The Wolfenden Report, homosexuality, and women

In 1957, the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Committee, published its report. That publication retains a higher profile than many other legal developments of the 1950s thanks to its cultural as well as legal effects. Legislation implementing its recommendations – the Street Offences Act 1959 and Sexual Offences Act 1967 – remained in force for the remainder of the century. More profoundly, the Wolfenden Report encouraged the shift to a liberal approach for sexual offences law which remains influential in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. This chapter focuses upon the part of the Report addressing homosexual offences, especially its implications for women. The Report is well-known for its recommendation that sexual activity between men should be partially decriminalised; this was eventually given legal effect by the 1967 Act. Academic analysis has also established its importance in importing the concepts of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘the homosexual’ into the law of England and Wales. Its significance for legal understandings of women’s same-sex relationships is less obvious, since it made no recommendations on these, and statute law on sex between women was unchanged. Indeed, ‘female homosexuality’ receives only passing mention in the Report. Nonetheless, this chapter argues that Wolfenden was a watershed moment for the regulation of sex between women, as well as for public perceptions of it. Lesbianism had previously been understood as a distinct phenomenon but was now reconceptualised as ‘female homosexuality’. This marked it as parallel to, but also less prevalent, less troublesome, and less sexual than, male homosexuality. The Wolfenden Report was therefore the start of a transformation in the wider approach of courts, Parliament, and broader campaigns whose repercussions continue to be felt today in both law and wider culture.