CHRISTINE STANSELL
As urban
reformers and writers told it, no tale of working-class life was more chilling
in its revelations of vice than the prostitute's. From the 1830s on,
prostitutes flitted wraithlike across the pages of urban social commentary, a
class of women rendered human only by the occasional penitent in their ranks.
Prostitutes had long been familiar to New Yorkers, but between 1830 and 1860
women "on the town" became the subject of a sustained social
commentary. By the 1850s, urban prostitution was troubling enough to lead city
fathers to lend the services of their police force in aiding William Sanger in
conducting a massive investigation. Dr. Sanger's report, the compendious History
of Prostitution, represents the coming of age of prostitution as a social
"problem" in America, and its integration into the new discourse of
secular urban reform.
The very fact that reformers ...
were thinking about prostitution had to do with tensions over gender relations
and female sexuality.... The alarm over prostitution was one response to the
growing social and sexual distance that working-class women - especially
working-class daughters - were traveling from patriarchal regulation....
In 1818, when the city watch
published its latest statistics on crime, the authorities took a complacent
view of prostitution. Although the numbers of known prostitutes and bawdy
houses in the city had doubled in a dozen years, they reported, the women and their
patrons had never been more quiet and law-abiding. In subsequent years, an offensive against
urban vice put an end to such laissez-faire attitudes. After 1831, when the evangelical women of New
York's Magdalene Society first took up the battle to banish prostitution from
the city, denunciations of what was purported to be an urgent problem became
common currency among moral reformers and public authorities.... By 1855, public concern was sufficiently strong
to move the aldermen to commission William Sanger to conduct a statistical
investigation in New York of the kind Parent-Duchatelet had published for
Paris in 1836. Sanger's researches
confirmed to him and to his public (as such researches often do) that the city
was indeed prey to an "enormous vice." It was, he gravely concluded,
"a fact beyond question that this vice is attaining a position and extent
in this community which cannot be viewed without alarm." . . .
What disturbed observers was
not just the number of women who bargained with men for sex, but the identity
of those women. For if the numbers of known professional prostitutes were not
growing disproportionally, those of casual prostitutes-- girls or women who
turned to prostitution temporarily or episodically to supplement other kinds of
livelihoods -- probably were. Moreover, the entire context of the transaction
was changing, as prostitution moved out of the bawdy houses of the poor into
cosmopolitan public spaces like Broadway. "It no longer confines itself to
secrecy and darkness," lamented Sanger, "but boldly strikes through
our most thronged and elegant thoroughfares."
... Since prostitution was
not a statutory offense, there was no legal pressure to conceal it. By 1857 William Sanger could catalogue a wide
range of establishments catering to prostitution. "Parlor houses,"
clustered near the elegant hotels on Broadway, were the most respectable,
frequented by gentlemen; the second-class brothels served clerks and "the
higher class of mechanics." In some theaters, prostitutes solicited and
consorted with patrons in the notorious third tier, reserved for their use. ...
Except for the parlor and bawdy houses, however, the trade was informal rather
than organized; that is, a woman could easily ply it on her own outside a
brothel. Prostitution was still a street trade of independent workers; pimps
were a phenomenon of the early twentieth century, a consequence of the onset
of serious police harassment....
There were specialized
services as well. In the 1840s, a nascent commercial sex trade began to offer
variegated sexual experiences beyond the prostitute's bed, mostly to gentlemen.
The sex trade was centered in the area between City Hall Park, the commercial
heart of the city, and the Five Points. There, crime and amusement rubbed elbows,
laboring people mixed with gentlemen and the quick scam flourished. Visitors
and men about town could, within an easy walk from most places of business,
gain entrance to dance halls featuring naked performers, brothels with child
prostitutes, eating places decorated with pornographic paintings, pornographic
edifying tableaux from literature and art (Susannah and the Elders, far
example) - as well as a variety of facilities for having sex. The network of
sexual experiences for sale was
certainly troubling evidence of the centrality of sex to metropolitan life;
indeed its presence in the most cosmopolitan areas of the city was one
indication of just how closely a particular kind of sex (bourgeois men with working-class women) was
linked to an evolving mode of sophisticated urbanity....
