Poor, sinful and dangerous women: illegal prostitution in the Mezzogiorno before and after Unification

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.

La diffusione della prostituzione tra le classi più povere e disagiate nel Meridione era una vera e propria ossessione della società borghese nella fase storica in cui affermava i suoi principi di ‘rispettabilità’ nel contesto dei cambiamenti istituzionali e socio-economici dell'Ottocento. La ricerca, mediante lo studio di fonti primarie inerenti a documenti di diverse istituzioni di assistenza, intende verificare il ruolo assunto dalle Opere pie nel controllo e nella gestione della prostituzione ed evidenzia l'ibrida funzione di rieducazione, assistenza e segregazione di quelle donne che rappresentavano un pericolo per la morale e l'ordine borghese, nonché mette in risalto le condizioni di vita e l'ambiente sociale delle giovani prostitute.

Poor street prostitutes: a threat to the new social order

During the transition from the Bourbon kingdom to the Kingdom of Italy, the ‘good society’ of the South was characterised by a widespread feeling of danger and an anxiety-ridden, almost hysterical attitude towards visible street prostitution involving poor women, in contrast to its view on ‘genteel’ prostitution, which was authorised, regulated and sometimes even encouraged.¹ The archival records of the prefectures, police institutions and various official bodies of the southern provinces reveal the extent to which the wealthy classes feared unregulated and child prostitution, as well as the uncontrolled arrival of women of low social background from the countryside. These records reveal a widespread and tangible fear that uncontrolled prostitution not only threatened the ethics and economic activities of bourgeois society but also provided fertile ground for the growth of (organised) crime. A reading of some of the ‘papers’ of the time highlights the dual nature (i.e. the ethical and the socio-economic profile) of the fear that street prostitution generated in the ruling classes.

In an 1856 report on unregulated prostitution, for example, the prefect of Palermo claimed that ‘dozens and dozens of young girls crowd the corners of the working-class districts, bewitching passers-by and often in the company of their mothers’, who were engaged in the same ‘trade’.² The situation in Naples was not very different. A few years later, in a report on prostitution in the city and the province, the prefect of Naples claimed that ‘the greatest scourge of prostitution, from the point of view of public morals and hygiene, are the illegal prostitutes whose number, although impossible to specify, can nevertheless be said to be not insignificant’.³ Elsewhere, we can read complaints about prostitutes invading entire areas of a city, as in an 1852 report to the prefect of Cosenza, which emphasised that ‘in the lower part of the town, throngs of shameless young girls exhibit themselves to passers-by’.⁴ In 1857, the prefect of Reggio Calabria noted that in the southern suburbs of the city, ‘old-looking women with their young daughters have the habit of lighting fires, in the evenings, in front of improvised and illegal shelters, to attract the attention of travellers heading towards the island’.⁵ He also wrote that the most ‘audacious and unscrupulous’ of them, aided by some boatmen from Messina and Reggio, ‘sat on the boats of the local shipping companies used to transport travellers between the mainland and Sicily in order to distract gentlemen and businessmen from their noble and respectable intentions’⁶. Likewise, in Catania, ‘in a narrow street close to the trading port, disreputable young women tend to parade in front of the doors of their dilapidated homes, suggesting the possibility of enjoying forbidden love there’.⁷ In the same year, the police commissioner of Messina explained to the prefect the many reasons why the good society feared prostitution:

Your Excellency, it is with regret that I report how, in these difficult times, other than the notorious criminal clans and their corrupt business dealings that this office has noted on several occasions, a notable increase in prostitution and all the filthy traffic that it brings with it has been recorded …. Not only does this trade now also involve young women, sometimes mere young girls, but it is spreading like an incurable plague, a sick plant that is difficult to eradicate even in small towns where the phenomenon was once limited …. The problem, the real one, regards the other criminal activities that prostitution brings along with it. Corruption, illicit trafficking, theft and various forms of harassment abound in the places where the women ply their trade …. A change has occurred in the perception, and the phenomenon is alarming, that these shameless women have of public authority … once intimidated by police controls, nowadays they show themselves to be disrespectful and careless of public morality.⁸

Similarly, the prefect of Salerno reported on ‘the numerous and despicable criminal activities’ that the spread of prostitution had encouraged, such as pimping, abortion and the abandonment and exposure of babies born ‘to women of lost morals’; he also noted with dismay the increase in ‘the vilest and horrendous of criminal activities caused by these wretches, infanticide’.⁹

The picture that emerges from these reports is one of a generalised sense of alarm, or even obsession, often blown out of proportion, which affected all the provinces of the South. As in the rest of the peninsula and other European states, the concern about street prostitution had socio-economic and cultural roots that were probably more profound than the ethical-religious aspects, although the latter were a fundamental part of the southerners’ cultural baggage. The spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes was by no means a new phenomenon in the nineteenth century; the practice of young women – wives, even with the consent of their legitimate husbands and daughters alike – selling their bodies to cope with situations of severe poverty, was centuries old. The phenomenon occurred in the lowest strata of society, which did not worry the ruling classes of the ancien régime – aristocrats, high priests and feudal lords; given the rigid division and impenetrability of the social classes, they simply did not consider or even ‘see’ the phenomenon. Consequently, poor prostitutes did not appear to them to be a threat to the prevailing order and morality. On the other hand, the respect and fortune reserved for noble prostitutes or ‘courtesans’ – some of whom were quite famous, like the mistresses of cardinals and princes, who had acquired great wealth and entertained the elite of the time in their salons – are well known.¹⁰

