Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Lesbianism and the Criminal Law pp 123–153Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

‘Gross Indecency Between Females’: The 1921 Parliamentary Debates

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

Abstract

The deliberate silencing of sex between women was overtly articulated in 1921 parliamentary debates on creating an offence of ‘gross indecency between females’. The amendment passed the House of Commons but was rejected by the House of Lords, making a significant yet contradictory moment when a policy reliant upon silence was publicly discussed. This chapter analyses those debates and their wider significance. It places them within a context of social disruptions and anxieties around gender, race, and class. While their most obvious cause was the First World War and its aftermath, others included the progress of the women’s movement, sexology and the sex reform movement, and women’s entrance into public life, particularly in the courts and legislature. The debates’ ultimate reassertion of silencing made them a paradoxical moment of lesbian invisibility and hypervisibility, which set the tone for the following decades.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    There was only one woman MP sitting in the House, Lady Nancy Astor, who did not speak in the amendment debates.

  2. 2.

    It passed the Commons with 148 votes in favour to 53 against, meaning that only about a third of MPs voted.

  3. 3.

    The Home Secretary’s comments were directed to an amendment making consenting 15-year-olds criminally responsible. The amendment, which he opposed, was rejected.

  4. 4.

    Macquisten did try to introduce it, and other amendments, in 1922. Again his apparent aim was to delay the Bill. His efforts were unsuccessful as the Speaker ruled the amendment outside the scope of the Bill (Mr Speaker, HC 25/07/1922, col. 365; Waites 2002, p. 331). That was a return to the legislative silencing which had seen the Home Secretary refuse to consider legislation criminalising sexual conduct between women in 1913 (Wedgwood, HC 04/08/1921, col. 1802; Ferris 1993; Doan 1997, p. 545).

  5. 5.

    Carol Smart (2000, p. 62) notes that similar perceptions of reform as an attack on men were expressed in the 1922 debates.

  6. 6.

    For contrasting interpretations, see Weeks (2016, p. 15) and Brady (2016, p. 92).

  7. 7.

    I am indebted to Julia Laite for this information; she discusses Neilans’s relationship in an unpublished forthcoming chapter.

  8. 8.

    See previous chapters, notably the discussion of Woods and Pirie v Cumming Gordon (Chap. 3) and Mourey (Chap. 4).

  9. 9.

    Until 1968, plays had to be licensed for public performance by the Lord Chamberlain.

  10. 10.

    Proceedings for criminal libel were more common than civil claims during this period since under the Libel Act 1843, a defendant would only be acquitted upon proving both the truth of the libel and that publication was for the public benefit.

  11. 11.

    For further discussion of press reporting, see Doan (2001, pp. 32–33) and Oram (2016, pp. 171–72). Press reports were obscure and unintelligible for many readers, particularly working-class readers (Oram 2007, p. 57; Bland 1998; Cohler 2010, pp. 140–42).

  12. 12.

    Eugenics advocated scientific breeding for the benefit of the race , and childbearing as the duty of every healthy woman. Its followers came from a wide range of political viewpoints and included sexologist Havelock Ellis and a number of socialist and feminist writers (Weeks 2016, p. 91; Richardson 2003).

  13. 13.

    For a discussion of the complex relationship between sexology and feminism see Hall (2004).

  14. 14.

    The primary purpose of the prosecution seems to have been to destroy the Legitimation League, a ‘free love’ organisation whose meetings provided a platform for anarchists and of which Bedborough was secretary; he pleaded guilty (Weeks 2000, pp. 27–28; Humpherys 2006, pp. 1–2).

  15. 15.

    Euphemisms predominated, with only Macquisten referring directly to ‘homosexual immorality’ and Wedgwood referencing ‘Lesbian vice’ (HC 04/08/1921, cols. 1800 and 1801).

  16. 16.

    Key legislation included the Education Act 1918; Housing and Town Planning Act 1919; Unemployment Insurance Act 1920; Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919; Representation of the People Act 1918; and Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918.

  17. 17.

    Contemporary understandings of female adolescence also fed into the idea of the mid-teens posing greater sexual risk for working-class girls than their middle-class peers (Oldfield 2001, pp. 68–71).

