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.

1. INTRODUCTION

Then they poured out their story of fury and resentment at being imprisoned because they were Communists. My only comment was that they might have done better to remain in the country where their views were the law of the land.¹

Francis E. Newton

Are you interested at all in the new criminal code bill for Palestine? I have not studied the new code completely but there are various proposals in it which seem very unwise and reactionary and which might be suggested to the colonial Secretary of State as fitting for modification.²

Alison Neilans, ASMH to Nina Boyle, NCW.

The article investigates the conjoined feminist legal lobbying on the 1936 Criminal Code for Palestine. It argues that while criminal legal transplants on the treatment of offenders and gender policy reforms were not seen as particularly problematic from the imperial centre, British metropolitan feminists, Christian missionaries and local mandate reformers contributed to establish a proto-typical version of feminist governance which, endorsing the civilising mission and spreading feminist expertise, crafted Palestinian women’s rights through tropes of protection, progress and civilisation.³ An emergent Palestinian-Arab feminism, while overall focused on women’s rights, remained marginalised in the process of gender legal reform, albeit more concerned with claiming economic and political rights under conditions of colonialism in the geopolitical space of the Mandate.⁴ The analysis of the correspondences – or their absence – between local and transnational feminist organisations, missionaries and colonial mandate officers shows the complexities and tensions around gender policy and criminal legal reforms in the colonial context. By critically analysing the ways in which early discourses of women’s rights were negotiated in feminist circles and then crystallised in the 1936 Criminal Code for Palestine, the article unveils the transnational feminist activism and connections behind gender legal reform in one of the most intractable and problematic of the British dominions. It contributes to the postcolonial literature underlining how gender and race were central in the construction of imperial political authority through the use of criminal legal tools.⁵

In 1917, during World War I, the British occupied Jerusalem and declared war on Syria (including Lebanon and Palestine) which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.⁶ Palestine was then governed by the Occupied Enemy Territories Authority until 1920 when colonial rule was established under the first High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel. After the 1919 Peace Conference, the Mandate system was established by Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant to resolve the question of the jurisdiction of former colonial territories.⁷ In April 1920 at the San Remo Conference, the Sykes-Picot Agreement was announced, and the allocation of Mandates decided.⁸ The British Mandate for Palestine officially entered into force in 1923 after Turkey had renounced its title over the former Ottoman Territories in the Treaty of Lausanne.

For Palestine, being a multi-ethnic but traditionally religious country, mobility was mainly linked to religious tourism or immigration directed to the holy places.⁹ The rise in sex-work/prostitution during the British military occupation of Jerusalem (1918-1921) aside, women travelling to work in the sex trade mainly headed to other, more vibrant, coastal cities, such as Beirut, Alexandria and Port Said. However, Haifa and other coastal towns (e.g. Jaffa and Tel Aviv, founded in 1909) were still part of a capitalist system in constant expansion towards the East: many workers were involved in the management of the railway or the recent pipeline built by the French and the British between Haifa and Baghdad.¹⁰ At the beginning of the century, Haifa was already acknowledged as an important nodal city for the region, a key route to Syria and an essential enclave to protect British interests through the Suez Canal. Due to its economic, political, symbolic and religious centrality, Palestine was a site of political turmoil that was perceived to require the continuous presence of (British) military forces. The presence of the military not only ‘required’ a steady supply of women, but also posed a medical security threat of venereal diseases.

The intertwining of legal and medical arguments with the abolition of the regulation of prostitution characterised a transnational gender criminal reformism, advocated by various feminist and women’s groups campaigning against either the double moral standard for women or the spread of sexual diseases. For example, the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) and the Howard League for Penal Reform advocated the abolition of soliciting laws (‘street offences’) as part of a wider feminist and criminal justice network that developed nationally and internationally between 1920 and 1939.¹¹ By the end of World War I, it was a common belief that penal modernisation and gender policy transfer from country to country could be achieved through national and international collaboration over criminal justice by sharing legislations and good practices.¹² Moreover, in relation to international mandate governance, the ‘treatment of (women) offenders’ was central to the assessment within the international system of the ‘standard of civilisation’ required by article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and article 23’s requirement that states collaborate on implementing treaties against human trafficking.¹³ It is in this space that the role of feminist organisations leading to the 1936 Criminal Code for Palestine is contextualised.

