The Power of Womanhood — Religion and Sexual Politics in the Writings of Ellice Hopkins

Abstract

Throughout the autumn of 1894, The Daily Telegraph documented the activities of a group of middle-class Christian women intent on seeking out and expelling prostitutes from London music halls notorious for their promotion of morally dubious entertainment. Entitled ‘Prudes on the Prowl’, the series was a hostile parody of the sexual prurience of the evangelical campaign for social purity — an organization which, according to the satirical Punch, was dominated by the interfering, self-righteous prudery of ‘Mrs Prowlina Prys’.¹ Social purity reformers had come to public prominence during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, that period described by George Gissing as one of ‘sexual anarchy’. Against a backdrop of increasing sexual scandal and ‘white slavery’ media scares, these pious women committed themselves to the moral purification of society through an elimination of prostitution and other forms of vice.²