A private Contagious Diseases Act: prostitution and public space in Victorian Cambridge

In Britain the regulation of prostitution became a matter of urgency in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, most famously in the C ontagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. 'Regulationist' policy attempted to i solate, segregate and domesticate prostitutional activity, resulting in a s patial order with clear class and gender biases. A precursor of regulationi sm exists however in the special powers held by the University of Cambridge to apprehend, inspect and detain suspected prostitutes. This paper examine s the nature of this regulationist system, and the way that it produced a g eography of prostitution in nineteenth-century Cambridge. The background an d experiences of women caught up in the system of registration, inspection and detention are also examined. These policies did not go unchallenged, an d their growing vulnerability to being represented as authoritarian and ana chronistic is ultimately highlighted for the light it sheds on the understa nding of other attempts at the regulation of prostitution. (C) 2000 Academi c Press.