Much of the literature has now established how legal transplants from the domestic and the international (and vice versa) as well as the entanglements between the colonial and the national, became a distinct feature of the complexities of colonial legal systems.¹⁴ Legal historical analysis is now starting to recognise the work of female legal reformers as part of the historical genealogies of present legal debates.¹⁵ However, this important body of literature often downplays the transnational and imperial dimensions shaping feminists’ transnational encounters and influencing gender legal reforms. For example, the biographer of Margery Fry, the first woman magistrate in the UK and secretary of the Howard League in Geneva, has suggested that ‘there is no evidence that she [Fry] regarded the transfer of policy from the imperial centre as particularly problematic’.¹⁶ Fry’s influence and action illustrates how well-established feminists, in supporting legal transplants in British dominions, had an indirect but significant impact on defining what a feminist agenda would be in the imperial dimension, and contributed to shaping, however inadvertently, an international imperial feminism which beyond the neutral façade of gender reforms, endorsed the civilising mission and was marked by western underlying racial biases.

Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Hila Shamir and Rachel Rebouché coined the term ‘governance feminism’ to indicate feminists’ engagements with the law and governance more broadly. Encompassing a wide spectrum of heterogenous elements, the category has been used to assess feminist strategies used to access governmental and bureaucratic sites of power and to discuss the ambivalence and emancipatory potential of feminism as a political project, when coopted in structures of governmentality.¹⁷ In this article, I use the term ‘prototypical feminist governance’ to refer to a wide spectrum of feminist efforts and engagements with international (mandate) law and institutions during the interwar period. I claim that women’s officers and inspectors acting as colonial authorities, Christian missionaries, members of transnational organisations performing advisory functions at the League and members of national lobbying associations involved in the imperial networks as gender consultants and experts, were able to mobilise, long before gender mainstreaming, a legal expertise on gender and women’s rights invoking international legal standards of gender equality and early human rights but often obscuring indigenous voices and alternative and indigenous legal realities.

The article argues that white and western feminists and lawyers advocating for a more ‘progressive’ criminal legislation in Palestine are indicative of the processes of silencing and obscuring the presence of the direct actors of the sex trade and Palestinian local grassroots organisations.¹⁸ The issue of sex work/prostitution mobilised familiar arguments of ‘morality’, and ‘public hygiene’ which were deeply problematic and under scrutiny in feminist circles. However, this article focuses on the regulation of sex work/prostitution and the treatment of offenders through the lenses of several western reformers in the colonial dimension. I use the combined term ‘sex work/prostitution’ as a methodological choice in order to highlight, first, the sex work approach which underlines the centrality of direct actors and their economic and entrepreneurial agency, and, second, to reproduce the language of the archive and the secular historical legacy of stigma, even in regulated and legitimised contexts.

The article is divided into six sections. Following this introduction, section 2.0 maps the international legal debates and the exceptionality of Palestine as a site of vested interest for both British and international legal reformism. Section 3.0 introduces the criminal legal context of the Mandate, unveiling the history of the appointment of Margaret Nixon as Welfare Inspector for Women and Girls. Section 4.0 focuses on the two reports on public morality and the treatment of offenders published in the Howard Journal for Criminal Justice in 1925 and 1935. Section 5.0 maps the transplants of international and national criminal regulations implemented between 1923, the start of the British Mandate for Palestine, and 1936, the promulgation of the Criminal Code, showing the legal developments that led to the creation of the Criminal Code for Palestine. Section 6.0, the conclusion, addresses the relations between empire, colonialism and criminal law by showing how preludes to feminist governance emerged in the context of the British Mandate for Palestine through the imperial legal activism of western white women projecting their ideas of hygiene, civilisation and womanhood, thus often ignoring or silencing local and indigenous voices.

2. THE DEBATE ON SEX WORK/PROSTITUTION AND TRAFFICKING BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE INTERNATIONAL

By 1919, the outline of a system of international cooperation and transnational dialogue aimed at international legal codification of the abolition of prostitution was in place. The International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons, founded in 1899 by William Coote, had the objective of creating homogenous law to fight (initially women’s only) trafficking.¹⁹ Solidly based on a typically anglophone abolitionist stance, it created the international platform for signing the 1904 and 1910 international conventions.²⁰ Still in force, these set minimum penal standards on how states should regulate the sex trade, including age of consent (to travel for business), definitions of traffic and procurers, and extradition of criminals.

