The Glasgow Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females was supposed to help vulnerable girls and women in the 19th century – instead it continued their abuse

Nine-year-old Annie McGuire and seven-year-old Elizabeth Martin were among thousands of women and girls admitted to the Glasgow Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females, one of a network of Lock hospitals built across Britain and its colonies in the 19th century, between 1846 and 1947.

Established to diagnose and treat women and girls for venereal diseases, the hospital lay at the heart of the notorious Glasgow System – the Scottish city’s response to the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA).

The CDA, implemented in garrison towns and naval ports across England and Wales in the 1860s, aimed to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases among the armed forces. The Glasgow Lock played a key role in the Glasgow System’s unprecedented coalition of police, courts, prisons, medical authorities and the city’s Magdalene institutions.

Annie and Elizabeth were admitted to the hospital with gonorrhoea – and died there three years later. They, like all those who died in the Lock, were buried in unmarked graves. These sparse details are all that remain of the short but brutal lives of these two little girls.

Although the hospital’s records reveal little about its patients’ personal stories, through them, as part of my research on gender-based violence, I’ve been able to glimpse the social repression of working-class women and girls in 19th century Glasgow.

Here was a city with a mission to end women’s supposedly evil ways and eradicate the “social evil” of prostitution and venereal disease. Vulnerable young girls like Annie and Elizabeth were victims of these attitudes, and blamed for the sexual violence they’d experienced. As a “treatment”, they were then subjected to more abuse – at the institution that was supposed to protect them.

‘Dangerous sexualities’

Alexander Patterson, a surgeon at the Lock in the 1860s, advocated the creation of the Glasgow System to eradicate prostitution and venereal diseases – by focusing on women as the cause of both.

Patterson’s suggestion was well received by the city’s leaders, who regarded prostitution and venereal diseases as “highly visible symbols of the social dislocation attendant upon the industrial era”. Women and their “dangerous sexualities” were supposedly responsible for a “social evil which disgraces the land”.

In their eyes, any woman was a “prostitute” if her behaviour, speech, dress or lifestyle defied Victorian social or sexual norms. Prostitution included what contemporary moralists regarded as degenerate working-class culture, whereby women were free to roam the streets creating a “dangerous temptation” to men and a threat to public morality and health.

The Glasgow Police Act 1866 granted officers full discretionary powers to apprehend any women or girl they thought was, or risked becoming, a prostitute. According to Glasgow’s chief constable Alexander McCall, this meant any woman found on the street who was unable to account for how she made her living.

Thousands were apprehended based on this definition (or on the whim of individual policemen), including homeless, destitute or unemployed women, separated women and single mothers, and part-time and casual female labourers.

Women and girls were taken first to the Lock for a compulsory, brutal internal examination. Its registers show ballerinas, actresses, shop girls, unemployed mill girls, domestic servants, farm workers and the wives of soldiers and tradesmen and children all being admitted.

The women entered the Lock’s doors under a sign proclaiming its aims: TREATMENT – KNOWLEDGE – REFORMATION. They were categorised as one of the following:

• “Wanderer” – a homeless, destitute young girl;

• “Fallen” – a young woman who had become a known prostitute;

• “Newly fallen” – a young woman or girl who had only recently become involved in prostitution; or

• “Hardened” – an adult woman working as a prostitute who was known to the police or who had previous convictions.

By 1910, the Lock was admitting around 300 women a year, housing around 50 patients at any one time. With shaved heads and regulation brown uniforms, these patients were highly visible and stigmatised outside the walls of hospital.

When well enough, the women worked in the laundry, kitchens and mortuary, and attended classes provided by middle-class women volunteers, designed to train patients in “acceptable” female behaviour.

A (short) life of incarceration

The Glasgow Lock’s records show many children under 13, like Annie and Elizabeth, contracted gonorrhea while incarcerated at other institutions and reformatories – possibly after being raped by men seeking the “virgin cure” for venereal disease.

The girls’ bodies, already severely damaged by sexual violence, often struggled to survive the punishing conditions – and brutal but largely ineffective treatments – inflicted on them in the Lock.

By the late 19th century, the Glasgow System, incorporating Duke Street women’s jail, the Lock, and Glasgow’s Magdalene institutions, was incarcerating, treating and attempting to reform thousands of women and girls.

Once treated, girls and young women considered to be in imminent danger of becoming prostitutes were admitted to the Magdalene, where they were subjected to a harsh regime of religious instruction and hard labour in its commercial laundry. Designed to divert them from prostitution and to become obedient wives and compliant workers, it remained in operation until 1960.

While the scandal of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland is notorious, Scotland’s Magdalene asylums are less well known. Glasgow’s Magdalene Institution for the Repression of Vice and Rehabilitation of Penitent Females was closely associated with the Glasgow Lock.

The hospital closed its doors in 1947, following the introduction of Britain’s new National Health Service. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow now has a dedicated Lock Room, telling its story through powerful visual displays. Demolished in 1955, the original Glasgow Lock Hospital sites lie within the University of Strathclyde’s campus area.

Anni Donaldson is a member of a University of Strathclyde working group of academics, students, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and The Women's Support Project which aims to create a permanent memorial to the women of the Lock Hospital on the University of Strathcyde's campus.