WILLIAM DODD AND THE MAGDALEN HOSPITAL: REFORMING THE COMMUNITY

Eighteenth-century philanthropy gave institutional sanction to the imagined terms of female community first advanced in Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal for the Ladies (1696–7). By mid-century, charitable foundations such as the Magdalen Hospital for Pentitent Prostitutes rationalized the need for such segregated orders by extending the argument made by Astell for an essential female virtue from moral into economic spheres. We can see this functional understanding of virtue delineated in a 1759 sermon William Dodd delivered before the Governors of the Magdalen Hospital. In it, Dodd maintains that the prostitutes paradoxically testify to the existence of an inherent female goodness; in them “the nobleness of virtue, and the delicacy of sentiment, have rather been covered over with defilement, than wholly blotted out”. If they are provided with temporary shelter from want, and have placed in “their hands the instruments of chearful industry and labour; instruments of industry in hands, which were wantoning in pernicious indolence, and impelled perhaps to the extremity of vice”, then they may be “saved to the Community, and made useful to it”. Habits of industry, enforced through proximity to other penitents, will finally provide the once fallen woman with an identity whose economic utility testifies to its communal worth.

Dodd's argument for social productivity through the training up of a newly laborious work force typically involves the suppression of desire and difference.