  18. 18.

    Jeffrey Green (2003, pp. 47–48) comments upon the lack of a colour line or overt racial antagonism in nineteenth-century Britain in contrast to the United States. While the most visible members of Britain’s ethnic minorities at that time were those who formed part of Queen Victoria’s court and, at the other social extreme, foreign sailors , black people had lived in every part of Britain in the nineteenth century (Killingray 2003, p. 51).

References

  • Association for Moral and Social Hygiene. 1920. The State and Sexual Morality. London: George Allen & Unwin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Attwood, Rachael. 2015. Stopping the Traffic: The National Vigilance Association and the International Fight against the ‘White Slave’ Trade (1899–c. 1909). Women’s History Review 24 (3): 325–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2014.964064.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beccalossi, Chiara. 2011. Female Same-Sex Desires: Conceptualizing a Disease in Competing Medical Fields in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67 (1): 7–35.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bland, Lucy. 1995. Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. Trial by Sexology? Maud Allan, Salome and the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ Case. In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2005. White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War. Gender & History 17 (1): 29–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brady, Sean. 2016. Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-27236-1.

  • Bristow, Joseph. 1998. Symond’s History, Ellis’s Heredity: Sexual Inversion. In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, 79–99. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheney, Deborah. 2010. Dr Mary Louisa Gordon (1861–1941): A Feminist Approach in Prison. Feminist Legal Studies 18 (2): 115–136.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cohler, Deborah. 2010. Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cree, Viviene E. 2008. Confronting Sex Trafficking: Lessons from History. International Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872808095249.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davenport-Hines, Richard. 1990. Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain since the Renaissance. London: Collins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doan, Laura. 1997. Gross Indecency between Women: Policing Lesbians or Policing Lesbian Police. Social & Legal Studies 6 (4): 533–551.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. ‘Acts of Female Indecency’: Sexology’s Intervention in Legislating Lesbianism. In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, 199–213. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2001. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Editorial.” 1896. Lancet, no. 19, November: 1344.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, Henry Havelock. 1897. Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 1: Sexual Inversion. The University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellis, Henry Havelock, and John Addington Symonds. 1897. Sexual Inversion. London: Wilson and Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. London: The Women’s Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ferris, Paul. 1993. Sex and the British: A Twentieth-Century History. London: Michael Joseph.

    Google Scholar 

  • Funke, Jana. 2013. ‘We Cannot Be Greek Now’: Age Difference, Corruption of Youth and the Making of Sexual Inversion. English Studies 94 (2): 139–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2012.760255.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Glick, Daphne. 1995. The National Council of Women of Great Britain: The First One Hundred Years. London: The Council.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, Mary. 1937. Chase of the Wild Goose. London: Hogarth Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green, Jeffrey. 2003. Reexamining the Early Years of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Composer. In Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, 39–50. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosskurth, Phyllis. 1981. Havelock Ellis: A Biography. London: Quartet Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hale, Brenda. 2009. Heilbron, Dame Rose (1914–2005). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L. Goldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/96231.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Lesley A. 1995. ‘Disinterested Enthusiasm for Sexual Misconduct’: The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, 1913–47. Journal of Contemporary History 30 (4): 665–686.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2000. Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Lesley. 2004. Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social Purity and Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain. Gender & History 16 (1): 36–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hall, Lesley A. 2009. Suffrage, Sex and Science. In The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives, ed. Maroula Joannou and June Purvis, 188–200. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hamilton, Cicely. 1909. Marriage as a Trade. London: Chapman & Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Humpherys, Anne. 2006. The Journals That Did: Writing about Sex in the Late 1890s. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, no. 3 (Oct.). https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.450.

  • Iglikowski, Vicky. 2019. Maud Allan and ‘Unnatural Practices among Women.’ National Archives Blog. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/lgbtq-history-maud-allan-unnatural-practices-women/.