This paradigm changed with the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of a new social class dedicated to business, trade and the nascent industry, which became the dominant class in the following century: the bourgeoisie. As the economic and social landscape changed, the division between classes faded and the meeting of two worlds – which had once been strictly separated and did not communicate – increased. The bourgeoisie, a middle class that has relations with all social classes, perceives its ‘permeability’ and the threat that poor street prostitutes can pose to the economic order and the moral foundations of the new social model it is building. In this new context, which was more cultural than economic, the conviction took hold that young women were ‘structurally’ incapable of earning an honest living unless they had an authoritative guardian who could guarantee their respectability, especially if they were poor (Guidi 1991). This confirms the incompatibility of poverty and chastity as well as the image of the irregular prostitute as a lonely woman who possesses a set of characteristics – indolence, illegality, immorality and a semblance of autonomy – that are diametrically opposed to the values of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. Consequently, street prostitution was a powerful symbol of female deviance in nineteenth-century Italy, capable of generating collective hysteria fuelled by the implication that those women, who did not fit into the canonical female categories of daughter, mother, wife or nun, were all (potential) prostitutes (Gibson 1985, 30–31).

In a southern society characterised by traditional and sometimes archaic customs, uncontrolled prostitution among poor women became a threat to the social order, partly as a result of growing urbanisation, which transformed the economic and social structures of both large and small cities. Many young women came to the city to escape situations of misery and hunger, initially working in precarious jobs (e.g. as maids, laundresses and ironers), but often ending up selling their bodies to supplement their low income from work, at first occasionally and then ever more intensively.¹¹ This practice was facilitated by the presence of a large number of pimps and procurers who went from one end of the city to the other, offering the women's services to strangers, and ‘this was, according to many observers, a peculiarity of our country and the Mezzogiorno, in particular’.¹² Occasionally, these subjects were relatives of the prostitutes themselves (e.g. lovers, husbands and brothers) who, living in very poor and filthy environments, did not hesitate to use their wives and even teenage daughters to contribute to ‘the family economy’. From this perspective, prostitution was considered a ‘necessary’ and not too dishonourable means of subsistence. However, the pimps and procurers of the ‘street women’ usually came from the underworld and regularly used prostitution as one of their main sources of illicit income. Almost all the police records on the southern provinces refer to the presence of these criminal elements in the prostitution circuit, although they never stop to check whether these exploiters acted individually or as part of an organised crime group.

The typical clients of street prostitutes were businessmen, adult men of different social classes and morals, and men of high lineage or modest social standing who – according to a fairly popular mentality of the time – resorted to street prostitution ‘to satisfy the “natural” male sexual impulse that is frustrated by the lack of passion in marriage’ (Gattei 82, 755). The increasing urbanisation that characterised many city centres in the nineteenth century brought with it garrisons of soldiers and servicemen of all kinds as well as an increasing number of university and secondary school students. This situation expanded the clientele of street prostitutes and led to a disproportionate increase in the prostitution market, which became ever more uncontrollable, and its exploitation.

The inevitable risk of contact between impoverished and immoral prostitutes and young girls from good families heightened fears of the harmful influence that illegal prostitution could have. Additionally, there was concern about the spread of venereal diseases, particularly syphilis; according to a widespread colonialist notion, it had arrived from the Americas in the sixteenth century and then died off only to reappear in the second half of the eighteenth century and become the ‘fear of the century’.¹³ The ‘French disease’,¹⁴ which was blamed exclusively on the prostitutes without ever considering the role of men as carriers of the infection, reflected the desire to identify and isolate prostitutes through more or less rigorous, prohibitive or partially tolerant measures that did not, however, undermine the spread of prostitution. Despite being considered a source of risk and danger, prostitution was deemed inevitable and necessary.¹⁵

This combination of ethico-religious and socio-cultural elements underlies the various strategies to regulate prostitution – all of different type and with varying objectives – adopted by the Italian pre-unification states during the nineteenth century. Some, like the Papal States, developed a strict prohibitionist policy, but they failed to stop the spread of prostitution ‘in the streets, in the dark corners of the houses, under the deserted porticoes and along the secluded promenades’ (Sormani 1982, 18).¹⁶ The same happened in Habsburg Milan, where strict prohibition was accompanied by a constant expansion of the phenomenon.¹⁷ Other states adopted more flexible measures to protect healthy society from the perverse effects of an unworthy profession, aimed at regulating an evil that was considered irradicable. However, they did so using a contradictory and hypocritical method: the so-called ‘legality of immorality’, which left intact the social disapproval of a reprehensible profession while introducing regulations to control and disciple its exercise.

Managing illegal prostitution: from the prohibition of the Prammatiche to regulatory policies

During the ancien régime, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had attempted – with mixed success – to conceal street prostitution among poor women, creating ‘ghetto districts’ in large urban centres where the old trade could be practised, thus preventing prostitutes from mixing with the rest of the population. The measures adopted were the so-called Prammatiche sulla prostituzione: these were acts of an administrative and law-enforcement nature, adapted to the cities for which they were issued and essentially aimed at isolating and confining the prostitutes to peripheral locations, as well as imposing strict, detailed and oppressive rules of behaviour.

