“Sapphic Sedition”: Lesbians and Law in the 1921 Criminal Law Amendment Act |

Content warning: this blog post contains historic language and views and discussions of topics which may be upsetting.

Resources

These can all be found in the Official Papers collection of the Law Library on the Ground Floor.

Hansard
- House of Commons, 6^th August 1885 (Vol. 300), columns 1397-1398.
- House of Commons, 4^th August 1921 (Vol. 145), columns 1799-1806.
- House of Lords, 15^th August 1921 (Vol. 46), columns 570-575.

Introduction

On 4^th August 1921, Frederick Macquisten, Conservative MP for Glasgow Springburn, proposed an amendment to the 1921 Criminal Law Amendment Bill, then being debated in Parliament:

‘Any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 4^th August 1921, vol. 145, cols 1799-1800)

Macquisten claimed that there was a scourge of ‘abandoned females’ seducing wives and destroying families and that the ‘falling away of feminine morality’, which had already brought down ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, was set to destroy the British Empire. Apparently, the only solution was to criminalise lesbianism.

The proposal led to two debates in the House of Commons, on August 4^th 1921, and House of Lords on August 15^th. It was the first-time lesbianism had been debated in Parliament and, perhaps surprisingly, ended with Parliament voting notto criminalise it. However, these debates show the perception, legality, and treatment of queer women during this period and how anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria was weaponised to prevent the passage of legislation intended to protect young girls and reform the agent of consent laws in the United Kingdom.

My intention with this post is to try and show of the incredible and fascinating items we have in the Bodleian Law Library collections. Much of what I will be citing comes from Hansard, which refers to official records of debates held in Parliament. These can all be found in the Official Papers collection on the ground floor of the library. These debates, and their records, are fascinating sources for early-20^th century queer history and, in honour of Pride Month, I hope to show how useful the Bodleian Libraries’ collections can be for studying LGBTQ+ topics.

1885-1921: The Criminal Law Amendment Acts

To understand the debates which took place in 1921, it’s worth discussing the background to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill and its predecessor, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885. Both pieces of legislation set out to do the same thing: to reform the laws governing age of consent in Britain and fight human trafficking.

The late 19^th century had seen increasing public concern about the trafficking and exploitation of young girls living in poverty in Britain. Campaigners sought to institute further protections for girls and for the age of consent to be raised higher than 13. In July 1885, journalist W. T. Stead published ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, a series of articles exposing the experience of human trafficking in London brothels. The subsequent public outcry increased the pressure on the government to act. In August, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, the age of consent was raised to 16 and a host of other protections against human trafficking were instituted.

Henry Labouchère (1831-1912), the MP who proposed the Labouchère amendment criminalising male homosexuality

However, during the Bill’s consideration stage (the last chance for significant amendments to be made to new legislation), Henry Labouchère, MP for Northampton, introduced an amendment:

‘Any male person who… commits, or is a party to the commission of… any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and… shall be liable, at the discretion of the Court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding one year with or without hard labour.’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 6^th August 1885, vol 300, cols 1397-8)

One contemporary journalist accused Labouchère of proposing this amendment as a ‘wrecking amendment’, an addition to a piece of legislation intended to be so controversial as to prevent the legislation’s passage through Parliament. However, Parliamentarians passed the amendment nearly unanimously without further debate except to increase the punishment to two years. The passing of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act brought Labouchère’s amendment (also known as Section 11 of the Act) into law. Indeed, it would remain the primary piece of legislation used to punish male homosexuality until its legalisation in 1967.

Aside from this, the Criminal Law Amendment Act provided only limited actual protections for girls. For example, it allowed only a three-month window after the initial act in which to bring prosecutions for violations of the age of consent law. Since many cases went undiscovered during those three months, many perpetrators escaped prosecution. Additionally, Sections 5 and 6 permitted the so-called ‘Reasonable Belief’ defence through which a defendant could claim that they were under the ‘reasonable belief’ that the victim was over 16 when they committed the act.

Campaigners thus turned their attention to campaigning for new legislation intended to strengthen the laws set down in 1885. Driven by feminist organisations such as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH), the campaign picked up pace in the early-20^th century. This was a period of significant change in the political landscape of Britain; in 1918, women over 30 granted the right to vote and be elected to Parliament and, by 1919, Viscountess Astor had become the first woman to sit in Parliament. In this changing social climate, campaigners proved successful in getting legislation introduced into Parliament to reform the 1885 Act. Thus, in 1921, a new Criminal Law Amendment Bill was born.

1921: The Criminal Law Amendment Bill

Amongst other protections, the 1921 Bill proposed to abolish the ‘reasonable belief’ defence and extend the window for prosecutions to 12 months. While the Bill had wide support in Parliament, it was not universally popular. A common criticism of the Bill was the perceived threat of blackmail, with some MPs suggesting that the longer window for prosecutions and the removal of the reasonable belief defence would lead to people inventing false claims to blackmail young men.

