When Toronto’s moral police waged war on prostitution

The women, aged 19 to 22, had just learned they would spend the next six months interned within Canada’s first all-female prison — the infamous Andrew Mercer Reformatory — for the nebulous crime of “vagrancy.”

All morning, a parade of policemen had been through the witness box, testifying to what they described as the women’s poor character and moral failings. All four were “streetwalkers, frequenters of Chinese resorts, and addicted to the use of drugs,” according to the July 19, 1909 edition of the Toronto Daily Star.

The paper doesn’t explain what a “Chinese resort” is, but it’s possibly related to the then-popular, racist myth of Chinese men drugging and seducing white women into sexual slavery (more on that later).

The four women “protested their innocence vigorously and with many tears, but a tremendous weight of evidence was arrayed against them,” the Star reported.

They were the latest “vagrants” stamped out by police under Toronto’s Department of Morality, established in the late 19th century to rid the city of vice amid the growing pains of urbanization and industrialization.

But what began as an initiative to tackle drunken rowdiness and improve the city’s image eventually evolved into an instrument to clamp down on the working class, minorities and working women.

The city’s devotion to strict, Victorian-era morals would earn it the nickname “Toronto the Good.” But who was Toronto good for?

William Holmes Howland was feeling good. It was early January 1886, and the mustachioed 42-year-old had just squeaked out an election victory to become Toronto’s 25th mayor. It was the first election in the city in which women had been allowed to vote.

A devout Evangelical Anglican, Howland swapped his career as a wealthy insurance executive for the mantle of a moral crusader. He cruised into office on a platform promising social and moral reform for Toronto’s working class and to scrub the streets of sin — starting with the drunk and disorderly.

He had a lot of scrubbing ahead of him, said Marcel Martel, a professor of history at York University. At the time, a great many Torontonians were rough and rowdy factory workers, he said: “When they weren’t working, many of them were drinking, and they got into fights.”

Similarly, the city was home to a thriving underground sex scene and brothel industry — one tacitly tolerated by police, said historian L.K. Bertram, an associate professor at the University of Toronto.

That’s a lot of vice for a profoundly religious city in the height of the Victorian era. “Late 19th century Toronto was an incredibly image-conscious society, one that was really anchored to ideas about Christianity, ideas about morality and proper conduct — especially of women,” Bertram said.

Residents were angry and scared, spurred on by salacious news stories of the city’s dark underbelly. Reform campaigns by religious organizations were picking up steam.

And in the middle of all that, Howland took centre stage.

One of his first moves was to establish Toronto’s first (and last) Morality Department. Its mission? Enforce public order, clean up the public drunkenness and stamp out prostitution.

Morality officers were also tasked with cracking down on gambling, the drug trade and offences ranging from domestic disputes to animal cruelty.

Further hammering on its new “Toronto the Good” reputation, city hall began pumping out bylaws starting in 1890, banning moral missteps including: gambling, swearing in public, panhandling, public intoxication, “indecency” (a.k.a. pornography), public nudity and more.

At first, morality officers were more interested in stopping public drunkenness than dealing with prostitution. The department’s official policy toward prostitution was intolerance, sure — but police also tended to view brothels as essential institutions, Bertram said.

“It actually had a lot more to do with men than women. There’s this idea that men couldn’t control themselves sexually,” Bertram explained. “In an effort to basically do a version of harm reduction, they wanted to make sure that these young men weren’t getting syphilis and they weren’t getting gonorrhea, and that they wouldn’t end up in a shotgun marriage if they got the maid pregnant.”

Whether they liked it or not, Toronto’s moral police would soon be forced to act. By the turn of the century, social purity reformers and women’s groups were gaining steam in their campaigns to shut down Toronto’s brothels, egged on by an unprecedented flood of young women moving to the big city in search of work and leisure.

Pearl-clutching Torontonians were scared these young women, often seen to be lacking in moral fibre and addicted to pleasure, would be seduced by urban villains into “temptations, crimes and follies,” wrote historian Carolyn Strange in her book “Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City.”