The Prammatiche were many and disjointed. One of the most famous examples is the Prammatica sull'esercizio del meretricio, issued in Naples by the regent of the Vicaria Marcello Carafa in 1772, which stated that prostitutes

shall not dare, nor assume to approach or pass, not even during the daytime before the Royal Palace, either on foot, by carriage, post-chaise or horseback, sedan chair or in any other possible manner. And secondly, that the aforementioned free women and prostitutes, within three days, counting from the day of the publication of the current document, of whatever condition they may be, must under penalty of whipping and three years of penance vacate and evict themselves from all the places within sight of the Royal Palace, the largo del Castello, Toledo Road, as far as the Royal Gate, commonly known as the Gate of the Holy Spirit.¹⁸

A very similar regulation was the Bando per li vagabondi e le puttane cassariote, adopted in Palermo in 1793. It prohibited ‘the practice of prostitution in the areas of the market, the port and the best streets of the city’. Like many other provisions, these were inspired by the policies of confinement of prostitution applied in some cities in northern Europe, which were difficult to apply in southern Italy, where the socio-economic and urban context did not allow for such regulations. The rigidity of the Prammatiche, as well as the women's habit of moving from one part of the city to another to procure clients, contributed to a distorting practice that resulted in numerous denunciations, warnings and temporary arrests, but also in a sort of ‘witch hunt’ whereby many poor women who were caught in places usually frequented by the nobility and the upper middle class were accused of prostitution even if they had never practised the trade. The Napoleonic period, which had spread a new attitude towards prostitution across Europe, including through more liberal and permissive measures along the lines of the new French regulations, had a strong impact on the system of the Prammatiche del Mezzogiorno. Thus, after two centuries of absolute prohibition of prostitution, from 1802 onwards, ‘the foundations were laid for a new system of management of sexual services called regulationism’; as a result, the prostitutes’ data were recorded in public registers, which allowed them to obtain a sort of ‘business licence’.¹⁹

The effects of French regulations were tangible in the South even after the Restoration. This is demonstrated by the decree issued by Ferdinand I on 15 November 1823, which overcame the practice of the Prammatiche and stipulated that the activity of prostitution be placed under the careful supervision of police authorities. Their task was to write an entry in an albo for each prostitute, allocate her to a brothel, and arrange for a compulsory medical examination to be repeated throughout the year and hospitalisation for women with venereal diseases. The decree ruled that security agents should make sure prostitutes did not disturb the public peace through provocations, yelling or other vulgarities, and it prescribed the control of the so-called matrona; being directly responsible for the management of the brothels, the matrona had the duty of communicating the personal details of the prostitutes who worked there to the judicial authorities (Canosa 1981, 29). These devices were essentially meant to ‘prevent, as far as possible, the propagation of an evil that attacks the physical constitution of man at the root and causes so much damage to the family’.²⁰

For the first time, the idea of prostitution as a real job – albeit a shameful one that must be circumscribed and controlled – emerged, whereas the street prostitute was placed in a separate, discriminated category. However, the regulation was not free from hypocrisy. Being entirely based on the so-called ‘notoriety’ and publicity of the sexual act for commercial purposes, it overlooked those female figures, such as the femmes galantes, kept women and demi-mondaines, who did not publicly show that they were selling their bodies, even if they engaged in free, promiscuous sexual activities that fell outside of ‘female integrity’ (Gattei 1984, 754). A rigid form of separation was thus implemented between prostitutes of low social extraction and women leading a ‘dissolute life’, since the application of measures of confinement and segregation in obligatory places (e.g. cloisters, shelters, convent schools, etc.) was justified only in the case of the former, even if it was hypocritically affirmed that these were not a form of imprisonment ‘but rather the administrative confirmation of a state of marginalisation already being experienced’ (Gattei 1984, 754).

The same hypocrisy was expressed by the main opponents of prostitution. Although they did not hesitate to consider the ‘trade’ a filthy and dishonourable activity, they recognised its social utility in satisfying male sexuality, which found no gratification in the withered and dull rhythm of married life. In reality, the devices for controlling and segregating prostitution that were included in the decree of 1823 concealed the fear that this part of the female population – labelled as being committed to vice and lust – could infect or at least mislead the large mass of the hard-working poor who crowded the southern districts. Hence the proposal to register them as ‘licensed prostitutes’ (Gattei 1984, 758) and ‘lock them up’ in rigidly controlled facilities, officially to reduce the risk of the spread of venereal diseases; in reality, this served to prevent the impudence of the public act from exerting a certain conditioning effect on that part of the population considered more fragile and hence more easily influenced. A good example is the story of the Imbrecciata, a suburban district of Naples where prostitutes – in addition to all kinds of vagrants – were locked up; through a decree of 1855, it was even decided to delimit the district's entire perimeter with a wall and a single entrance gate that was closed at midnight, preventing anyone from entering and those on the inside from leaving.²¹

These measures were also the consequence of concerns about the negative influence that the influx of young women from inland areas towards urban centres might have on the ‘respectable’ part of society. Before and after Unification, women's migration in the Mezzogiorno took an a peculiar character that would later be accentuated by the great transatlantic emigration of Italian men. The ‘American women’, as the wives and daughters of emigrants to the United States were derisively called, assumed an entirely new role in the traditional sexual division of labour and

as the men took the path of emigration, … the work of women and children extended beyond the ordinary and … in the Mezzogiorno … further strains were added to those traditionally borne by women (Bianchi 2001, 258).²²

Whether or not this was a temporary migration aimed exclusively at finding seasonal or permanent work, the removal of thousands of women and girls from their country of origin contributed to changing the family structure that, in the absence of men, was thus managed directly by the women in a way that – according to some scholars (Teti 1987) – hinted at elements of matriarchy.

