2
"A Lady . . . Whom I Should Never Have Suspected"
Personal and Collective Portraits of Prostitutes

When sixteen-year-old George Templeton Strong drove by a brothel where he hoped to catch a glimpse of some of the prostitutes then involved in the notorious Jewett murder trial, he was rewarded by a sighting of thirty-nine-year-old madam Rosina Townsend. To the boy, Townsend seemed an "old lady, dressed in black with a very good-natured, mild countenance whom I should never have suspected of being such a character as she is."^[1] In his comment, the youthful Strong noted a significant point about nineteenth-century New York prostitutes. Both because these women had some incentive not to appear conspicuous and because their lives in this era were closely interwoven with that of the respectable community, they were not always readily identifiable, then or now. Yet we can piece together the life stories of a number of these women—some who were obscure, as well as some who gained notoriety. These brief personal histories give us a sense of the variety and scope of these women's experiences within the context of a broader community life, a helpful perspective for later isolating the statistical components of the prostitutes' collective profile.

Personal Profiles

As keeper of a notorious Thomas Street brothel, Rosina Townsend was a key witness at the June 1836 trial of Richard Robinson

for murdering Helen Jewett and attempting to burn down her establishment. Townsend and nine other prostitutes were among the dozens of witnesses who testified at the trial.^[2] Observers described Madam Townsend as "one of the most dashing of her infamous line of work."^[3] She was said to be a woman of beauty and accomplishments, with "bright eyes, ripe form," and "graceful figure." According to the press, she appeared before the court well-dressed, wearing a gold watch and splendid earrings, and her pretty ankles were "adorned with exquisitely embroidered white silk stockings."^[4] Only the New York Herald , taking issue with the rival New York Sun for giving Townsend's testimony equal credence with that of decent, respectable New Yorkers, disparagingly portrayed Townsend as a "weather beaten courtesan" and "one of the oldest, ugliest, and wickedest of the harridans from that [Thomas Street] sink of corruption."^[5]

On the witness stand Townsend was described as "cool and collected."^[6] She testified about the murder but also described her own background and her reasons for entering prostitution. Her real name, she said, was Rebecca Rosana Brown, and she was originally from Castleton, New York, seven miles from Albany, where her parents still lived. She was married in Castleton, and afterward she and her husband moved to Cincinnati, where he left her for another woman. Following her abandonment, Townsend returned to her parents' home in Castleton for a few weeks and then moved to New York City in September 1825, hoping to find employment. For three months she boarded with her husband's aunt and took in sewing. By Christmas of that year, her "head was so afflicted" she said she "could not see the light of day."^[7] Although treated by a physician, she was forced to give up sewing and became a chambermaid in the home of Henry Beckman, a position she held for just a short time before pain in her arm began troubling her so much she could not do the necessary domestic work. From Beekman's, Townsend, now twenty-nine, moved to Maria Pierce's assignation house, which she left after a few months. In 1828 she took over her own prostitution establishment at 28 Anthony Street. By then she was using several names: Rosina or Rosannah Thompson or Townsend. A year later she moved into 41 Thomas Street, a house she managed for the six years preceding the trial. Townsend stated that in the eleven years since her abandonment, she had not seen her husband and did not know if he were alive or dead.^[8]

Rumors abounded concerning Townsend's accumulated wealth. It was alleged she owned property valued at approximately $20,000, and she was said to have lent $10,000 to a Broadway tradesman, whom she assisted with his business by balancing his books and keeping his affairs in order. She also was said to have made a loan of $1,000 to another business firm.^[9] Tax records from 1835 indicate that she was assessed on $5,000 in personal property (with no real estate holdings listed), and the press reported she held $3,500 in insurance on the furnishings of her house. A $5,000 property assessment suggests her actual worth was approximately $17,000, which in current dollars would be worth approximately $250,000.^[10]

Despite her seemingly secure financial situation, the many threatening letters she received following the murder and trial prompted her to sell her furnishings at auction and relocate. Her whereabouts became a matter of considerable speculation. One local paper reported she was moving to a residence on Prince Street, to quarters provided by a group of New York merchants who were attempting to persuade her not to reveal their names as customers.^[11] Another newspaper reported she moved to Philadelphia and established a brothel there. It is also possible that in response to her trial-related notoriety she may have continued to live in New York under an assumed name; in any event, her name disappears from New York directories and tax rolls after 1836.^[12]

Townsend's career shows the financial possibilities of prostitution for practitioners with business acumen. Coming late to the profession, impoverished, seriously ill, and marginally employed, she became in just ten years a well-off, comfortable, and successful operator. The Jewett tragedy disrupted her career on Thomas Street, but it did not appear to interfere with her wealth or the comfort and composure that wealth brought her.

