed so as to institute a sense of public duty and private responsibility among the propertied classes. The cult of the disinterested amateur was part of the notion of the classically trained English gentleman, whose education and sense of moral duty purportedly created a moral superiority and disinterestedness that uniquely fitted him to rule. The development of popular forms of literature aimed at boys in this period served to glorify this particular manifestation of gentlemanly rule. More broadly, the model of the reformed public school itself, as well as a reformed Oxbridge (the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been restructured in large part somewhat earlier to meet the needs of a changing, moralized civil service), came to have a considerable influence on educational institutions in Britain. The masculine emphasis in sports was complemented by the club life of the upper classes, which, while always decidedly masculine, in the 1880s and ’90s, in terms of the development of London clubland, served even more to emphasize expressions of masculine identity in leisure activities.