For laboring people as well as bourgeois moralists,
prostitution was linked to "ruin," a state of affairs to be avoided
at all costs. But while bourgeois men and women viewed ruin as the consequence
of prostitution, working-class people reversed the terms. It was ruin,
occasioned by a familial or economic calamity (for women the two were
synonymous), that precipitated the "fall" into prostitution. The
disasters that afflicted women's lives - male desertion, widowhood, single
motherhood - propelled adult women into prostitution as a comparatively easy
way to earn a living. The prospect of prostitution was, like the possibility of
these other misfortunes, a part of everyday life: a contingency remote to the
blessed, the strong and the fortunate, right around the corner for the weak and
the unlucky. Prostitution was neither a tragic fate, as moralists viewed it
(and continue to view it), nor an act of defiance, but a way of getting by, of
making the best of bad luck.
Prostitution was indeed, as reformers liked to point
out, tied to the female labor market. Women on their own earned such low wages
that in order to survive, they often supplemented waged employment with casual
prostitution. There is a good deal of information on this practice in the 1850s
because William Sanger asked it. "A large number of females," he
observed, "earn so small wages that a of their business, or being a short
time out of a situation, is sufficient to reduce them to absolute
distress." . . .
Many of the women with whom Sanger and his police interviewers talked had as the closest employment at hand after suddenly losing male "My husband deserted me and four children. I had no means to live." with another woman. I support the child." "I came to this city, from Illinois, with my husband. When we got here he deserted me. I have two children dependent on me." These were the painful female actualities from which culture would fashion its own morality tales of sexual victimization and depravity…
Yet ultimately Sanger's
survey yields a very different picture than his own preferred one of the
victim of circumstance, the distressed needle-woman and the deserted wife at
starvation's door.... When Sanger asked his subjects their reasons tip prostitution, over a quarter - a number
almost equal to those who cited
"destitution”--gave "inclination" as their answer.
"Inclination," whatever its moral connotations, still indicated some
element of choice within the context of
other alternatives. “C.M.” while virtuous, this girl had visited
dance-houses, where acquainted with prostitutes, who persuaded her that they
led an easy, merry life. "S. C.”
this girl's inclination arose from a love of liquor." "E. C. left her
became a prostitute willingly, in order to obtain intoxicating liquors which
had been refused her at home."
The historical issues are
complicated. One can imagine a sullen woman trapped was the Blackwell' s Island
venereal disease hospital, flinging cynical answers -- "drink,"
"amusement" -- to the good doctor's questions as to appeal to the
preconceptions she sensed in him. But although this may have been true in some
encounters, the dynamic between the doctor and his subject is an unlikely
explanation of why so many women rejected a paradigm of victimization (which,
if anything, Sanger himself promoted) for answers that stressed their own
agency in entering prostitution....
Of course, we cannot separate such answers from the
economic difficulties laboring women faced. But structural factors alone cannot
clarify why some women took up prostitution and others in similar straits did
not. Nor can they illuminate the histories of women who entered prostitution
from comparatively secure economic positions.... It is possible to see from
Sanger's statistics that while a substantial proportion of prostitutes came
from the ranks of unskilled immigrants, as one might expect, a large number
did not. Even more significantly, a sizable group of women (73) had fathers in the elite
artisanal trades - ship carpentry, butchering, silversmithing - and a
scattering (49) claimed to be daughters of professional men - physicians,
lawyers and clergymen. Still others came from small property-owning families in the city and country, the daughters of shopkeepers, millers and
blacksmiths.
Sanger threw up his hands over an array of data that
defied his preconceptions.
... But the range of family circumstances is
confounding only if one assumes that indigence was the major cause of
prostitution. In fact, a variety of factors led women into the trade. The
daughter of a prosperous ship carpenter could end up on the streets because she
was orphaned and left to support herself; she could also use prostitution as a
way to escape a harsh father's rule. A country girl, abandoned by a suitor, might
go on the town because she knew no other way to earn her bread; or because she
was determined to stay in the city rather than return to the farm. A married
woman might even hazard the prospects of a hand-to-mouth independence,
supported in part by prostitution, rather than submit to a drunken and abusive
spouse....