During a second attempt to pass the Bill in 1922, an MP, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore-Brabazon, claimed that the government had given in to feminist ‘hen-pecking’, that this legislation represented an attempt at ‘eugenics’, and that it didn’t propose ‘equal treatment, but [this] is legislation directed entirely towards one sex’ (Hansard HC Deb. 5^th July 1922, vol. 156, cols. 408-409). The Bill had only a set amount of time in which to pass through Parliament, if a compromise between MPs could not be reached within that timeframe, then the legislation risked not passing. Enter: Frederick Macquisten.

Macquisten’s amendment was consciously modelled on the Labouchère Amendment, directly imitating its wording and even citing the 1885 Act:

‘Any act of gross indecency between female persons shall be a misdemeanour and punishable in the same manner as any such act committed by male persons under section eleven of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 4^th August 1921, vol. 145, cols 1799-1800)

Like Labouchère, Macquisten was accused of proposing this as a wrecking amendment, hoping to shut down the new Bill before it could become law. If this was Macquisten’s intention (as Derry, 2018 has suggested), his rhetoric in support of the amendment remains illustrative of contemporary views of lesbians.

Throughout his speech, Macquisten cast lesbians as a threat to the security of the British empire, implying that the ‘falling away of feminine morality’ was a threat to the British Empire (after all, it had already brought down Greece and Rome – why not Britain?). This wasn’t new rhetoric; during the First World War, one MP named Noel Pemberton-Billing had claimed that there were some 47,000 British subjects (many of them gay men and lesbians) who were working for Germany to undermine the empire.

Not just that, but lesbians were destroying families; according to Macquisten there was an ongoing problem of men whose families were being torn apart by ‘the wiles of one abandoned female, who had pursued his wife’. Even worse, lesbianism was contributing to ‘dreadful nerve deterioration’ which, in turn, was causing the spread of cocaine throughout Britain. Lesbians, apparently, were a national crisis. Another MP agreed, claiming that according to one neurologist:

‘no week passes that some unfortunate girl does not confess to him that she owes the breakdown of her nerves to the fact that she has been tampered with by a member of her own sex’

And that:

‘asylums are largely peopled by nymphomaniacs and people who engage in this vice’.

Colonel Moore-Brabazon (1884-1964)
MP and opponent of the Criminal Law Amendment Act

Not everybody agreed; many MPs felt that most women didn’t know that lesbianism existed and that, by legislating against it, the British government was likely to make it a much bigger problem. Moore-Brabazon, an opponent of the amendment and the Bill as a whole, stated that there were:

‘Only three ways of dealing with perverts. The first is the death sentence. That has been tried in old times, and, though drastic, it does do what is required – that is, stamp them out. The second is to look upon them frankly as lunatics, and lock them up for the rest of their lives. That is a very satisfactory way also. It gets rid of them. The third way is to leave them entirely alone, not notice them, not advertise them.’ (Hansard HC. Deb. 4^th August 1921, vol. 145, col 1804)

MPs appeared uncertain as to how many lesbians there were and, even, how much people knew about them. While Wild had claimed that lesbians were popping up all over the place, others claimed that only one in every thousand women had even heard of lesbianism, much less done anything.

A common view was that lesbians were simply heterosexual women gone wrong; Macquisten described them as ‘abandoned females’ and Wild described women as being ‘tampered with’. This was a popular view at the time; queer women were nothing more than straight women who, for some reason, had been corrupted. The fear was that advertising lesbianism risked making the ‘problem’ worse, alerting women to the fact that lesbianism was possible and thus threatening to corrupt them further. If women didn’t know lesbians existed, then they couldn’t be corrupted. As far as MPs were concerned, they were not only defending British family values but selflessly protecting women.

Despite opposition in the House of Commons, the amendment passed and was added to the Bill. However, on the 15^th August, the debate played out again when the Bill reached the House of Lords. Essentially the same points were raised but, in contrast to the Commons, the Lords decided that the risk of advertising lesbianism was simply too great. The amendment was rejected and, with it, the compromise upon which the Bill had been built collapsed and the entire Bill, including its reforms to age of consent laws, failed.

Conclusion

Macquisten’s amendment had done its job; the Bill was sunk and important reforms intended to protect girls from exploitation were delayed… for a time. Public pressure didn’t disappear and, a year later, the government was able to force a similar piece of legislation through Parliament which became the 1922 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Lesbianism would never end up being directly criminalised but other laws and legislation were used to punish lesbianism. In 1928, for example, Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian romance The Well of Loneliness was banned for obscenity in the UK and had to be smuggled across the English Channel from France.

The debates which took place in August 1921 are a fascinating source for studying the perceptions of queer women in the early 20^th century. They tell us a lot about the way that lesbians were presented and how the identities of LGBTQ+ women were punished and perceived in law. They also show just how important our collections can be for studying this history and how, by looking through sources like Hansard, we can begin to see how anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria was weaponised to prevent real advancements in protections for women throughout the country.

Resources

Introduction

1885-1921: The Criminal Law Amendment Acts

1921: The Criminal Law Amendment Bill

Conclusion

Further Reading