Although the League of Nations was quick to embrace abolitionist positions originating from the past decade of feminist activism, there was resistance to policy recommendations with regard to prostitution within national borders or concerning colonial policies. These were seen as infringing national sovereignty and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the League. Thus, as long as prostitution affected only local women, the League decided not to intervene.²¹ Following the 1921 International Conference, the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children was concluded.²² The Convention established an Advisory Committee, led by Rachel Crowdy, to supervise international agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children and in obscene publications and the study of all international questions relating thereto.²³ The Committee was composed of government representatives, appointing assessors and experts to study particular problems: it was renamed the Social Questions Committee in 1936.²⁴ As Kozma has argued, the focus on ‘traffic in women’ rather than on ‘prostitution’ had immediate political reverberations. It targeted women travelling alone, not prostitution itself, and this has to be considered as the product of the particular international system of governance in place at the time. Because the League only had international jurisdiction, it had to be an international phenomenon; and, because the League could not reach a consensus in regard to prostitution or licensed houses, at least addressing trafficking would allow the issue to be tackled indirectly.²⁵

Pedersen’s study of the mandate system put in place by the League of Nations is widely recognised as groundbreaking. However, the role and legacy of British associations and their proximity to transnational and international sites of law-making in relation to the application of the Conventions on Traffic has not been the focus of specific attention.²⁶ Britain initially requested that the Convention not be applied to Mandate territories, ‘eastern countries’ and tropical colonies in the belief that a different treatment was justified due to ‘different climate conditions and social and religious customs’.²⁷ But the ASMH and the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic against Persons, headed by conservative suffrage activist Annie Baker, lobbied the League and the British Government for the Mandate territories to be included.²⁸ The debate around the applicability of the Convention to the Mandate territories provides an opportunity to preliminarily discuss the intersection of two different issues: the legal status of the Mandate territories – and therefore what constitutional and international legal arrangements allowed the UK to be a signatory to the Convention on behalf of Palestine – and the feminist lobbying efforts to include Palestine in their political agenda.²⁹ The question around the applicability of the Convention, as well as any reports or recommendations of the Advisory Committee as adopted by the Assembly, had to be decided by the Permanent Mandates Commission at the request of the Council as the Mandate territories were formally considered administered by the League.

This was the subject of an initial debate between William Rappard, President of the Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC), and Leonora de Alberti, Secretary of the Council for the Representation of Women in the League of Nations, who had written to the Council on the question of the omission in Mandate Classes A and B of any reference to the Convention on Traffic. De Alberti argued that the traffic of ‘white slaves’, even if non-existent, might be established in the future, and therefore, the omission in the application of the convention, would constitute a grave infraction of the Convention itself.³⁰ A similar letter was also sent to all members of the League by the London-based National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases, to pressure the Government to adopt the Convention in areas over which Britain had a Mandate, its colonies and protectorates.³¹ On 29th November 1923, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance wrote to Rappard (PMC):

The British Overseas Committee of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance has instructed me to write to you urging that […] the Permanent Mandate Commission should be instructed to make a full enquiry into conditions in those areas which bear directly upon this question. We have frequently been informed that the reason why the Convention is not enforced in those territories is because traffic does not exist, but on pressing the matter we learn that in many cases this is the case only because the moral condition of the people is so bad that actual traffic is superfluous. If this is indeed the case an enquiry into conditions would seem more necessary than ever.³²

The International Convention of 1921 had set the principle of minimum legislation, but had also raised the age of consent to 21 (art. 5) and urged states to adopt regulations to indicate where suspected victims of trafficking could find help and assistance in ports and train stations; it had also expanded potential trafficking victims to both sexes and to children.³³ From then on, the Advisory Committee expanded its remits to include violence against children, paedophilia and rape, and considered prostitution and trafficking not only as a moral purity threat, but also as a consequence of social inequality and poverty. Data on human traffic had to be collected and the issue scientifically investigated in order to adopt the necessary reform.³⁴ The debate was no longer framed in terms of ‘white slavery’ as it had been during an earlier period when Jewish and Eastern European women were depicted as abducted and transported around the world to be forcibly prostituted to satisfy the lust of non-white men.³⁵ However, the debate continued amidst a racialised social panic about prostitution, the dangers of non-marital relations and racist fears of miscegenation.³⁶ From 1925 onwards, the focus shifted from ‘white slavery’ to ‘sex slavery’ only. With the International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women in 1933, all reference to prostitution was condemned, and traffic was equated with pimping and exploitation of prostitution. Sex workers consenting to travel between countries for business were excluded, and the definition of trafficking crystallised in international law.³⁷