Over time, the desire to extend the range of affective and matrimonial choices outside their places of origin inevitably took root among the youngest – often underage – girls, thus marking a break with the traditional systems of family composition that, until then, had clearly separated the ‘female universe’ imported from the rural areas from the city's ‘men’. The new female behaviour that the immigrant young women adopted in the city generated anxiety among the urban social classes, which grew ever more convinced that the ‘foolish and thoughtless’ girl was incapable of earning an honest living if not by soliciting. Likewise, the figure of the girl who prostituted herself in the nooks and crannies of the streets belonged – in the eyes of the emerging bourgeois society – to that indistinct group of vagrants, destitute people and marginal groups that poured into the cities and constituted a threat to morality and social order. As a result, a generalising attitude took hold, rooted in the belief that the moral degeneration of the city was caused by the newcomers, who were sometimes described with ferocity by the commentators of the time. This is demonstrated by the case of Giovanni Bolis, who did not hesitate to claim that

this filthy vermin that plagues society is like the wave that runs to the sea, thus into the great cities flow all these perverse and roaming people … who disdain work … deprived of any sense of morality … making the streets of the cities look like ‘infected and foul sewers’ (Bolis 1871, 461–462).

The archival records tell us that illegal prostitution not only concerned mostly the poorer and marginalised classes but also involved underage girls. Quite often, the families themselves induced their daughters – even if they were very young or still in their infancy – to contribute to the support of the family by selling their bodies publicly or ‘giving themselves’ to the service of some wealthy gentleman. In the absence of any records of underage girls active in prostitution, we cannot rely on exact numbers and percentages. However, prefects’ and police reports highlight that child prostitution was very common in the southern provinces, where the practice of families offering their daughters for prostitution to cope with conditions of extreme poverty and hardship was quite widespread.

The efforts of the Bourbon institutions to regulate and circumscribe a phenomenon that was taking on worrying dimensions and characteristics – especially in the large and crowded cities – were often in vain, owing to various, mainly socio-economic, reasons but occasionally also to the behaviour of police officers. Unscrupulous, driven by self-interest and allured by all too easy bribes and ‘concessions’, these police turned a blind eye to the proliferation of unauthorised prostitution.²³ This is also why the Bourbon kingdom – despite its attempt to regulate prostitution following the French example – failed to exercise effective public control over prostitution. Consequently, it was forced – either by necessity or choice – to find places for the segregation of poor prostitutes that, while not specifically punitive, were marked by the ambiguity that is typical of certain charitable institutions: ‘… material relief associated with moral control …, characteristics that were common to … girls’ schools, retreats, asylums intended for the relief and moral protection of women’ (Guidi 1991, 9).²⁴ We could therefore say that the act of assistance and moral ‘recovery’ performed by religious bodies from different standpoints was essentially combined and integrated with the need for control and repression of prostitution, which was in fact considered inevitable but dangerous in the context of social changes in which ‘bourgeois respectability’ was building its economic-social and ethical-moral institutions. This situation was poignantly highlighted by the consideration that

if state intervention had the support of public coercive apparatuses and was therefore able to strike certain sexually ‘dangerous’ conduct with greater harshness as opposed to ethical-religious intervention, the latter was favoured by a wide range of micro-controls, spread throughout the territory and meticulously managed by the service apparatus of this structure …, a fact that gave them much greater efficacy, in terms of intensity and duration, than that which the state control and intervention apparatuses could boast (Canosa 1981, 7).

This approach to the control of street prostitution by assigning a special role to charitable institutions is also the outcome of the evolution that these institutions had undergone over time, in conjunction with changing social attitudes towards poor prostitution.

Some of these institutions, including the Opere Pie and moral entities of different types, date back to the Middle Ages, when various mendicant orders and confraternities aimed at assisting the poor and doing charitable work emerged. Mainly as a result of the initiatives promoted by the Church of the Counter-Reformation, they gradually expanded towards a broader panorama of economic and social care, in particular through the creation of hospitals and hospices that played quite an important role in assisting members of the most disadvantaged classes. From the eighteenth century onwards, many charitable institutions were created with the primary purpose of helping and supporting poor, lonely young women who were forced into prostitution, including in its most degrading and unsafe forms, in order to survive (Fiori, 2005, 1–3).

Initially, the ‘conversion’ and redemption of sinful prostitutes was the primary goal of these religious and charitable institutions. The parable of the redeemed prostitute not only symbolised the resolution of the conflict between the dishonourable practice of prostitution and conversion through repentance and faith. More generally, it testified to the possibility of civic redemption and moral elevation by helping the poor and the sinner. However, this ethical-religious framework tends to weaken the moment social judgement towards illegal prostitution starts to change. The concern about this type of prostitution that affected nineteenth-century society led to firm disapproval and condemnation of street prostitution, marking the passage ‘from sin to guilt’ in the evaluation of the phenomenon; this was inevitably followed by the adoption of more ‘secular’ functions by the charitable organisations that operated alongside public institutions. In this way, these Opere Pie and charitable organisations were gradually assigned more complex tasks with regard to illegal prostitution, ranging from care and support – like a form of proto-welfare – to the control, segregation and repression of prostitutes, which had nothing to do with the original mission of saving female sinners but fulfilled the task of protecting the economic-social order and the moral foundations of the ruling classes.

The role of charitable institutions in controlling prostitution

In 1850, Charles Dickens – writing in the pages of the weekly magazine Household Words – described the miserable and humiliating lives of poor English women confined in one of the country's many workhouses; his account depicted the social conditions of lost, derelict and alienated humanity.²⁵ While English legislation on the poor had its roots in the Elizabethan era, beginning in 1601, in the rest of Europe such provisions came later. Nevertheless, the confinement of poor women or women involved in prostitution in ad hoc institutions (together with idle, sick, old and disabled people) became a characteristic element of the main laws on the poor, which aimed at discouraging the idle and those who preferred to live on the margins of legality even if they could work.²⁶ The birth of care, correction and work institutions for poor and immoral people across Europe, managed and directed mostly by religious congregations, reflected the desire of the new dominant – mostly bourgeois or petit bourgeois – classes of the nineteenth century to delegate the function of disciplining the ‘low society’ to Christian morality. This was meant to happen through an ideal combination of ethical and physical forms of coercion that would allow people's bodies, lives and time to be reintegrated through work and repentance.

Even the birth and proliferation of institutions for the assistance and confinement of ‘dishonoured women’, during the first half of the nineteenth century, should therefore be seen as a form of defence of the emerging social classes against the danger these women represented, even if every coercive intervention was hypocritically presented as an attempt to re-moralise and normalise an immoral way of life through work and prayer. It is no coincidence that Michel Foucault called the Opere Pie (care homes and shelters for prostitutes and tramps) para-penal institutions, where religious orders – endorsed and financed by the bourgeois classes – put a new system of control in place that lay on the borderline between morality and penalty, whose main function was to ‘target moral guilt and, even before that, psychological tendencies, habits, behaviours and instruments that foster guilt, including brothels’ (Foucault 2013, 120). Many different types of moral and welfare organisations fit Foucault's definition. A statistical survey of 1861 identified no less than 25 organisations with the most disparate functions, some dating back to remote cultures and religiosity, others more recent and linked to new economic and social needs (Fiori 2005, 55). However, women's confinement in the Opere Pie of the Mezzogiorno was not a form of confinement in a ‘total institution’, but a hybrid form in which charitable benevolence merged with strategies of physical and penal social control. In the pre-unification South, the difficulties of the Bourbon administration in providing assistance to the poor and needy led to the ‘care’ and the control of the latter being entrusted to a widespread network of organisations managed mostly by religious orders or autonomously, in partnership with the state or privately. The creation of the majority of the institutions devoted to assistance and charity was the result of consolidated processes that had begun in previous eras, when the ruling classes – mostly the nobility – and the local clergy had helped to create and finance these institutions.²⁷ Many of these charitable institutions soon turned into aggregations of political, economic and vote-catching power, actually putting ‘pressure’ on the Bourbon monarchy.

Only during the Napoleonic period (mainly in 1808 and 1809), were several laws promulgated that placed the institutions for women and the poor under the Ministry of the Interior's control. However, with the Restoration, a series of decrees restored the Church's lost prerogatives, allowing it to manage almost all charitable institutions through the figures of confessors, spiritual rectors and priests directly appointed by the bishops.²⁸ If charitable care aimed at men took on the characteristics of fighting precariousness caused by the lack of integration into the job market, for women, poverty and misery were considered much more dangerous as they could lead to immoral behaviour:

[I]n the case of women, by contrast, the intervention often takes the shape of a response to structural precariousness, which derives not only from their intrinsic economic weakness but also from the need to keep them under protection as they are liable to ‘naturally’ choose the path of immorality and prostitution. From this perspective, they appear dangerous to the harmony of society in such a way that is not only contingent but structural, and hence symbolically more corrosive. If the immorality of the tramp, the idler [and] the poor in general is indeed a threat to a given social order, women's immorality risks calling into question all social orders insofar as it subverts the basis of a ‘gendered’ destiny in which the good order of society is rooted (Groppi 1994, 4–5).

Indeed, the archival material abounds with examples of the numerous Opere Pie in southern Italy, which demonstrates how prejudice against women and the fear of sexually immoral behaviour represented a great concern of the society of the time, which also tried to intervene with preventive measures.

In 1860, for example, four orphaned girls aged between 12 and 16 were assigned – by order of the judicial authority – to the Casa d'istruzione e istituto dei trovatelli in Palermo, ‘in order to prevent the harshness of life from leading the virgins to lustful and commercial activities’.²⁹ In 1857, a young homeless woman with no family, ‘suspected of having mischievous attitudes’, was assigned to the women's hospice in Castrovillari, in the province of Cosenza, ‘so that a secluded and contemplative life might distract her from unbridled pleasures’.³⁰

In fact, the houses of charity and the Opere Pie aimed at the recovery and rehabilitation of female sinners but also ‘at prevention in the case of weak-willed virgins who were at risk of succumbing to sin’ (Barbagli 2020, 317). We can trace the origins of this trend back to the fact that for some time, the municipal and provincial administrations and the magistrates had no longer been able to manage the massive amount of measures against prostitutes: they were, therefore, inclined to grant them – especially if they were young and without a criminal record or admonishments – the possibility of ‘redeeming their honour’ in charitable institutions. A decisive role was played by the Regale determinazione contro le meretrici e ruffiani, written by the priest Gennaro Maria Sarnelli in Naples as early as 1737, which would influence the local administration in the management and repression of prostitution in the following decades. Although Sarnelli, who was leading a veritable crusade against prostitution, believed that the fight against sex trafficking and its drastic reduction was of the utmost importance, ‘he [did] not ignore the motivations that lead to tolerance, indeed, in some details he [anticipated] regulationism …, he almost [anticipated] certain measures … like registration in the book of prostitutes’ (Valenzi 2000, 9) and sought to understand the social causes that led women to prostitution. The priest's strict religious but simultaneously social approach resulted in the establishment of several retreats for ‘women at risk of falling into prostitution’ or women involved in prostitution.³¹ In cases of this kind, we cannot speak of purely repressive institutions, as women occasionally requested confinement voluntarily, putting themselves on long waiting lists and sending pleas to enter the Opera Pia, a place that offered very few alternatives and whose discipline many women formally accepted, only to then continually try to circumvent it (Guidi 1991, 15–16).

Poor families often used the dreaded threat of prostitution to request the confinement of their underage daughters. Numerous requests of this kind reached the administrations of Sicilian care homes and convent schools, as in the case of Francesca Fiore's missive to the Mother Superior of the Collegio di Maria di Giuliana in Corleone, which reads as follows:

Most respected and devoted Mother, I am the mother of four daughters left alone by an emigrant husband. I am unable to and cannot bring up my daughters and I beg your kind and most devoted lordship to receive into your pious dwelling the youngest of them who spends whole days at the dock in the company of bad people who could soil her reputation. I am illiterate and this letter is written by Don Antonio, the town's parish priest, who pays his respects and asks you to consent to the above plea.³²

At other times, the request was more specific, as in the case of Mario Pomari, a young widowed father of six who asked the management of the Maria Gisino boarding school in Palermo to ‘take in my daughter Benedetta, who has been engaged in immoral practices ever since her mother left us, and to train her to become a laundress and find her a dutiful and hard-working husband’.³³

In Calabria, the request sometimes takes on the tones of a threat: ‘… if you do not take on my Carmela, the responsibility for her conduct will fall on you’.³⁴ In Naples too, many requests to be admitted to these institutions were made, and for various reasons. The applications were written in the form of a plea and described a range of dangerous situations threatening young orphaned girls or widows who were unable to adequately care for their children. A recurrent motif was that of the risk of the family and entire community being contaminated as a result of the moral disorder and scandalous behaviour of a disgraced young woman (Guidi 1991, 50).³⁵ By contrast, other such requests reveal how a part of southern society did not perceive these places as punitive institutions. For these reasons, families asked women's shelters to take their daughters in only to be told that, in the absence of a court order attesting to the practice of prostitution (and hence to the crime), it was not possible to accommodate anyone in those institutions.³⁶

While in these cases it is possible to discern – albeit intermittently – the charitable role of the various care institutes, in others it is their mere function as places of punishment and actual imprisonment that comes to the fore. The numerous shelters for prostitutes in southern Italy were marked not only by the rigidity with which the segregation was organised, through a set of more or less flexible rules, but also – and above all – by the social composition of the women who were confined there. In fact, we can distinguish three macro-categories of female confinement in the nineteenth century, roughly corresponding to three different correctional systems.

The first category regards the institutions that took in ‘women at risk of falling into prostitution’ at the family's explicit request and whose act of prostitution, unlike the cases mentioned above, was not just hypothesised but a reality. Consider, for example, the request by Giuseppe Ruffi and his wife Concetta, who asked the management of the Casa di carità del santissimo crocifisso in Catanzaro to ‘take our Elena Maria, who has been selling herself for some time now, causing grave dishonour to the whole family’.³⁷ A particularly well-documented case is that of Immacolata Guerci, who began practising the trade as a very young girl at San Giuseppe Iato. Surprised by her brother Mario, an artillery corporal stationed in Palermo, she was imprisoned at his heartfelt request at the Reclusorio delle vergini della divina provvidenza. Her file contains rich correspondence between the institute's director – the Mother Superior – and her brother, from which it becomes clear that

the woman is repentant! Quite repentant indeed! She assiduously collaborates in the activities of this devout house: she cleans, cooks, tidies up and prays, she prays three times a day. It is with great joy that I can announce to you that Immacolata has embarked on the road that will lead her to become one of our sisters [nuns] now that she has been cleansed from vile carnal pleasures, redeemed and received into the Court of Our Lord Jesus Christ.³⁸

This example shows what kind of activities female inmates had to perform in women's care institutions. As has been rightly noted, these activities reflected

an intervention of a moralising and redemptive nature, unparalleled in the male care scene, that is intended for these women; through iron discipline, work and spiritual exercise, the woman of lost honour can regain an honest role in society in these ‘frontiers’ between sin and redemption.³⁹

At the same time, there are plenty of examples of open rebellion against the rigid rules imposed in correctional institutions, as in the case of a very young prostitute from Reggio Calabria, Elisabetta Ferroli. According to the director of the Monte di Pietà, Ferroli is ‘an impossible maiden, [who] refuses all duties, responds rudely and in protest refuses to wear the robe provided, but [what is] serious and worrying is her refusal to perform any religious function because she is unrepentant of what she has shamelessly done’.⁴⁰ Another example is that of Adelina Fiore, who ‘in open defiance of everything and everyone not only refused to work the silk but even tried to tamper with the loom so as to make it unusable’.⁴¹

The second category of nineteenth-century female confinement concerns the ‘voluntary internees’. These were prostitutes of all ages who, caught tempting clients in middle-class or affluent neighbourhoods, hence outside the territorial space that was granted to them more by custom than by rule, were fined or warned by the public security authorities. These women were given the possibility to revoke their – both administrative and pecuniary – sentences by requesting the ‘reception’ in an Opera Pia that would certify their ‘repentance and full redemption’.⁴² However, this rule, which permitted the ‘atonement’ for one's mistake in a charitable institution, should not be interpreted as an attempt to give ‘unfortunate’ women a second chance; it responded to the desire of the Bourbon administrations to weed the prostitutes and their activities out of the prestigious salons of the city. Well aware of the impossibility that these women would pay the fines and convinced that warnings and admonitions would not hinder them in their intentions (‘removed in the morning, they soon return in the evening’),⁴³ the authorities thus hoped to limit the damage.

The archival documents of the southern provinces contain many examples of this type. In several cases, seeking support at one of the many shelters or retreats for young girls was the only way out for the prostitutes. In such cases, the supervision over them was much tighter and reported punctually to the authorities, and the stay in the convent school or care home took the shape of a compromise between a care and a prison system.

For the entire duration of their stay in the institutions, the prostitutes were not allowed to ‘receive any visitors, slept in a secluded part of the building, and worked and prayed separately from other women who had not discredited themselves through any venal sin and whose only misfortune was misery’.⁴⁴ Permissions were granted for ‘jaunts’ outside the institution but these were very brief and always had to be guided and supervised. This makes it difficult to find cases of rebellion or refusals to do the usual work activities in the archives. Instead, a sort of relief on the part of the youngest occasionally emerges; in the letters sent to their families and collected in the documentation of the various Opere Pie, they feel freed from a system of exploitation that forced them into prostitution. This is the case of Angelica Mastovito, who stated the following in a poorly written letter to her brother:

My dear brother. As you go to sea, I will tell you what happened to me. After our mother's death, I was left poor and homeless. I went to Palermo and trusted a woman and her so-called husband. They promised to help me find a job and a home. Oh brother, some job exhibiting yourself, filthy and scantily dressed. Soldiers have arrested me and sent me to the place from where I write. But here, my brother, I am well, I am well and I work at the loom, I work a lot but this is work and labour, not like that. Come back soon to put a flower on the grave of our unfortunate mother.⁴⁵

The third category regards those establishments scattered throughout the southern territory that hosted prostitutes who had been sentenced by the judicial authorities to spend a period of detention that varied according to the sentence – detention centres in every sense of the word. An initial analysis of the inmates’ social composition tells us these were adult women and usually repeat offenders, generally not prostitutes but brothel keepers deemed guilty not only of carrying out the ‘trade’ but also of soliciting and exploiting minors. The archival documents show that these women were at times subjected to suffocating control and the judicial authorities constantly inquired about the inmate's conduct and whether they showed any signs of repentance. While, in reality, the life and tasks performed in these institutions were no different from the cases analysed above, the punitive purpose in the activities imposed on the women prevailed over the re-educational one. Thus, if in other institutions, prayer and work had the dual purpose of teaching morals and providing ‘some domestic know-how’,⁴⁶ guaranteeing a certain work autonomy for the ‘dishonoured’ women and, above all, the ‘hope of a good marriage’,⁴⁷ in the case of prostitutes imprisoned in shelters, this rehabilitative function was often less evident. One example is the report that the management of the Casa di educazione ed emenda delle donne togliere dal peccato in Palermo sent to the prefect in 1852:

Dear and honourable Mr Prefect, as is customary, we report on the state of the confined women in this institution. The 28 dishonoured women and hardened prostitutes hosted in this house generally carry out the activities we have imposed on them, but the chronic lack of staff that plagues our humble and pious home does not allow us to prevent them from constantly entering into conflict and settling old disputes. Last May, four of them were severely punished for attempting to slaughter another internee for trivial reasons, but we have good reason to believe that they secretly bear a grudge. Unrestrained and violent, they subjugate the younger ones and set them against us. For them and their corrupt and irredeemable nature, redemption or civilisation in this society is impossible, let alone any form of oblate life.⁴⁸

It is not surprising that, once the aim of re-education and ‘repentance’ had waned, the living conditions of the women confined in these shelters became increasingly degrading and ‘far from inducing the deviant women who whine here in idleness, filth and abandonment to make amends’,⁴⁹ they instead encouraged attempts to escape or protest. In 1857, for example, the escape of 12 female inmates from the convent school of Santa Maria Vergine in Palermo alarmed the institute's management. In a communication sent to the prefect and, for information, to the police headquarters, the incident was explained as follows:

Distinguished Mr Prefect, It is with heavy hearts that we inform Your Excellency of what happened yesterday evening, 22 September. After ceasing work at the loom, 12 female guests of this institute, all guilty of prostitution and solicitation, took advantage of the brief absence of the supervisor Isabella Custrò and managed to escape through the window of the laundry room. Our laborious searches have so far been in vain and fruitless. Distinguished Mr Prefect, please make sure to mobilise your militia so that these scoundrels can return to serve their sentences. A timely commitment of the competent authorities is required, for if the aforementioned were to reach the traditional places frequented by immoral people, we would certainly lose track of them.⁵⁰

