Prostitution and Moral and Sexual Hygiene in Mandatory Palestine: The Criminal Code for Palestine (1921–1936)

Abstract

This article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century British feminists’ expertise on hygiene, sexuality and morality projected an early prototypical form of governance feminism in Mandate Palestine by producing a common language and a governmental apparatus which reflected racialised and orientalist assumptions, and limited indigenous women’s rights through tropes of progress and civilisation. The article analyses women’s contributions to penal reform in Mandatory Palestine, focusing on the regulation of sex work/prostitution, treatment of prisoners and adultery as proposed for the draft Criminal Code for Palestine between 1921 and 1933. It relies on the correspondence between transnational organisations (such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene), women’s groups and charities active on gender and women’s rights to reveal how penal reform was discussed nationally and internationally in women’s debates. It offers an analysis of the history of feminist advocacy in criminal justice on the regulation of prostitution and trafficking, adultery and treatment of prisoners, and adultery in mandate international law on Palestine during the interwar period. It contributes to the scholarship reassessing women’s engagements in criminal justice from a postcolonial perspective by highlighting processes of silencing and marginalisation within the geopolitical space of the mandates and the Empire.

Notes

1 Frances E. Newton, Fifty Years in Palestine (Coldharbour 1948) 37.

2 Correspondence concerning draft Penal Code for Palestine, 3AMS.D, LSE Women’s Library Archive.

3 Janet Halley and others, Governance Feminism: An Introduction (University of Minnesota, 2018) xi–xx.

4 Ellen Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement 1920–1948 (University of California Press 2003); Assaf Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (University of North Carolina Press 2006).

5 Antoinette Burton (ed), Archive Stories. Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Duke University Press 2005); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain (Princeton University Press 2008); Aziza Ahmed, ‘Bandung’s Legacy: Solidarity and Contestations in Global Women’s Rights’ in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds) Bandung, Global History, and International Law (CUP 2017); Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History, 1842–1933 (CUP 2015); Suheir Azzouni, ‘Palestine’ in Sanja Kelly and Julia Breslin (eds) Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa, Progress Amid Resistance (Freedom House 2010).

6 William L Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East (5th edn, Westview Press 2012).

7 These territories were considered inhabited by people ‘not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ and thus, their ‘well-being and development formed a sacred trust of civilisation’. Art 22 (1) Covenant of the League of Nations (entered into force 10 January 1920) 1 League of Nations Official Journal, 3 https://www.refworld.org/docid/3dd8b9854.html

8 A secret agreement between British negotiator, Mark Sykes, and French diplomat, Georges Picot to divide the Middle Eastern territories of the Ottoman Empire into British and French spheres of influence once the war ended. British Government, ‘The Sykes Picot Agreement’ World War I Document Archive, May 2016. https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Sykes-Picot_Agreement accessed 13 April 2021.

9 Deborah S Bernstein, ‘Prostitution in Haifa and Jaffa’ in Trafficking in Women (1924-1926), United Nations Historical Series, 2017, 107-111.

10 Daphna Sharfman, Eli Nachmias and Johnny Mansour (eds) The Secret of Coexistence: Jews and Arabs in Haifa during the British Mandate in Palestine, 1920–1948 (Booksurge 2007).

11 Julia Ann Laite, ‘The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: Abolitionism and Prostitution Law in Britain (1915-1959)’ (2008) 17(2) Women’s History Review 207; Anne Logan, The Politics of Penal Reform: Margery Fry and the Howard League (Routledge 2018).

12 Women working in these organisations, such as Cecily Craven (Howard League) and Alison Neilans (AMSH) (both jurists and feminists), were assiduous readers of reports on the state of criminal justice in the interests of women and/or prisoners from different parts of the British Empire and contributed lengthy comments on draft criminal ordinances dealing with the treatment of women offenders and the regulation of prostitution, trafficking, rape and adultery in various parts of the world under the label ‘crimes against morality’. Logan above note 11.

13 Covenant of the League of Nations above note 7.

14 Susan Pedersen ‘Samoa on the World Stage: Petitions and Peoples before the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations’ (2012) 40 The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 231; Susan Pedersen, ‘Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations’ (2008) 66 History Workshop Journal 1, 188; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (OUP 2015) Natasha Wheatley, ‘Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions’ (2015) 227 Past & Present 1, 205.

15 Logan above note 11.

16 As above at 128.

17 Halley above note 3.

18 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and Education of Desires: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Duke University Press 1995); Fleur Johns, Thomas Skouteris and Wouter Werner, ‘The League of Nations and the Construction of the Periphery’ (2011) 24(4) Leiden Journal of International Law 797; Ratna Kapur, ‘The Tragedy of the Victimisation Rhetoric: Resurrecting the Native Subject in International/Postcolonial Feminist Legal Politics’ (2002) 15 Harvard Human Rights Law Journal 1.

