Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies' Campaign Against the Brothels in Westminster, 1690-1720‪.‬

The Sexual Offences Act of 1985 is generally seen as the first time that the law targeted male clients of prostitutes. The statute made "the soliciting of women for sexual purposes by men" punishable by summary conviction. (1) The MPs who passed the legislation saw the move as a distinctly "modern law," illustrative of the fact that we now "live in an age of sexual equality." (2) In the early days of feminism in the nineteenth century, England's Ladies' Associations began to speak out about the inequality of laws that made prostitutes' soliciting an offence but ignored their male clients. (3) Their calls for equality echo through the twentieth century. (4) The Sexual Offences Act stood as the first time that these feminist arguments had been heard, and the bill was welcomed "for the sake of women everywhere." (5) This paper will show, however, that male clients of prostitutes were policed long before 1985, and that a desire to police male heterosexuality had in fact preceded the feminist movement. For a forty-year period in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the reformation of manners societies arrested hundreds of men for being in the company of "lewd women." These middle-class societies sprouted up around London and in the provinces from the 1690s to the 1730s. (6) The societies targeted everything from profanity to Sabbath-breaking, but historians who have examined their activities in the brothels have tended to focus upon the societies' suppression of female prostitutes and male sodomites. (7) This article will show that the societies for the reformation of manners policed male heterosexuality by targeting whores' clients. Their arrests and prosecutions were relatively minor, and thus have been largely dismissed by historians, but they deserve more attention.