1. Sun , 15 March 1834. The similar story of Ann Burke reinforces the details of this case. See Sun , 27 February 1835.

2. Herald , 12 April 1836.

3. CGS, People v. Robinson , 19 April 1836, Coroner's Inquest Report of 10 April 1836.

4. For an interpretive framework for understanding nineteenth-century women's history, see: Kerber, "Separate Spheres," 9-39. For a discussion of the activities and position of women in the nineteenth century see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood ; Stansell, City of Women ; Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise ; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 ; and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 .

5. Barbara Berg, Remembered Gate , 199, 267-69, notes that a sense of sisterhood, or a sense of common socio-legal condition shared with prostitutes, existed in the antebellum New York female moral reform movement. For a discussion of the political activities of English prostitutes in response to the Contagious Diseases Acts, see Walkowitz and Walkowitz, "We Are Not Beasts," 208-20.

Not until the twentieth century would American prostitutes themselves find a collective voice to press for their legal and social rights, with their organization of COYOTE in the United States and their participation in the World Whores Conference in Europe. See Rosen, Lost Sisterhood , 177; Hobson, Uneasy Virtue , 216-17; and Penny Skillman, "Life 'In the Life,'" 11.

6. Stansell, in City of Women , uses the concept of independence in a similar way.