19 Rachel Atwood, ‘Stopping the Traffic: the National Vigilance Association and the international fight against the ‘white slave’ trade (1899– c.1909)’ (2015) 24 (3) Women's History Review 325–350.

20 International Agreement of 18 May 1904 and the International Convention of 4 May 1910 for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, and the Agreement of 4 May 1910 for the Suppression of the Circulation of Obscene Publications.

21 Camila Pastor, ‘Suspect Service: Prostitution and the Public in the Mandate Mediterranean’ in Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (eds) The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (Routledge 2020) 183.

22 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, Geneva, 30 September 1921, entered in force 15 June 1922, League of Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 9, 415.

23 Rachel Crowdy (1884-1964) was a social reformer activist. In 1919 she became the first woman to head a section at the League of Nations: the Social Questions and Opium Traffic and from 1935–6 she was a member of the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms. Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-32647?rskey=k3OaZr&result=1

24 Resolution of the Council, 26 September 1936, 17th Year Official Journal, N 11 Nov 1936, 1174, 1178. The advisory committee included delegates from nine countries (Harris, UK; Hein, Denmark; Burgeois, France; Paulucci di Calboli, Italy; Okayama, Japan; Sokal, Poland; Greciano, Romania; Rios, Spain and Paulina de Luisi, Uruguay). However, women’s, philanthropic, and missionary-oriented associations active in the earlier decade were given a privileged place on the Committee. The following international organisations were represented: the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children (Annie Baker); the International Women’s Alliance (Avril de la Croix); the International Catholic Association for the Protection of Girls (De Montenach); the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (Samuel Cohen), and a Protestant organisation, Fédération des Unions National des Amies de la Jeune Fille (Steinhauslin). British hegemony on the committee is striking: the UK had three strong abolitionist delegates on the Advisory Committee (Harris, Cohen and Baker) who strongly influenced its ideology and practice.

25 Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (SUNY Press 2018) 24-41.

26 Pedersen, The Guardians above note 14.

27 Deborah Bernstein, ‘Gender, Nationalism and Colonial Policy: Prostitution in the Jewish Settlements of Mandate Palestine (1918-1948)’ (2012) 21 Women’s History Review 1, at 85.

28 Pastor above note 21; Kozma above note 25.

29 As above.

30 Traffic in Women and Children in Mandated Territories: Various Correspondence with the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene and other Associations, R669, LNA.

31 As above.

32 As above.

33 International Convention of 30 September 1921 on Traffic in Women and Children.

34 In the mid-1920s, the League of Nations Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children travelled to affected countries in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas in order to investigate the relationship between trafficking and prostitution, and to interview individuals involved in the regulation, repression, medical control, organisation and practice of the sex trade. United Nations, Trafficking in Women (1924-1926): The Paul Kinsie Reports for the League of Nations - Vol. 1 and 2, United Nations Historical Series, 2017.

35 Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (Clarendon 1982).

36 Kamala Kampadoo, ‘The War on Human Trafficking in the Caribbean’ (2007) 49(2) Race and Class 79.

37 League of Nations, Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of the Full Age, 11 October 1933, 150 LNTS 431.

38 Elyse Semerdjian, “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008); J E Baldwin, Prostitution, Islamic Law and Ottoman Societies, 55 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1, 117-152; Francesca Biancani, “Let Down the Curtains Around Us” Sex Work in Colonial Cairo 1882-1952, PhD Thesis LSE, 2012.

39 Bernstein above note 27 at 86.

40 As above.

41 As above.

42 Fleischmann above note 4 at 33.

43 As above.

44 Correspondence concerning draft Penal Code for Palestine, FN to AN, 10 March 1921, 3AMS.D.21-28, LSE Women’s Library Archive.

45 Likhovski above note 4.

46 Pastor above note 21.

47 According to Fleischmann, the PWC, a branch of the International Women’s Council funded in Chicago in 1888, was created in 1921 by Lady Samuel, wife of the first High Commissioner. Most of its members were European. Thirteen of its thirty-six affiliates were Jewish, one Arab. Fleischmann above note 4 at 34.

48 Such as the International Women’s Council and the International Abolitionist Federation; both groups sat as consultative bodies to the International Traffic in Women and Committee at the League; to the Association of Social and Moral Hygiene in Britain.

49 Fleishmann above note 4 at 33.

50 PWC, ISA, RG65 3117; PWC, CO 733/111/8, TNA.

51 ‘Regrading of Government Welfare Inspector’, 00071706.81.CF.C3, Israel State Archive, 4.

