demonized prostitution and sexual activities. Therefore, in order to preserve the principles of the Christian faith, legislation was created in an attempt to abolish prostitution. As an inadvertent consequence of these Acts, Britain was not reformed, but rather women were further repressed and lost the rights to their bodies. Prostitutes and their clients were believed to be sinners as the evangelical movement of the nineteenth century occupied Britain. Prostitution was often misunderstood, and was customarily held as a “terrible evil” (Maccubbin) for the women that were forced into prostitution, the men who needed to fulfill their desires, and for society as a whole. Prostitution was said to be “an evil which it has been found impossible to suppress without the most disastrous consequences” (“The Contagious Diseases Acts,” 1871). Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey  Negative stereotypes about prostitutes compelled society to class women as “outlaws” (Acton 4) who were innately sinful. However, for many women prostitution was required out of circumstance and necessity. A large range of social conditions caused women to choose prostitution. Women were seen simply as “victims of seduction” (Luddy), so there was an incredible discrepancy between the available occupations and the pay for both genders. Society’s attitude toward working women complicated a woman’s ability to support their families, thus there were few opportunities for women to find a well-paying job after becoming a prostitute. Society’s role in the support of the Contagious Diseases Acts allowed for police harassment to ensue Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, thus causing a lack of rights for women to have their own social, legal, and economic identities. Despite the overwhelming evidence denouncing the Contagious Diseases Acts as immoral, historian Frank Mort declared that the Acts were the “single most important legislative intervention addressing sexuality throughout the nineteenth century” (Mort 53). Great Britain was not the first of the European countries to establish and enact a Contagious Diseases Acts upon their population. For example, both France and Ireland provided the British government with inspiration to create their own system of regulation. However, the British model of the system only applied to the armed forces, whereas the other systems were applied to the entire civil population. Only two years after the original act was made, an extension to the Contagious Diseases Acts passed, thus extending the guidelines of the act to cover the entire British population. These Acts served as a shield by which men were protected from contagious diseases, often being justified by medical and military officials. Author Robert Maccubbin even argued that for men of any social status, prostitution was a convenience and was simply tolerated by society. One surprising supporter of the Acts was women’s suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Anderson was one of the few suffragist that supported the Contagious Diseases Acts because she believed it was th Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey e only means of protecting innocent women and children from venereal disease. Through these measures, the government was able to provide a “guarantee of securi>