A Visible Woman: Sex, Surveillance, and Suicide Under the Contagious Diseases Acts of Britain

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Contagious Diseases Acts of Britain (1864-1886) through the story of Jane Percy (1838-1875). An actress and music hall performer living in the subjected district of Aldershot, Hampshire, England, Percy was accused of engaging in prostitution in the spring of 1875 under the Contagious Diseases Acts (CD Acts) legislation. This legislation, designed to curtail the spread of venereal diseases amongst British soldiers, allowed for the detention and physical examination of women who were assumed to be prostitutes in various garrison and port towns across the United Kingdom. Shortly after her accusation, Percy’s body was discovered in Aldershot’s Basingstoke canal, the result of an apparent suicide. This event which came to be known as the Aldershot Suicide was seized upon by anti-Contagious Diseases Acts activists as an example of the harmful nature of this legislation. Through a new historicist/narrative approach, this dissertation uses primary and archival materials to reconstruct Jane Percy’s story in order to recentre the lived experiences of the women subjected to the Contagious Diseases Acts and to offer a critical examination of the CD Acts repeal movement. In three thematic sections built around elements of Percy’s life—Sex, Surveillance, and Suicide—this dissertation examines issues of identity, narrative construction, visibility, and performance. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s discourse on the history of sexuality and sexual deviancy, Mary Poovey’s analyses of nineteenth-century sanitarian discourse, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of visuality, Judith R. Walkowitz’s feminist examination of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and Elisabeth Bronfen’s theories on death and the female body, this dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to the history of gender, sexuality, medicine, and public health in the Victorian era. While Jane Percy may not have been a “public woman” as was alleged, it is my contention that she was a “visible woman,” a woman with a notable presence in her community. This visibility contradicted dominant gender ideologies of the period and contributed to her being brought under the Contagious Diseases Acts’ system of surveillance and her transformation into a symbolic martyr for the repeal movement following her death.