52 Newton above note 1 at 149.

53 Fleishmann above note 4 at 50-51; 108-109.

54 ‘Palestine’ (manuscript notes) (1 Feb 1929) by Margaret Nixon, Welfare Inspector for the Palestine Government, 3AMS.D.24, box 116, LSE Women’s Library Archive.

55 As above.

56 ‘Correspondence concerning draft Penal Code for Palestine’, As above.

57 Newton above note 1.

58 Newton above note 1 at 37.

59 Margaret Nixon, ‘Palestine: Women and Girl Offenders’ Howard Journal of Criminal Justice (1935) 4(1) 135.

60 As above.

61 The locution ‘victim feminism’ was used in the 1990s to indicate a feminist legal theoretical framework which sees women mainly as victims. A major exponent of this theoretical strand was Katharine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press 1989). See, Elizabeth M Schneider, ‘Feminism and the False Dichotomy of Victimisation and Agency’, (1993) 38 New York Law School Review, 387.

62 Saba Mahmood, ‘The Subject of Freedom’ in Saba Mahmood Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press 2005) 1.

63 Pedersen, The Guardians above note 14.

64 Justin Quinn Olmstead (ed), Britain in the Islamic World: Imperial and Post-Imperial Connections (Palgrave MacMillan 2018) 179.

65 As above.

66 Turan Kayaouglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire and China, (CUP 2010) 192.

67 ‘Correspondence concerning draft Penal Code for Palestine’. As note 2.

68 Such as the Chief Secretary and the Director of Department of Health, the District Commandant of Police, the Attorney General and the Deputy Inspector General.

69 Ordinance to amend the Law Concerning Offences Against Women and Children and Against Decency, Official Gazette, Issue 176, 1926, 627-629.

70 Bernstein above note 27 at 87.

71 In accordance with article 17 (1) of the Palestine Order-in-Council, 1922, as amended by Article 3 of the Palestine (Amendment) Order-in-Council, 1923. ‘Palestine Gazette’ 6 Jun 1933, 3AMS.D.24, box 116, LSE Women’s Library Archive. On 28 September, 1936, the Palestine Gazette published the Criminal Code Bill. Gazette Extraordinary, Palestine Gazette, Issue 633, 1936.

72 Neilans was regarded as an expert on legal and administrative methods of dealing with prostitution and venereal disease. She opposed, on practical grounds, the compulsory measures for dealing with venereal diseases and took a prominent role in pressing for the repeal of the special law against prostitutes and the substitution in its place of an equal law applicable to all. ‘Alison Neilans: Biographical Details’, 2IAW.1.H.7, LSE Women’s Library Archive.

73 Logan above note 11.

74 ‘Correspondence concerning draft Penal Code for Palestine’ as note 2.

75 As above.

76 As above.

77 See epigraph 2. Nina Boyle (1865-1943) was a campaigner and member of different women’s organisations; she was a leader of the Women’s Freedom League, campaigned for women to become police constables and was active in relief organisations such as Save the Children Fund. Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliographies. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37212?rskey=CVGqfh&result=1

78 Charlotte Weber, ‘Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911-1950’ (2001) 27(1) Feminist Studies 125.

79 Alison Neilans, An equal moral standard: what does it mean? (Association for Moral and Social Hygiene [ca 1935]).

80 ‘Correspondence concerning draft Penal Code for Palestine’ as note 2.

81 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representations (Routledge 1996).

82 Anne Logan, ‘Feminism and Criminology in Britain, 1910-50, in Sara L. Kimble and Marion Rowekamp (eds) New Perspectives on European Women’s Legal History (Routledge 2007) 272.

83 See in this issue Alice Finden, Hygiene, Morality and the Pre-Criminal: Genealogies of Suspicion in British Occupied Egypt, 9.

84 Avra Theodoropoulos ‘The Oriental Women’s Congress in Damascus: II. The Alliance Delegate’s Report’ (1930) 24:12 Independent Woman 189-190; Sumita Mukherjee, ‘The All-Asian Women’s Conference 1931: Indian women and their leadership of a pan-Asian feminist organisation’ (2017) 26:3 Women’s History Review 363; Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, ‘Women’s International Activism during the Inter-War Period, 1919–1939’ (2017) 26 (2) Women’s History Review 163.

85 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Profile Book, 2019).

86 See note 61.

87 Ann L. Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Culture’ (1989) 16(4) American Ethnologist at 634–635.

88 As above.

89 Camilla Pastor, ‘Performers or Prostitutes?: Artistes during the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon, 1921–1946’ (2017) 13(2) Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 287.

90 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Diseases in the British Empire (Routledge 2013) 2–3.

91 As above at 6.