For working-class women, the pressures of daily life
took the form both of need and desire: the need for subsistence, the desire for
change. Either could be urgent enough to push a girl or woman into that shady
zone not too many steps re moved from the daily routines in which she was
raised. The resemblance of prostitution to other ways of dealing with men
suggests why, for many poor women, selling themselves was not a radical
departure into alien territory.
It was in large part the involvement of young girls
in prostitution - or more important, the relationship to the family that
juvenile prostitution signified - that brought prostitution to public attention
in the 1850s.... Adolescents
and young women found casual prostitution inviting as metropolitan life made it
an increasingly viable choice for working girls. Casual prostitution bordered
on working-class youth culture: both provided some tenuous autonomy from family
life....
Prostitution was by no means a happy choice, but it
did have advantages that could override those of other, more respectable
employments. The advantages were in part monetary, since prostitution paid
quite well. The gains could amount to a week or even a month's earnings for a
learner, a servant or a street seller; for girls helping their mothers keep
house or working in some kind of semi-indentured learning arrangement, money
from men might be the only available source of cash. ... The serving girl
Harriet Newbury, a country girl from Pennsylvania, came into a windfall of luck
in 1828 when
a navy captain gave her ten dollars each time they had intercourse. These were
gentlemen's prices. Prostitution with workingmen yielded smaller gains,
"trifling things" - a few shillings, a meal or admission to the
theater. But even to sell oneself for a shilling was to earn in an hour what a
seamstress earned in a day in the 1830s.
. . . Who were the men who created
the demand for young girls' sexual services? ... Certainly gentlemen had money
for such pleasures, and Victorian men could use sex with prostitutes to satisfy
longings they could not express to their supposedly
asexual wives.... However, the erotic sensibilities of workingmen were also
involved. Juvenile prostitution stemmed not just from class encounters but from
the everyday relations of men and girls in working-class neighborhoods. Rape
trials, one source of information about illicit sexuality, show that sex with
girl children was woven into the fabric of life in the tenements and the
streets: out-of-the ordinary, but not extraordinary....
The men who made sexual advances
to girls were not interlopers lurking at the edges of ordinary life, but those
familiar from daily routines: lodgers, grocers (who encountered girls when they
came into their stores on errands) and occasionally fa-thers. Sometimes the
objects of their attentions could be very young. For the men, taboos against
sexual involvement with children seem to have been weak; in court, they often
alluded to their actions as a legitimate and benign, if slightly illicit, kind
of play.... Roughhousing, teasing, fondling and horseplay were the same tokens
of affection that men gave to children in the normal course of things.
Similarly, the favors men offered in exchange for sexual compliance - pennies
and candy - were what they dispensed in daily life to gamer children's
affection. Men's erotic attention to girls, then, was not a discrete and
pathological phenomenon but a practice that existed on the fringes of "normal"
male sexuality.
Child molestation could blur
into juvenile prostitution. The pennies a man offered to a girl to keep quiet
about his furtive fumblings were not dissimilar to the prostitute's price.
Adult prostitutes were also highly visible throughout the city, and their
presence taught girls something about sexual exchange.... For the great majority
of girls, however, it was not the example of adult prostitutes that led them
into "ruin" but the immediate incentive of contact with interested
men. Laboring girls ran across male invitations in the course of their daily
rounds - street selling, scavenging, running errands for mothers or
mistresses, in walking home from work, in their workplaces and neighborhoods
and on the sophisticated reaches of Broadway. Opportunities proliferated as New
York's expanding industry and commerce provided a range of customers extending
well beyond the traditional clientele of wealthy rakes and sailors. Country
storekeepers in town on business, gentlemen travelers, lonely clerks and
workingmen were among those who propositioned girls on the street.
Men made the offers, but girls
also sought them out. "Walking out" in groups, hanging about comers,
flirting with passersby, and generally being "impudent & saucy to
men" (as parents committing a girl to the House of Refuge described it)
could lead to prostitution. The vigilant John McDowall at watch on fashionable
Broadway observed "females of thirteen and fourteen walking the streets
without a protector, until some pretended gentleman gives them a nod, and takes
their arm, and escorts them to houses of assignation."...
