Abstract
This section includes a miscellany of concerned voices in the public arena. The Public Morality Council’s report [(a)] relied largely upon medical expertise and therefore produced a variation on a familiar theme: homosexuals should be divided into inverts (untreatable; they should not be prosecuted) and a variety of others (many of whom should be treated—rather than imprisoned—before they became habituated to their homosexual practices). The Ethical Union also advocated reform [(b)], making a clear distinction between the law and morality. What others considered to be morally wrong or distasteful, it argued, was no grounds for the law to interfere in private, adult, consenting conduct. This was a straightforward echo of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which was to be reflected in the logic of the Wolfenden Report and the Hart-Devlin debate (p. 262) as well.
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Notes
Church of England Moral Welfare Council, The Problem of Homosexuality; Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England, pp. 176–82; Timothy W. Jones, ‘Moral Welfare and Social Well-Being: The Church of England and the Emergence of Modern Homosexuality’, in Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan (eds), Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 206–8; Grimley, ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation’, pp. 728–9; Grimley, ‘Bailey, Derrick Sherwin (1910–1984), Church of England priest and sexual ethicist’, ODNB online, accessed 30 Apr. 2013; HO 345/7, ‘The Homosexual, the Law, and Society’, preamble.
The Public Morality Council began life in 1899 as the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality, with the aim of fighting vice and indecency. It largely represented the churches and an evangelical crusading zeal against sexual nonconformity, variously targeting over the decades street prostitution, unwholesome plays and films, queer spaces and morally deficient commercial venues in general. See G. I. T. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 81; Houlbrook, Queer London, pp. 25, 78–9.
The first British ethical society, the South Place Ethical Society, was founded in London in 1888 at the instigation of Stanton Coit, a disciple of fellow American Felix Adler. Other societies swiftly followed, and by the mid-1890s the four London societies joined together in the Ethical Union. See Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 42; Stephen Law, Humanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 1.
This organization had its roots in late-Victorian moral reform societies. The White Cross Army, established by Ellice Hopkins in 1883 to recruit men for the cause of social purity, amalgamated with the Church of England Purity Society in 1891 to form the White Cross League. In 1939 this in turn amalgamated with the Archbishops’ Advisory Board for Moral Welfare Work to form the Church of England Moral Welfare Council. See Frank K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 215–16; Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England, p. 177.
Denmark was the first European country to introduce a surgical castration law for sex offenders, in 1929, and the other Scandinavian countries, Germany, Estonia, Latvia and Iceland followed suit in the 1930s and 1940s. Switzerland, the Netherlands and Greenland used castration without legislation. Britain and the Catholic countries did not practise surgical castration. See Louis Le Maire, ‘Danish Experiences Regarding the Castration of Sexual Offenders’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 47, 3 (1956), 294; Nikolaus Heim and Carolyn J. Hursch, ‘Castration for Sex Offenders: Treatment or Punishment? A Review and Critique of Recent European Literature’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 8, 3 (May 1979), 282–3.
It was originally named the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals and became the Progressive League in 1940. The first president was the philosopher and public intellectual C. E. M. Joad, and the vice-presidents included H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Barbara Wootton, Vera Brittain, Aldous Huxley, Kingsley Martin and Leonard Woolf. See Joad (ed.), Manifesto: Being the Book of the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934); Tony Judge, Radio Philosopher: The Radical Life of Cyril Joad (London: Alpha House Books, 2012), pp. 81–2.
Inspired by the ideas of Sir Francis Galton, this was established in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, and became the Eugenics Society in 1926. See Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 26–7.
Founded by freethinkers in 1899 to publish secular and humanist literature deemed too controversial by mainstream publishers. See Bill Cooke, The Gathering of Infidels: A Hundred Years of the Rationalist Press Association (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), pp. 27–9.
An obscure organization led by humanist philosopher J. B. Coates. See Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), p. xx.
In 1942 Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime had reintroduced a distinction (abolished during the French Revolution, see above, II: 3(a), n. 26) between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ sex by criminalizing sexual relations with anyone of the same sex under the age of 21. The age of heterosexual consent remained 15. Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government after the liberation perpetuated this distinction: by the decree of 8 February 1945 (article 331) it reaffirmed a sentence of from six months to three years for this offence. See Michael D. Sibalis, ‘Homophobia, Vichy France, and the “Crime of Homosexuality”: The Origins of the Ordinance of 6 August 1942’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8, 3 (2002), 302–3; Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; 1st edn 1972), p. 64.
The National Council of Social Service was created in 1919, in part with a legacy from Edward Birchall, who had been killed in action in France in 1916. The Standing Conference of Juvenile Organisations was created under its auspices in 1936; it acquired the name heading this memorandum in 1943. See Margaret E. Brasnett, Voluntary Social Action: A History of the National Council of Social Service, 1919–1969 (London: National Council of Social Service, 1969); Keith Laybourn, ‘Birchall, Edward Vivian Dearman (1884–1916), philanthropist’, ODNB online, accessed 3 Apr. 2015.
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Lewis, B. (2016). Christians, Moralists and Reformers. In: Wolfenden’s Witnesses. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137321503_5
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