3. LOCAL SEX WORK/PROSTITUTION AND THE INCLUSION OF PALESTINE IN TRANSNATIONAL DEBATES

When the British occupied Palestine in 1917, neither prostitution nor brothel-keeping was an offence under the Ottoman Penal Code.³⁸ However, with the sudden increase in migration and general impoverishment after World War I, on 27th June 1918 the Commander of the Occupied Enemy Territories Authorities issued a military command regulating prostitution,³⁹ declaring it an offence to manage a brothel outside authorised areas, solicit outside a brothel, and solicit or communicate venereal disease to a member of His Majesty’s Forces.⁴⁰ In 1921, Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner for Palestine (1920-1925), repealed the paragraphs concerning ‘authorised areas’ but all other clauses remained. Bernstein claims that ‘there is no direct evidence as to who, within Palestine, might have called upon the new civil administration to abolish the military command’,⁴¹ but points to the role played by the National Council of Women and the Palestine Women’s Council (PWC).

No piece of legislation would go unnoticed to one of the most politically passionate, locally well-known, and fiery active Christian missionaries of Mandate Palestine. On 10th March 1921, Frances Newton, British missionary and member of the PWC who had lived in Palestine since 1889, wrote to Alison Neilans of the AMSH about the repeal.⁴² She described a meeting with the Chief of the Civil Police Office in which ‘he agreed that a registered area for brothels failed to achieve its purpose and thought that the new notice would have very little effect’.⁴³ She also informed Neilans about the ‘existing state of things’ in the Municipality of Haifa under the order signed by the former Military Governor, describing some of the characteristics of the regulationist model, at the time still widespread in the majority of Mediterranean states and colonies and under which sex workers were forced to undergo intrusive medical examinations.⁴⁴

Newton’s missive also describes what was, in fact, a characteristic feature of the Mandate Territories: their hybrid legal status of foreign/colonial military law and domestic/indigenous civil authorities meant that their juridical system was defined by a legal patchwork of different legislations that constantly triggered constitutional and administrative conflicts of jurisdiction.⁴⁵ Different authorities pursued different interests. The military did not wish to suppress the legislation on the regulation of prostitution as it believed that brothels were essential to sustain troop morale and protect them from venereal disease; local and administrative authorities opposed the ‘exceptionalisation’ and criminalisation of the state-regulated activity of prostitution because they had a fiscal interest in regulating prostitution as a source of municipal tax revenue. Nevertheless, Samuel’s partial repeal curiously led to the decriminalisation and deregulation of prostitution in toto.⁴⁶

The PWC was fundamental in prompting a policy turn to abolitionism in Palestine in the aftermath of World War I.⁴⁷ Mandate women’s organisations had different forms of transnational ties: to international women’s organisations; to the local mandate British authorities; and to British national feminist organisations.⁴⁸ The creation of new institutional roles and the exchange of most efficient practices in collecting information and data about the status of women in the colonial space highlight how women’s organisations were part of a transnational governance and policy-oriented infrastructure. This infrastructure, encapsulating globalised mobility into state-building projects characterised by border surveillance and morality control, transformed deeply multifaceted political and colonial encounters into civilisational goals of moral and capitalist development. The PWC was a ‘consultative body’ which initially received no official recognition.⁴⁹ The British government expressed its desire to refer questions ‘affecting women and children in Palestine to the Council but would not bind itself to realise any resolutions that the Council passed’.⁵⁰ The PWC pushed the Palestine Government to appoint a Women’s Welfare Inspector. Initial resistance gave way to financial support secured by Newton from the Syria and Palestine Relief Fund and a new institutional role, a ‘Welfare Inspector for Women and Children in Palestine’ attached to the Secretariat, was created: Newton suggested that Margaret Nixon be appointed to the role,⁵¹ later praising her work:

… the pioneer work of Miss Nixon has resulted in such proof of its value that the Colonial Office is now appointing women welfare inspectors in several of our dependencies and has started a special course of training for the natives of those countries so that they can go back and look after their own.⁵²