  • Jackson, Margaret. 1984. Sexology and the Social Construction of Male Sexuality. In The Sexuality Papers: Male Sexuality and the Social Control of Women, ed. L. Coveney, M. Jackson, S. Jeffreys, L. Kaye, and P. Mahony, 45–66. London: Hutchinson.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jeffreys, Sheila. 1984. “Free from All Uninvited Touch of Man”: Women’s Campaigns around Sexuality, 1880–1914. In The Sexuality Papers: Male Sexuality and the Social Control of Women, ed. L. Coveney, M. Jackson, S. Jeffreys, L. Kaye, and P. Mahony, 22–44. London: Hutchinson.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1985. The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930. Melbourne: Spinifex.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jenkinson, Jacqueline. 2007. Race’ Riots, 1919. In The Oxford Companion to Black British History, ed. David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Joint Select Committee. 1920. Report by the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill [H.L.], the Criminal Law Amendment (No. 2) Bill [H.L.], and the Sexual Offences Bill [H.L.]. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kettle, Michael. 1977. Salome’s Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century. London: Granada Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Killingray, David. 2003. Tracing Peoples of African Origin and Descent in Victorian Kent. In Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, ed. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, 51–67. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. 1886. Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine Klinische-Forensische Studie. Stuttgart: Enke.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, and C.G. Chaddock. 1892. Psychopathia Sexualis: Translation of the Seventh German Edition. London: F. A. Davis Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laite, Julia. 2008. The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: Abolitionism and Prostitution Law in Britain (1915–1959). Women’s History Review 17 (2): 207–223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lammasniemi, Laura. 2017. Regulation 40D: Punishing Promiscuity on the Home Front during the First World War. Women’s History Review 26 (4): 584–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2016.1148506.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Medd, Jodie. 2002. ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’: Anatomy of a National Scandal. Modernism/Modernity 9 (1): 21–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2002.0015.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Neilans, Alison. 1921a. Editorial. The Shield.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1921b. Editorial. The Shield, 115–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1921c. Editorial. The Shield, 155.

    Google Scholar 

  • Newsome, Stella. 1957. Women’s Freedom League, 1907–1957. London: Women’s Freedom League.

    Google Scholar 

  • Normanton, Helena. 1921. The Work for Women M.P.s. London: Women’s Freedom League.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oldfield, Carolyn. 2001. Growing up Good? Medical, Social Hygiene and Youth Work Perspectives on Young Women, 1918–1939. University of Warwick.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oppenheim, Janet. 1991. “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Oram, Alison. 2007. Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. ‘A Sudden Orgy of Decadence’: Writing about Sex between Women in the Interwar Popular Press. In Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and National Culture, ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, 165–180. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oram, Alison, and Annmarie Turnbull. 2001. The Lesbian History Sourcebook: Love and Sex between Women in Britain from 1780 to 1970. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pearson, Lynne F. 2004. Discovering Famous Graves. Princes Risborough.

    Google Scholar 

  • Polden, Patrick. 1999. The Lady of Tower Bridge: Sybil Campbell, England’s First Woman Judge. Women’s History Review 8 (3): 505–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029900200218.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pugh, Martin. 2000. Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Richardson, Angelique. 2003. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rowe, Michael. 2000. Sex, ‘Race’ and Riot in Liverpool, 1919. Immigrants & Minorities 19 (2): 53–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619288.2000.9974991.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Showalter, Elaine. 1987. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smart, Carol. 2000. Reconsidering the Recent History of Child Sexual Abuse, 1910–1960. Journal of Social Policy 29 (1): 55–71.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, F.B. 1976. Labouchere’s Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. Historical Studies 17: 165–173.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • The Times. 1921a. House of Commons, May 13.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1921b. Age of Consent, July 16.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1921c. The Criminal Law Amendment Bill, August 18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Upchurch, Charles. 2009. Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waites, Matthew. 2002. Inventing a ‘Lesbian Age of Consent’? The History of the Minimum Age for Sex between Women in the UK. Social & Legal Studies 11 (3): 323–342.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Walkowitz, Judith R. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Weeks, Jeffrey. 2000. Making Sexual History. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. 3rd ed. London: Quartet Books.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Law School, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Caroline Derry

Authors
  1. Caroline Derry
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Caroline Derry .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Derry, C. (2020). ‘Gross Indecency Between Females’: The 1921 Parliamentary Debates. In: Lesbianism and the Criminal Law . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35299-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35300-1

  • eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation