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TOWN AND GOWN PROSTITUTION: CAMBRIDGE’S
ARCHITECTURE OF CONTAINMENT OF SEXUAL DEVIANCE
Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
Peter Lang, 2022.
<https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202511626>
MARÍA ÁNGELES TODA IGLESIA
Universidad de Sevilla
mtoda@us.es
<https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2115-428X>
Continuing in the same line of gender- and class- inflected archival research
undertaken in her previous work, The London Lock Hospital in the Nineteenth
Century: Gender, Sexuality and Sexual Reform (2014), Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz
presents a study of the institutions that attempted to contain “sexually deviant”
working-class women in Victorian and Edwardian Cambridge. A lecturer at the
University of Málaga, Romero Ruiz has published extensively on the history of
sexuality in Victorian England and brings her specialisation and close reading of
contemporary documents to produce a text that can contribute significantly to
several areas of nineteenth-century studies, particularly those concerned with the
interworking of gender, power and class.
These areas are outlined in the introduction, as the author explains how she builds
on James Smith’s 2008 term “architecture of containment”, drawn from studies of
Irish Magdalen Laundries, as well as on earlier studies on prostitution and reform
such as Finnegan (1979) or Mahood (1990). The book centres both on the history
of specific institutions in Cambridge, thus contributing to studies on Victorian
reform legislation and regulation, and on the construction and reality of the figure
of the “fallen woman” in the same period, an issue that has long been an object of
interest for feminist and gender studies (since, for instance, Nead 1988).
Additionally, close attention is paid to the oft underestimated element of class
which is so crucial to understanding Victorian issues. This perspective is especially
present in how Romero Ruiz reads both the women’s lives and the attempts to
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“contain” their behavior, partly in relation to the conflict between working-class
and middle-class moralities. For this purpose, she draws on studies of the Victorian
poor. A final —and to me very valuable— contribution of the volume is to the
growing field of studies on Victorian and Edwardian material culture and its neo-
Victorian representations, often through the lens of “thing theory” (Sattaur 2012;
Arias and Pulham 2019; Maier et al 2022), as I will explain below.
The introduction sets up institutions, gender and class as centres of interest,
providing a brief context to Cambridge in the nineteenth century and to the two
jurisdictions —the town and the university— which will interact in the development
of the institutions that will be discussed in each of the chapters: the university-run
Spinning House; the Cambridge Poor-Law Union Workhouse, dependent on
commissioners and parishes from the town; the Cambridge Gaols; and finally the
Cambridge Female Refuge, where both town and gown were involved. A brief
contextualisation of prostitution in Cambridge completes the introduction.
However, what is missing is a definition of the concept of prostitution itself. It
seems to me a concept too loaded to go unexamined, particularly as the essay
applies a gender studies perspective; even the term (sex work or prostitution?) has
been the object of heated argument and painful division within feminism. While it
is crucial to insist, as the author does, that sex work was an intermittent,
complementary source of income for many young female workers of the period, an
analysis of the patriarchal power structures that give rise to the institution of
prostitution, going beyond brief references to the “separate spheres” theory,
would have been pertinent. Similarly, some problematic uses of language, such as
frequent references to the objects of this “containment” as “girls” —even given
the fact that many were teenagers— and the occasional fall into Victorian
terminology, as in “hardened prostitutes” without quotation marks, might have
benefited from revision.
The first chapter establishes the history and organisation of the Cambridge
Spinning House, which came to be specialised in imprisoning, with a view to
reformation, young women accused of soliciting students or of “riotous” or
“scandalous” behavior. Romero Ruiz’s thorough analysis of the regulations
governing the Spinning House provides a fascinating glimpse of the material
conditions of life in these institutions. Her study of the Committal books and of
contemporary censuses does much toward individualising the conditions, ages,
origins and jobs of the women who were subsumed under the category of “fallen”.
Of particular interest to me was the access to the voices of these women as witnesses
in an inquest held after the death of one of the inmates “of rheumatic fever, caused
by a violent cold caught at the spinning house” (2022: 39); the witnesses vividly
describe the lack of fire, the dampness of the beds and the cells and the drafts
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coming from the broken windows. Judith Butler’s theories of precariousness and
vulnerability are here appropriately applied to the relations of power which
governed the inmates’ lives, and the author emphasises the differences in the
punishment applied to the undergraduates and to the women in cases of sexual
misconduct, as well as the blurred lines between patrolling working-class women’s
behavior in general and prostitution in particular.
The second chapter, “‘Fallen Women’s’ Makeshift Economy: The Cambridge
Poor-Law Union Workhouse” develops this conflation of prostitutes and working-
class women, emphasising the theme of poverty and its stigma. It provides a full
account of the British Poor Law’s origins and the workhouse system to frame the
specific institution whose archives are analysed. Once more, the wealth of specific
detail can be invaluable to students of Victorian and Edwardian material culture
— and to authors of neo-Victorian novels: “the inmate’s diet was based mainly on
bread and gruel, potatoes, and suet or rice puddings. To these, soup, cheese and
broth were added, depending on the day of the week” (2022: 63). Attention is
returned to the specific issue of “deviant” women in the workhouse at the end of
the chapter, in which the related issue of single or abandoned mothers is developed
through a careful study of the Cambridge register of births and the proceedings
against the fathers of these “illegitimate” children. Chapter 3, briefer than the rest,
similarly discusses the Victorian prison system in general and Cambridge Gaols
specifically, and centers on the petty crimes for which women defined as prostitutes
came to be imprisoned —since prostitution itself did not constitute an offence
since 1824 (2022: 43)— as well as providing significant data such as the very
young age of many of the offenders.
It is in the last chapter, “Domesticating the ‘Fallen’: The Cambridge Female
Refuge” where the central themes of the study, which occasionally compete for
attention, are most clearly and successfully brought together. Romero Ruiz here
discusses institutions whose objective, beyond spatial containment, is to reform and
recycle women involved in prostitution, bringing them within the domestic scene
“in a place of confinement with characteristics like those of a middle-class home
with the values of protection and isolation from peril” (2022: 104). Framing the
analysis within Foucauldian theory, the author reads the Cambridge Refuge as an
example of the exercise of power to create “docile bodies” (2022: 111) and
emphasises the ideas of vulnerability and precarity in the situation of the inmates,
particularly through the institution’s emphasis on isolating and policing them as
sources of possible contamination for both the university and the city. The medical
examinations (also present in other institutions discussed), as well as the physical
separation between the premises and the city, between the women and their friends
or relatives, and between the women themselves, are read as elements in exerting
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this power. Through the meticulous analysis of the Annual Reports, the chapter not
only presents the day-to-day patterns of regulation and discipline, but contributes a
wealth of material detail. Readers may find the list of prices paid for the different
items washed, ironed and starched, or sewn by the inmates, which even specifies,
“Cotton or thread will be charged if not sent” (2022: 121). Such tasks are presented
as part of the attempt to guide the women toward traditional female (and heavily
underpaid) working-class occupations that would be beneficial to the middle-class
economy: building on theories of resistance and resilience such as Sarah Bracke’s
(2016), Romero reflects on the destinations and further life choices of those who
left the Refuge, both the “successes” —whose letters from outside she quotes with
due caution— and those who chose to break away from the control and dependency
of the center. The changes brought on in the last years of the nineteenth century by
the growing involvement of middle-class women with the Social Purity Movement,
and by the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which raised the age of consent,
are also analysed in terms of how they led to a less punitive, more reformist
treatment. The final emphasis is on the persistent clash of values between working-
class and middle-class attitudes on sexual work or prostitution.
The volume thus provides valuable information as to the internal history of
Victorian institutions and how they shape, and are shaped by, Victorian middle-
class ideologies of gender and class. Its exhaustive archival work gives further
specificity and nuance to the growing understanding of women’s history in the
mid and late nineteenth century, as well as to the history of the institutions
employed to control and police working-class bodies.
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Received: 05/03/2025
Accepted: 01/09/2025
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