Imperial ideology prompted the articulation of functions of government towards the reform of gender roles and sexuality along ideals of Victorian domesticity and positivist civilisational lines. The quote above shows how the legal creation of institutional roles as a turning point in the legislature de facto assimilated the local indigenous space of charitable and political feminist work. Palestinian Arab (women’s) organisations such as the Haifa Women’s Union, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, active in assistance to the poor and protection of orphaned children, do not appear in the archives recording the creation of this institutional framework of colonial governance oriented towards gender and women’s issues. Yet the reports of the overzealous missionary Frances Newton are easily accessible, together with her pride in affirming the benefit of exporting new administrative women’s officer roles to other territories of the British Empire. These records give a glimpse of how western female and missionaries’ attitudes contributed to the construction of civilisational standards by projecting hegemonic ideas of ‘hygiene and morality’ through the reiteration by ‘trainings’, ‘aid’ and ‘assistance’ of universal social norms to develop ‘useful members of the society’ but tell little about how ‘useful’ local and charitable women’s societies and activities already were.⁵³

4. LEGAL IMPERIAL HEGEMONY AND THE GOVERNMENTAL REPORTS ON WOMEN AND YOUNG OFFENDERS

On 1st February 1929, Nixon’s first report on prostitution and venereal diseases in Haifa and Jaffa called for discretion, education and prevention, while Jerusalem, initially a city ‘free from vice’ and regarded by the Turks ‘as a holy city where no licensed houses should exist’ still had two streets authorised for brothels by the military.⁵⁴ The ‘Social Service Association’, a voluntary organisation created in 1918, representing Christians, Muslims and Jews, according to Nixon’s report, reported these ‘houses of questionable repute’ and eventually the Chief of Police acted and abolished the tolerated area.⁵⁵

Sex-work/prostitution was socially and religiously perceived as an offence, and sex workers were considered promiscuous and boundary-crossing, thus moral and religious lawbreakers. Accordingly, reform in the matter often intersected with the missionary proclivity of ‘rescuing women’ from criminality and sin. For example, writing to Neilans in 1921, Newton underlined the urgency of legislative criminal reform, beyond ‘vice and prostitution’, to improve the conditions of women prisoners.⁵⁶ In her autobiography, she recalls being recognised as an unofficial probation officer as a result of her frequent visits to prisons and police stations while working as assistant to Miss Nixon in Haifa.⁵⁷ In the Haifa Police Station, she writes, the women’s room could contain between a dozen and fifty women. Women offenders were processed according to three main criminal categories: women as ‘adulterers’, often Bedouins or members of nomadic communities who, found alone, could only be managed under that label by the police; ‘lunatics’; and ‘communists’. Of her visit to the women’s prison, she writes:

After making the round of the Arab women, I went up to the four girls, and standing over them, asked what language they spoke. “Russian” was the curt reply. However, it turned out that one spoke French, so we were able to carry on the following conversation: “Why didn’t you stand up when I came in?” “Why should we? You are no better than us”. “It is not a question of better or worse, it is a simple matter of good manners to rise and say, ‘good morning’ when a visitor enters the room”. I waited while they sat still, glowering and scowling at me in a perfectly detestable manner. At last, I said “well, if your manners do not come up to mine, mine must come down to yours” and I sat down beside them on the floor. Then they poured out their story of fury and resentment at being imprisoned because they were Communists. My only comment was that they might have done better to remain in the country where their views were the law of the land.⁵⁸

The gendered and racialised social hierarchy of the mandate space did not exclusively permeate the mindset of Christian missionaries residing in the Middle East. Miss Nixon, too, was subject to anxieties about women’s social and moral hygiene and prostitution which she considered equal to murder and theft, and which informed her fervent faith in the need for legal reform along ‘progressive’ lines. The work of the Women’s Welfare Officer in collecting data to prompt policy reform displays how gender and racialised tropes were deeply engrained. Female subjects were regarded as the principal conduits of diseases and illicit trade and categorised as a source of political, social and physical threats, reaffirming the parallel in the denial and consequently, subjugation of (certain) humans’ aspirations and desires over (certain, i.e. dangerous) bodies and (certain, i.e. dangerous) territories. Education through colonisation required sanitation and the instillment of certain gendered habits of social and moral hygiene. For example, Nixon described the situation at the Bethlehem women’s prison:

After the occupation, the Mandatory Power took over the old Turkish system of prisons which was quickly altered […] cleanliness and sanitation in the prisons were strictly enforced […] Murderesses, thieves, prostitutes, and the worst class of offender were indiscriminately herded with young children who had stolen a chicken or raided a garden or a shop for food […] Many a time, the Inspector or the Matron of the women’s prison has telephoned to tell me that the Communist women were smashing everything they could lay hands on […] the offenders were greatly disappointed when very little notice was taken of these outbursts, and they had to sleep in rooms with no glass in the windows […], which though no doubt very healthy, was not too comfortable on a cold night in Palestine. These tactics have now been entirely abandoned on the part of the women communist prisoners.⁵⁹

While it is not easy to retrace the journeys of what would most likely have been Eastern female migrants and refugees arriving in Palestine during the interwar period, the focus on British manners’ hierarchical pedagogy endorsed by missionaries and governmental inspectors reveals the great uneasiness with non-conforming manners and language. This preoccupation seems to be linked to deep anxieties about radical and non-conforming women, fears about destabilisation of the political order, and ultimately, their transformative potential. Through the picturesque and haughty description of such scenes of women’s prisons, by highlighting the antinomies between the healthy and unhealthy, hygienic and contagious, vulgar and refined, barbaric and civilised, the inner dichotomies of a liberal juridical system that needs to exclude in order to protect and which recognises agency only through subordination, are reproduced and relocated from the Victorian era to the twentieth century, and from Britain to Mandate Palestine.

Nixon also posed the question around the purpose – to rehabilitate, rather than punish – of the criminal justice:

In the girls’ reformatory home much more freedom is possible than in the women’s prison. […] This is only possible because our women’s prison is comparatively small, and every woman or girl is a person, not a case. In the large prisons in England and elsewhere this individual treatment is very difficult if not impossible. […] Surely the same principle holds good with regard to prisons, where every individual needs special treatment if she is to take her proper place in the community at the end of her sentence.⁶⁰

Newton’s and Nixon’s reports bring to light different sets of women’s crimes which were the target of the legislative effort endorsed by the British on criminal legal reform in Palestine. The lengthy correspondences exchanged between missionaries, women reformers and governmental officials are indicative not only of the processes of gender legal reform through tropes of progress and civilisation but also of the way in which these were interwoven with security and surveillance, as shown by the constant fear of ‘communism’, and the reflections about the suitability of prisons to meet the purpose of the modern criminal system, i.e. in theory, the rehabilitation of the offender.

The imperial dimension of their institutional role and advocacy resides in the articulation of a rehabilitation for women that, based on western intellectual premises, casts local indigenous women either as lacking or in the process of acquiring the tools and the consciousness to their development. All those subjected to the mandate system of governance were deemed as not having a consciousness of their own. Instead, they were considered to be victims in need of rescue by the enlightened white reformers and lacking the necessary education to realise their chains. Thus, the idea of rehabilitation of a ‘young woman offender’ which, constructed along racialised and heteronormative lines, was at the core of an early ‘victim feminism’.⁶¹ This was premised on liberal assumptions about what constitutes ‘human nature’ which were integral to western intellectual tradition.⁶²

Generally speaking, improvements in prison sanitation, the status of women, and improvements in the education of ‘native’ and, to a certain extent, migrating women, were driven by the legal formulas of ‘raising the standards of the status of women in the mandated territory’ and ‘raising the standard of the treatment of prisoners’.⁶³ These were directly implicated in the ‘trust of civilisation’, which was, together with the principle of non-annexation, the guiding principle of the international system of supervision put in place by art 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. However, it is generally accepted that the British Mandate and colonial authorities did little to improve the rights of any group of women in the Middle East.⁶⁴ British (as western) support of Palestinian (non-western) legal development was not consistent, but conditional: when it was not clear that non-western legal reform could contribute to western interests, or directly undermined them, they did not support those reforms.⁶⁵ When they did support them, as in the case of prostitution, the legal institutionalisation often responded to a certain interest. Often, by projecting standards and rule alien to the targeted population, what was put in place was more a pervasive process of semi-colonisation through legal imperialism: the creation of standards of legal reform through the projection of domestic concerns over Palestinian mandate subjects.⁶⁶