Similar cases were recorded in the provinces of Cosenza,⁵¹ but also in Reggio Calabria,⁵² testifying to the repressive character of these institutions. Here, imprisonment and the disciplining of the soul in a strongly humiliated body persisted as cornerstones of the female care and reclusion system for a large part of the nineteenth century: ‘[T]he peculiar inheritance of female deviance, ideologically linked to sin and hence stigmatised mainly for offences relating to the sexual sphere, indeed seems to be at the root of the birth of women's prisons’ (Carbone 2016, 98).⁵³

Prostitution after Unification: the legalisation and control of brothels vs freedom and deviant behaviour in the illegal world

The complex and confused Bourbon model of prostitution regulation changed in many ways in the years immediately following Unification. While these merit a more detailed analysis, I will mention them only in passing to highlight that, in the new national context, the problem of street and illegal prostitution continued to be perceived as a source of danger to the new socio-economic order, but its structural causes were not addressed and the problem was far from being resolved.

Shortly after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy, Cavour's ministerial decree of 15 December 1860 was extended to the southern regions. The decree reinstated the French model of brothel management, albeit with certain innovations, some of which were – to say the least – incomprehensible and irrational. The regulations expressed the seemingly contradictory values of freedom and discipline: prostitution was no longer a criminal act but a voluntary work activity that any woman was free to exercise provided that she did so in brothels run by an owner (the matron) and in accordance with strict rules. The state established the rules governing the services, the behaviour to be adopted and the rates to be charged, depending on the class of the brothel. Prostitutes received a quarter of the amount paid by the client and had to undergo regular police and, above all, health checks, but they were free to leave the brothel and stop working as prostitutes.

In the newly unified, liberal country, the regulation of the sex trade through mechanisms of surveillance, segregation and control was meant to prevent the physical and moral contamination of society through potential contact with prostitutes, while at the same time reassuring society about the dangers to health and public order that result from uncontrolled and (predominantly) child prostitution. However, the objectives were not achieved. With regard to the desire to curb the spread of prostitution among young girls and adolescents, Cavour's decree was absurd and contradactory, as it gave every young woman the right to become a ‘licensed’ prostitute by registering in a brothel or – where it was permitted – authorising her to work in her own home, provided she had reached the age of 16. Thus, at a time when the age of consent was set at 21, the paradoxical situation might occur that a minor was not allowed to marry without parental consent but could independently become an organised prostitute (Barbagli 2020, 395).

Moreover, even after the introduction of the case chiuse, many women decided to set up their own businesses and practise prostitution in their homes or on the streets, driven by the desire for more earnings and freedom of movement or encouraged and controlled by exploiters of all kinds, including those belonging to criminal organisations. The numbers were extremely high, considering that the statistics provided by the Ministry of the Interior for 1870 show that regular, ‘licensed’ prostitutes accounted for only a small part of actual prostitution: in the South, official calculations reported a total, clearly unreliable, number of about 50 legal prostitutes per 10,000 inhabitants only in cities such as Capua, Gaeta, Reggio Calabria and Salerno, while this ridiculous percentage dropped to 30 or less in larger cities such as Naples, Messina and Catania.⁵⁴

Hence, illegal, poor, street and child prostitution spread rapidly despite the new disciplinary measures, and this further alarmed middle-class society, which had hoped that the case chiuse would have permanently isolated a phenomenon that was by then considered uncontrollable. This happened when the liberal and statist approach of post-Unification Italy began to take hold, which foresaw the need for a radical transformation of the Opere Pie and the charitable institutions by changing their purpose and secularising them, followed by the 1866 law (1873, for Rome) on the suppression of religious corporations that – at least in the first few years – did not have the hoped-for effects. In some cases, it even had a disastrous impact on those institutes that got women off the streets; without economic support and adequate legislation, they could no longer continue their work of ‘rescuing’, supporting or controlling deviant young women.⁵⁵

In this context, the image of the illegal prostitute became particularly alarming and assumed a prominent role in the iconography of the dangerous social classes, given that the figure of the prostitute ‘combined the characteristics of many marginal groups: the poor tramp, the criminal, the sexual deviant and the woman’ (Gibson 1985, 31). Thus, if the thief and the delinquent represented a threat to the economic stability of the bourgeoisie because they endangered its property, the illegal prostitute, through her conduct, threatened other values of society: public order, morality and health (Gibson 1985, 11–12).⁵⁶ It was only in subsequent years that the socio-cultural attitude towards illegal prostitution partially changed, following the explosion of positivist doctrine (Lombrosian theory, in particular), which counted prostitutes among the criminal population, based on the alleged ‘unquestionable assumption’ that crime and prostitution were somehow similar.⁵⁷ It was the most radical paradigm shift in the regulation of prostitution: from control and segregation to criminalisation. Since prostitutes were considered to be inherently and genetically delinquent women, decent bourgeois society found a reassuring outlet for its fears about the gloomy influence of prostitution, as it was relieved of the burden of tracing the socio-economic causes of the spread of prostitution.

Translated by Andrea Hajek

Email: andreahajek@gmail.com