EPILOGUE

Two incidents, one often mentioned and another to be described briefly, suggest the argument of this work: that prostitutes need to be viewed in terms of the variety of possibilities and responses their profession allowed, as beings who engaged in a full range of human interests and relations, beset by problems but also by opportunities related to both their profession and their status as women.

In 1834, prostitute Phebe Williamson and her estranged husband went to court. The husband charged his wife with abandonment because she had moved to a prostitution establishment; she charged him with assault and said she would not stay with him any longer. She was there asking the court for assistance in dealing with personal abuse, as she and other prostitutes had successfully done on numerous occasions. He was there asserting his proprietorship in a patriarchal society, where presumptions of male dominance allowed a man to "discipline" his family. The judge ruled that in contrast to other cases in which a prostitute as an individual citizen could enlist the court's assistance in dealing with customer violence in her own home or business, this was "a case over which the law allowed him no control"; he advised the parties to go home and be reconciled.^[1] As an abused prostitute, a woman could expect the assistance and protection of the state, but as an abused wife, a woman remained under the control of her husband. Gauging the possibilities of life as a prostitute in relation to those offered as a wife and homemaker with a drunken and abusive husband, Phebe Williamson,

like some other women, chose to stay in prostitution, where her sociolegal and economic situation seemed better and where she in fact had more freedom to choose and ability to protect herself than as a housewife.

That Williamson's choice entailed advantages was apparent to her and to many other prostitutes, but that it also entailed dangers was obvious to all nineteenth-century observers. In April 1836, evidence of both the dangers and the advantages surrounded the charred body of a murdered prostitute, Helen Jewett, found in a brothel at 41 Thomas Street. Describing the scene, a reporter noted the elegant furnishings, the four-poster bed with its linen sheets, the prints hung on the walls, and the writing desk with a number of beautifully bound leather volumes. He also mentioned her velvet dress, feathered bonnets, and leather boots.^[2] This description epitomized the hope of most women who entered prostitution: they would have economic opportunities that would allow them a more comfortable way of life, including some luxuries. The coroner's description, however, suggested the other side of prostitution: the body was "externally burned on the arms, back and legs. On the right side of her head were three wounds of the scalp [where] ... the bone was driven upon the brane [sic ] and the brane lacerated." Furthermore, the "uterus was labouring under an old disease."^[3] Violence and brutality were ever-present dangers for the prostitute, as were venereal disease and other health problems.

Co-existing with the luxury and the dangers were still other dimensions of Jewett's life, as suggested by her personal correspondence discovered in the bedroom. She had experienced a wide range of positive human relationships that were obviously important to her and that helped her enjoy, as well as cope with, her daily life.

When contemporaries considered the prostitute in relation to genteel Victorians' views of morality and their notions of "woman's nature" and "woman's place," she seemed the antithesis of the true Victorian woman. Everything about her work, whether practiced on a temporary or long-term basis, challenged the traditional assumptions about women's roles. She became a symbol of society's ills or a scapegoat for many of its problems, simultaneously a victimizer and a victim. The labels and abstractions moved her to the center of public discourse, capturing the attention of writers, reformers, and ordinary citizens, but the rhetoric virtually obscured the fact that she remained an ordinary human being,

dealing with life in all its human complexity. The moralistic rhetoric also obscured society's prejudices against women who were poor and foreign, and whose lives suggested a social, economic, and sexual independence that was threatening to both social and patriarchal hierarchies.

The life options of New York City prostitutes were not so different from those of many other women at the time, given the constraints, dependence, and often victimization decreed by society. Prostitutes, like other women, were at times able to work around these very considerable limitations to create for themselves reasonably independent and rewarding lives. If nineteenth-century prostitutes were not wholly victims, however, neither were they masters of their own destinies. Just as nineteenth-century women in general were renegotiating gender relations—both poor women laboring outside the family and middle- and upper-class women working in voluntary associations or in women's rights or feminist organizations—so were prostitutes renegotiating their place in society.^[4] New York prostitutes displayed a certain independence in their life styles and in their relations with fellow New Yorkers, but they were not assertive of their rights as prostitutes per se. Though some of the early women's rights and feminist advocates noted a parallel between the condition of the prostitute and that of all women, there is no evidence that a self-conscious political sense of sisterhood developed.^[5] When New York prostitutes asserted their independence, they did so as citizens, as women, and as workers. As citizens they readily argued their case before public forums such as courts. As daughters they responded to patriarchal strictures and structures by leaving home for more social freedom and control over their own economic resources. As wives they sometimes left abusive, inept, or boring husbands to care for themselves. As workers they left bad-paying and oppressive jobs for an occupation fraught with problems but promising economic opportunity and better working conditions.^[6]

Such elements of independence, however, were accompanied by daily compromises, trade-offs necessitated by negotiated relationships with officials and fellow New Yorkers. Prostitutes were able to create a protected though always threatened environment in which to work. As mothers, daughters, and even wives, they accepted the debilitating and degrading aspects of their work in order to provide for families as well as to support themselves. As workers, they responded to clients' sexual

demands to raise income or improve lifestyles. As businesswomen they competed but also networked with each other to take advantage of the opportunities of their marketplace. And finally, as friends and coworkers, they mutually depended on each other for social, emotional, and sometimes economic assistance.

For the occupation as a whole, life in mid-century New York City presented a small "window of opportunity." The city's prostitutes enlarged and redefined their place in New York's urban geography, local economy, and social fabric. They moved beyond the geographic and social confines imposed in an earlier period and integrated themselves into the public life and local neighborhoods of the burgeoning metropolis. Furthermore, the social flux accompanying mid-century changes created a situation in which prostitutes were able to establish a significant degree of autonomy and control in their professional lives, both as individual workers and in managerial roles. In spite of being dependent on males as customers, New York's prostitutes were able to sever or lessen their dependence on particular men as they, as females and workers, predominated in the operations of their special sector of the local economy. Some of these gains were temporary. Whereas mid-century New York prostitutes expanded their realm in both a physical and socioeconomic sense, later prostitutes would find opportunities increasingly bounded by geographic restrictions (red-light or vice districts) as well as physical and socioeconomic restraints involving pimps and other third-party interests.

Too much should not be made of the possibilities for New York women in prostitution in the mid-nineteenth century. Women were not empowered by going into prostitution, even though some prostitutes did create personal opportunities out of adversity. Yet the degradation and disadvantages of the occupation were still great for its luckier as well as its less fortunate practitioners. To overemphasize potential opportunities for this group of working women is as misleading or limiting as it was for their contemporaries to view prostitutes as a threatening statistic or as a problem, as victims or victimizers. As nineteenth-century New Yorkers discovered, the prostitutes in their midst were not easily "ordered" or characterized; they were a widely diverse group of women living in a variety of situations—human beings, trapped like others by circumstances, but also using circumstances to create a life and a work culture for themselves and those they cared about.

The story of the life of the mid-nineteenth-century New York City prostitute was the story of hundreds of women, just as it was the story of a Helen Jewett or a Phebe Williamson. The gracious furnishings and the warmly intelligent letters, as well as the brutally battered body at 41 Thomas Street, were all part of the possibilities facing the many women who became prostitutes in New York City. And who could say that Phebe Williamson, in deciding to follow in the footsteps of a Helen Jewett rather than in those of her abusive husband, was either fool or free?