5. THE CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THE DRAFT PENAL CODE FOR PALESTINE

The Government of Palestine Official Gazette published Herbert Samuel’s Criminal Amendment Ordinance of the previous military orders in 1925.⁶⁷ It was considered as ‘a first step’ in taking care of what were defined as ‘offences against women’. The publication of the legislation was preceded by a discussion between different mandatory authorities on whether the closure of brothels would stop sex-work/prostitution in the country.⁶⁸ In changing this policy, Bernstein points out the primary different concerns of the mandate authorities. As highlighted above, their interests seemed limited to fiscal benefits and promoting ideas of social purity, respectability and decency, attached to femininity. The second amendment, published in 1927,⁶⁹ added a wide range of prohibitions taken from the British Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 passed in Britain to avert trafficking of women and children. Essentially, prostitution, if carried out in private by a woman living on her own, was not considered an offence, but the managing of brothels was. The two amendments, which in effect transferred the entire contents of British legislation concerning prostitution to Palestine, brought Palestine de facto in line with the international treaties of the early century. Although the 1921 International Convention was only signed by Britain on behalf of Palestine in 1931, the penal measures advocated in it were already in place, and further strengthened by the 1936 Criminal Code for Palestine.⁷⁰ This section examines the correspondences around the Draft Code for Palestine and takes into consideration only those provisions which, referring explicitly to scientific and medical opinions on sexuality, health and moral hygiene, are most able to reflect broader orientalist tones, and racialised and religious assumptions, as well as those which clearly delineate the difficult balance between humanitarianism and imperialism in transnational criminal law-making.

A new Draft Code Bill for Palestine circulated in 1933.⁷¹ It is in this context that Alison Neilans, former suffragette and then secretary of the ASMH,⁷² contributed to the development of the criminal provisions of the law of Palestine in order for them to be ‘aligned with the principle of modern legislation’. Cicely Craven from the Howard League⁷³ and Margaret Nixon as Welfare Inspector for Palestine, engaged in extensive correspondence with Neilans. Craven wrote to her early in January 1934, about the Howard League’s concerns over the draft code, in the hope of ‘eliminat[ing] the reactionary measures’ referred to in the Howard League’s resolutions.⁷⁴ A second letter suggests to Neilans that the AMSH’s interest should lie in chapter 17 ‘offences against morality’. Craven questioned the reformulation of the crime of ‘adultery’ (clause 183) which made the offence unequal between men and women, with women punished in all cases but men only if they committed adultery ‘in the marital home’. Craven also advised Neilans to contact Nina Boyle at the National Council of Women in order to take the ‘necessary actions’ in Parliament.⁷⁵ Interestingly, fearing that women’s concerns were not proper ‘legal concerns’ to be taken into consideration by the Howard League, Craven had to negotiate her feminist legal progressivism, so that her letter to Neilans concludes with a call for feminist support: ‘nothing of this has anything to do with the Howard League, so please do not say that we brought this part up!’.⁷⁶

Backed by Craven, Neilans wrote to the Welfare Inspector for Palestine in Jerusalem, Margaret Nixon, Mrs Olive Gordon, the executive secretary of the British Colonies and Dependencies Committee of the National Women’s Council, and Nina Boyle as the legal expert on prostitution and venereal diseases, listing all the different arguments against those provisions considered reactionary, conservative and discriminatory.⁷⁷ Neilans began an extensive exchange of letters with Nixon, commenting on the new penalties introduced by the Criminal Code Bill for Palestine and pushed for the abolition of the double standard in relation to prostitution, as well against stereotypes and prejudices about commercial sex. On adultery, she employs – not without orientalist overtones⁷⁸ – those arguments that refer to double standards of morality:⁷⁹

I wonder what you think about Clause 183 which makes Adultery a punishable offence. It is, of course, not an equal law, but I suppose it is too much to hope for in a Mohammedan country. Adultery appears to be punishable in this section in the wife under all circumstances, and in the husband, if he commits adultery “in the marital home”? I was trying to think why Palestine should make adultery a punishable offence and I suppose it is because of the severity with which some of the tribes punish immorality in women […] that is a very marked example of the double standard of morals, which I should have thought would have been wise to avoid in view of the impact of modern civilisation on Palestine today.⁸⁰

Neilans was proposing not only the abolition of state-regulated prostitution but also the decriminalisation of non-marital sex alongside an anti-venereal disease propaganda campaign. However, Neilan’s writings suggest she struggled to balance her criminal legal expertise with considerations about identity, cultural relativism and the civilisational mission that were deeply rooted in legal discourses and practices. Nevertheless, she played a great role in influencing and lobbying the British Government when considering the legal regulation of specific ‘women’s issues’ in Palestine: through the voices of white British feminists who engaged institutionally at the national and international level to promote feminist causes, racialised and gendered tropes and biases continued to inform feminist legal knowledge of the ‘peripheries of the empire’.⁸¹