City life allowed such girls to find a wide range of customers and to travel far enough to thwart their mothers' vigilance. Early experiences with men, which girls may have shared round with their peers, perhaps bequeathed a bit of knowledge and shrewdness; perhaps the streets taught them how to turn sexual vulnerability to their own uses. To be sure, there were no reliable means of artificial contraception; only later, with the vulcanization of rubber, did condoms become part of the prostitute's equipment. Any sexually active girl would have risked an illegitimate pregnancy, attended by moral and financial burdens that could bring her to the edge of “ruin.” Nonetheless, there were ways to practice birth control. Most likely, a girl engaging in sexual barter stopped short of sexual intercourse, allowing the man instead to ejaculate between her legs, the client's customary privilege in the nineteenth century. Recipes for abortifacients and suppositories . . . probably circulated among young women. If other measures failed, abortions, provided by midwives and "irregular" physicians (as those outside the medical establishment were called), were widely available in American cities. Indeed, ferreting out abortions - both medically induced and self-induced - was a major task of the city coroner. In 1849, the chief official of public health in the city reported that stillbirths were increasing at an alarming rate, and he concluded darkly that the role of "crime and recklessness" - that is, abortion - in this phenomenon "dare not be expressed"
To us now, and to commentators then, selling one's
body for a shilling might seem an act imbued with hopelessness and pathos. Such
an understanding, however, neglects the fact that this was a society in which
many men still saw coerced sex as
their
prerogative. In this context, the prostitute's price was not a surrender to
male sexual exploitation but a way of turning a unilateral relationship into a
reciprocal one. If this education in self-reliance was grim, the lessons in the
consequences of heterosexual dependency were often no less so.
Prostitution offered more than money to girls. Its
liaisons were one important way they could escape from or evade their families.
For young girls, the milieu of casual prostitution, of walking out, could
provide a halfway station to the urban
youth culture to which they aspired. For older girls, casual prostitution
could finance the fancy clothes and high times that were the entree to that
culture. For all ages, support from lovers and clients could be critical in
structuring a life apart from the family.
Prostitution and casual sex provided the resources
for girls to live on their own in boardinghouses or houses of assignation - a
privilege that most workingwomen would not win until after the First World War.
Before factory work began to offer a more respectable alternative, sex was one
of the only ways to finance such an arrangement. The working-class room of
one's own offered a girl escape from a father's drunken abuse or a mother's
nagging, the privilege of seeing "as much company as she wished" and
the ability to keep her earnings for herself. Sanger touched on this aspect
when he identified "ill treatment" in the family as one of the
primary reasons girls went into prostitution. The testimony he collected bears
witness to the relationship between youthful prostitution and the relations of
the household: "My parents wanted me to marry an old man, and I refused. I
had a very unhappy home afterward." "My step-mother ill-used
me." "My mother ill-treated me ." "My father accused me of
being a prostitute when I was innocent. He would give me no clothes to
wear." "I had no work, and went home. My father was a drunkard, and
ill-treated me and the rest of the family." Sexuality offered a way
out....
A girl's ability to engage quietly in casual prostitution or sexual bartering depended largely on whether she used streetwalking openly to defy her obligations to her family. She might earn a little money now and then from casual liaisons; as long as she hid the luxuries she gained thereby and continued to earn her keep at home, she might evade suspicion. But part of the allure of prostitution was precisely the chance it offered to break free of work and authority. The "ruin" working people feared for their girls was not sexual activity alone, but sex coupled with irresponsibility; the defiance of the claims of the family went hand in hand with workingclass conceptions of immorality. Parents became alarmed and angered, for example, when their girls moved about from one servant's position to another without consulting them. They saw such independent ways as a prelude to trouble. Sometimes the girl had changed to a place in a "bad house," a dance hall or house of assignation where the temptation to dabble in prostitution would have been nearly irresistible. Sometimes, however, the girl provoked her parents' wrath simply by shifting from one place to another....