Fanning the flames was a moral panic in the 1910s around so-called “white slavery” — an idea spread by scandal-mongering newspapers and church publications that young white women were being lured into the sex trade by “foreigners.”

Toronto social surveys found no such evidence of these claims. But didn’t stop prominent voices like Sarah Galt Elwood McKee, a long-serving president of the Ontario Women’s Christian Temperance Union, from saying things like: “Two great evils are rampant in this province: the liquor evil and white slavery” in 1913.

Of “Chinese resorts,” Strange wrote that some of the most overt racism was targeted toward Toronto’s largely bachelor population of Chinese men, whose exotic food and clothes inspired “racist fantasies of their mysterious powers over white women.”

According to the Morality Department’s Insp. Kennedy, the “lure of the Chinamen” had only developed because young women had “too much liberty to roam the streets … to their utter demoralization,” Strange reported.

The morality squad was finally forced to take action.

Moral police stormed brothels and arrested sex workers — and even male patrons — by the hundreds in the 1910s. Brothel arrests skyrocketed from 103 (including 90 women) in 1912 to 411 arrests of women and 243 men the next year, Strange wrote.

Keep in mind that “police would come down much harder on women of colour, men of colour and poor Catholic Irish immigrants,” Bertram said. “People that didn’t fit into their idea of the protected class were overly policed … while white, wealthy men or men who had standing were given all kinds of passes.”

“They seldom targeted the men,” Martel added. “The men might be fined, but women would be arrested. Because it was always a woman’s fault.”

With brothels suppressed, police began to shift their focus from “houses of ill repute” to so-called freelance prostitutes and “street walkers.” It didn’t take much to be suspected and arrested for prostitution — that’s what the catch-all charge of “vagrancy” was for. The offence includes minor infractions from sleeping on the streets to having no visible means of support, Strange wrote.

Suspected prostitutes and “suspicious” women were routinely arrested on vagrancy charges with little evidence — inmate case files of “vagrants” in women’s reformatories included teenagers who stayed out without their parents’ permission, women who lived with men out of wedlock or unmarried women found in bed with men.

At the peak of the moral reform lobbying, from 1912 to 1916, 13.3 per cent of all women arrested in Toronto were charged with vagrancy.

In their hunt for freelance prostitutes, morality officers began trolling entertainment venues, especially dance halls, for the grave crime of entering such places unescorted. That was actually a bylaw. See, after 1896, police had the power to devise their own bylaws.

It was up to the discretion of the often undercover officers whether a woman out dancing had been “escorted” there, or was present with the intention of picking up men. Notably, no similar standard was in place for men aiming to pick up women, which “would presumably have been a more effective way to protect young women from harm,” Strange wrote.

The Morality Department hired Toronto’s first two female police officers in 1913, primarily to patrol the dance halls and other entertainment venues. Unlike their male counterparts, these women weren’t allowed to arrest anyone and were instead expected to persuade young women from the path of sin.

These women officers functioned more like social workers, counselling women in moral danger, attending women’s courts and acting as liaisons with probation and parole officers, Strange wrote. It fit with the Morality Department’s wider function as a social service

Police officials reluctantly admitted the women were doing a fine job, eventually hiring another three women by the late 1920s and raising the force’s gender ratio to five women and about a thousand men.

After over four decades of operation, Toronto’s morality department would officially be phased out in the 1930s — but its legacy continued to live on until recent history, said Chris Bateman, a historian with Heritage Toronto.

“Some of those roles of the morality squad just got rolled into the larger police force,” Bateman said. “You still saw police activity around immorality into the 60s, 70s, 80s — the police raided the offices of an early LGBTQ-focused magazine in the 70s, and the (1981) bathhouse raids, for example, were carried out under the guise of morality. 

“So, although the squad itself officially gets phased out, the idea that police should be in charge of enforcing morals continues until relatively recently,” Bateman said.

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