Journal of Historical Geography , 26, 3 (2000) 376–402 doi:10.1006/jhge.2000.0235, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on A private Contagious Diseases Act: prostitution and public space in Victorian Cambridge Philip Howell In Britain the regulation of prostitution became a matter of urgency in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, most famously in the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. ‘Regulationist’ policy attempted to isolate, segregate and domesticate prostitutional activity, resulting in a spatial order with clear class and gender biases. A precursor of regulationism exists however in the special powers held by the University of Cambridge to apprehend, inspect and detain suspected prostitutes. This paper examines the nature of this regulationist system, and the way that it produced a geography of prostitution in nineteenth-century Cambridge. The background and experiences of women caught up in the system of registration, inspection and detention are also examined. These policies did not go unchallenged, and their growing vulnerability to being represented as authoritarian and anachronistic is ultimately highlighted for the light it sheds on the understanding of other attempts at the regulation of prostitution.  2000 Academic Press Introduction Blurring the boundaries between public and private worlds, between the commercial and the conjugal, female ‘prostitution’ seemed to many Victorians to promise nothing less than social anarchy. Not only did the ‘common prostitute’, through her promiscuous public activity, propagate moral and physical contagion, she further introduced the public character of commerce and cash into intimate relationships that were regarded as properly private and domesticated. The ‘social evil’ therefore encapsulated almost everything that the respectable Victorian feared about modern urban society; and the figure of the streetwalker was assured of her place in the iconography of dangerous sexuality. [1] On the other hand, the longstanding notion that prostitutes had a special utility for society was still commonly affirmed. Women in the trade continued to be regarded as a necessary outlet for powerful male sexual appetites left dangerously unsatisfied in a society where men married late and on assuming a prosperity. Such women could be thought of as serving to protect the honour of those respectable women who made up the set of marriageable partners. The Victorian discourses of sex and sexuality were in this way partly governed by the assumption that for men the sexual drive was natural and not to be denied, whilst for women there was either no innate enjoyment of sex, or that such sexual drives were more or less confined to the unrespectable class of female prostitutes. [2] Inevitably, there was a central ambiguity about how prostitutes were regarded and understood. Prostitutes were seen as both victims, of male seducers 376 0305–7488/00/070376+27 $35.00/0  2000 Academic Press