Fancy dress also played into
prostitution. As in the cases of domestic servants and factory girls, fancy
dress signified a rejection of proper feminine behavior and duties. For the
girls who donned fine clothes, dress was an emblem of an estimable erotic maturity,
a way to carry about the full identity of the adult, and a sign of admission
into heterosexual courting. Virtuous girls, who gave over their wages to their
families, had no money to spare for such frivolities; from a responsible perspective
fancy dress was a token of selfish gratification at the expense of family
needs...
Country girls from New England
and upstate New York were also open to the inducements of prostitution in the
city. Refugees from the monotony and discipline of rural life, they were drawn
by the initial excitement of the life, its sociability and novel comforts.
Rachel Near, for instance, came from Poughkeepsie to New York in 1835 to learn
the trade of tailoressing from her sister. About three months after she arrived
she ran into another Poughkeepsie girl on the street whom a man was supporting
in a house of assignation. "She persuaded her to go into her House, which
was neatly furnished by her ill gotten gain, and asked her to come and live
with her, and persuaded her until she consented to do so." There Rachel
met a Dr. Johnson, visiting the city from Albany, who supported her in style
for six weeks, and she supplemented her earnings from him with visits to a
bawdy house "where she used to get from 5 to 7 $ pr night, some weeks she
used to make 40 & 45$." . . .
Rural courtships often played a
part in urban prostitution.... Courtship was a gamble; elopement, the
possibility of rape and male mobility made it all the more treacherous. Country
girls were especially vulnerable to the process whereby desertion led to
prostitution. Sanger found that 440 of his subjects were farmers' daughters.
Left alone in the city, often without friends to help them, country girls sometimes
had no choice but to turn to the streets for their bread. The sanctions of
rural communities gave some protection to young women, but once they isolated
themselves from neighbors, family and other women, they could find themselves
caught in an escalating series of circumstances in which intercourse, voluntary
or involuntary, led to prostitution.... However, we should avoid interpreting
prostitution as a desperate measure. It could also be an act of shrewdness,
prompted by a woman's comprehension of the power relations in which she found
herself.... But it would also be wrong to cast prostitution as a deliberate bid
for control; mostly, farm girls - like their urban peers -just wanted to live
on their own....
The money and perquisites from casual prostitution opened up a world beyond the pinched life of the tenements, the metropolitan milieu of fashion and comfort. Every day girls viewed this world from the streets, as if in the audience of a theater: the elaborate bonnets in shop windows, the silk dresses in the Broadway promenade, the rich food behind the windows of glittering eating places. Bonnets, fancy aprons, silk handkerchiefs, pastries were poor girls' treasures, coveted emblems of felicity and style. There were serious drawbacks to prostitution: venereal disease, physical abuse, the pain of early intercourse and the ever-present prospect of pregnancy. While the road back to respectable marriage was not irrevocably closed, it must have been rocky, the reproaches and contempt of kin and neighbors a burden to bear. Still, casual prostitution offered many their best chance for some kind of autonomy - even for that most rare acquisition for a poor girl, a room of her own....
The urgency that discussions of prostitution took on
in the 1850s indicates just how disturbing youthful female independence could
be in a society structured culturally on women's dependence on the household.
In the public spaces of New York, as well as in domestic service and on the
Bowery, the evidence of girls' circumvention of family discipline was deeply
troubling, especially (but not exclusively) to people who saw the family as
woman's only proper place and asexuality as a cardinal tenet of femininity. The
stress on the female reprobate's active pursuit of her appetites was the
reformers' rendition of an obvious fact of youthful prostitution: It was not
solely the resort of hopelessness and misery....
We are still too much influenced by the Victorians' view of prostitution as utter degradation to accept easily any interpretation that stresses the opportunities commercial sex provided to women rather than the victimization it entailed. Caution is certainly justified. Prostitution was a relationship that grew directly from the double standard and men's subordination of women. It carried legal, physical and moral hazards for women but involved few, if any, consequences for men. Whatever its pleasures, they were momentary; its rewards were fleeting and its troubles were grave. But then, the same could be said of other aspects of laboring women's relations with men. Prostitution was one of a number of choices fraught with hardship and moral ambiguity....