These governmental reports read in conjunction with women’s reports and autobiographical memoirs are here used not to illuminate any ‘reality’ of the prison conditions for women or of the regulation (or abolition) of prostitution in Palestine, but rather to understand which voices were heard/ignored by the government and which discourses, practices, values and norms were mobilised in terms of women’s rights, the construction of the ethnic or political ‘other’ and the scope of criminal law.⁸² The absence of Arab women’s associations from the process of gender legal reform is insightful. Arab-Palestinian women’s associations, such as the Haifa Women’s Union and the Jerusalem Women’s Executive, were well-established along the legal and political horizon of Mandate Palestine, equalling the Egyptian Huda Sharawi in leadership of the Arab women’s movement and at the League. References are scarce and there is a need for further study, but Arab women’s positions in relation to prostitution, trafficking and adultery may have had some synergies with western feminist interventions, but it is clear this was not perceived as an important source of knowledge.⁸³ In 1928 in Beirut, 1930 in Damascus and 1932 in Teheran, ‘eastern women’ from different Arab (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Transjordan, Aleppo) and non-Arab (Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan) states or semi-colonial states, preliminarily sketched an initial women’s rights agenda where reform of religious law on marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance were at the top of their feminist agenda.⁸⁴ Their absence from the scattered archive of Mandate Palestine testifies not only to the lack of consideration by the British authorities, but also to the dispossession and silencing of local women’s voices and concerns regarding governance and reform.⁸⁵ In the 1930s, the situation in Palestine became progressively tenser, with the rise of Jewish immigration escaping Nazi-fascist regimes in Europe. Arab women’s associations’ legal activism was first and foremost preoccupied with claiming economic and political rights dramatically threatened by the sudden surge in population, the outburst of colonial violence, the imprisonment of political dissenters and the massive presence of British military personnel to quell the 1936 revolts. However, British and international feminist reformers, with their assumption that Arab women lacked political consciousness, seemed more preoccupied with fostering an early version of ‘victim feminism’ which was focused more on the ‘enlightened’ mission of the salvation of women and re-education of criminals.⁸⁶

6. CONCLUSION

Any feminist criminological critique is never without its own contradictions, and Palestine offered a litmus test for western feminists’ engagements with criminal law. This article offers an overview of women’s role in criminal legal reform in Palestine under the British Mandate by highlighting the legal advocacy of British female legal observers and reformers and the difficult compromises they made around gender policy and criminal legal reforms in the colonial context. The criminal legal picture of Mandate Palestine was complicated by the need to regulate trafficking and prostitution and treatment of (women) offenders as indicative of the standard of civilisation required by art. 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. In this context, the role of British reformers in the colonies – in a Mandate Territory – is particularly striking: European women with a ‘feminist consciousness’ in those colonies experienced racial and internal social distinctions but were also active agents of imperial feminist culture, which raised more general questions about how gender is essential to the structure of colonial institutional racism and imperial political – and feminist – authority.⁸⁷ Gender was fundamental, for example, in the regulation of prostitution, as women were regarded as the principal conduits of moral and physical diseases.⁸⁸ At the same time, the fact that prostitution was associated not just with sex, but with performance and spectacle triggering its illegitimacy and associating it with disease and disorder, rendered it something to be suppressed or controlled.⁸⁹

The importance of such a topic resides in its multi-layered character, as the regulation of sexuality and mobility was pivotal in terms of understanding genealogies of feminist governance in the British Empire around ‘women’s issues’: the legal and political debate around such issues shows the racialised and gendered bias in the process of colonial and transnational criminal policy and law-making.⁹⁰ In terms of feminist governance, the centrality of the topic testifies to feminist internationalists’ efforts in the battle between an abolitionist or regulationist system of bodily discipline, that, manufactured in Europe and the west, sheds light on the Eurocentric bias of the early feminist movement, and demonstrates the easy access of western feminists to sites of law-making, both nationally and internationally. At the same time, however, by focusing on protecting women and children from abuse and the manifestation of sexual immorality, British advocates shifted attention from social hygiene to social morality and contributed to making morality the subject of criminal law.⁹¹ Alison Neilans, Frances Newton, Cecily Craven and Margaret Nixon deployed their ‘feminist politics’ within a racialised project of making citizens of the empire, ensuring local Palestinian women’s juridical alienation and subjugation to foreign legal standards. In this sense, while embedded in national and international systems of power that fuel women’s activism and inclusion in the male-dominated arena of the politics of criminal law reform, British feminists set the framework and agenda for what ‘feminism’ had to be in Palestine, highlighting and complicating the discourses on race, gender, empire and criminal law.

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.