A second madam brought to the fore by Jewett's murder ran a house where the victim had worked earlier. Mary Berry, Mrs. Francis or Frank Berry, who sometimes also went by the grand title of "Duchesse de Berri," was born Mary Cisco and was said to have "graduated into the profession under the tutelage of one of the most accomplished harpies on record—her mother."^[13] Berry's husband, who was listed in city directories as a tailor, was better known to the public and police as a "con man" and comanager with his wife of the 128 Duane Street brothel. Their house offered guests liquor, women, dice, and cards, and Mr.

Berry was said to specialize in getting the guests drunk and then robbing them. It was said he did not fear the law because he knew its loopholes and limitations and could always walk away from a court charge for robbery with a profit in his pocket.^[14] The brothel was mentioned in the press on a few occasions as the site of riots and assaults, which may well have been caused by his shady dealings with clients.^[15] Although Mary and Frank were ostensibly co-owners of the brothel, Mary appears to have been the real manager. The property tax records for 1835 list the house under her name, not his, with assets of $2,000.^[16] She was described in the press as a "buxom, bold, resolute landlady of abundant means."^[17] Apparently, Frank enjoyed a carefree lifestyle and let Mary worry about finances. A letter from Mrs. Berry to Helen Jewett, who was on vacation in Philadelphia in December 1835, complained that Mr. Berry had written from Washington requesting $50. "He spends money faster than I can make it whenever he gets loose," she wrote; if he came to Philadelphia, Jewett should "talk to him about this extravagance."^[18]

Frank either died or disappeared sometime after 1836, because he is not mentioned subsequently, and beginning in 1838 city directories list Mary as "Widow Mary Berry." Along with the loss of Frank, Mary seems to have lost press notoriety, but was evidently still running a brothel at 128 Duane Street ten years later.^[19] Like Townsend, she appears to have been able and successful, quietly accumulating a comfortable property, assessed at $5,000 in the 1840s. After the Jewett notoriety, and freed from an extravagant and trouble-making husband, she continued a long, stable career.

Another madam whose career spanned many years of New York history was Adeline (or Adelia or Adelaide) Miller, also known as Adeline Furman, who survived and flourished despite some notable personal and legal attacks. Born in the New York area, Miller became a resident of New York City about 1818. Both the 1850 and 1855 censuses list her age as 70, so by that time in her life she may have quit counting the years. In the early part of her prostitution career in New York (the 1820s), she used the name Furman, and she was known by both Furman and Miller in the 1830s. During this decade she ran several prostitution houses simultaneously, under the name of Furman at one address and Miller at others. From the 1840s to 1860 she is usually listed in sources as Miller. The 1830 city directory said she was the widow of a Henry Miller, and an 1839 source reported she had "buried three husbands"

and had had children by two of her spouses. She is known to have had a son, Nelson, who in the 1840s was married and living with his family not far from Miller's brothel. An 1830s source reported that Miller also had two daughters, one who allegedly became a prominent actress and another who was reported to have died "mysteriously." Both daughters were said to have been reared respectably by their mother and given "elegant and classic educations" to keep them free from the "lazaar house of crime."^[20]

Like other prostitutes, Miller changed addresses several times in her career. From her first appearance in city directories in 1821 through to the mid-1830s, she was listed at six different residences. In 1835-1836, sources note she was in charge of at least three houses, which she rented; using female managers, she apparently ran several prostitution operations simultaneously. In 1836 Catherine Cochran was managing Miller's house on Orange Street, a Mrs. Brown was managing a second house for Miller, on Mott Street, and Miller herself was overseeing the third house, on Reade Street.^[21]

In the 1830s Miller's establishments came under attack from both officials and private citizens. In 1831 she called for help from the city watch in controlling rowdies who were causing trouble in her Elm Street brothel, but a few years later, after the arrest of a sixteen-year-old girl who was being kept by a man at Miller's "most noted and horrible sink of iniquity and prostitution, 44 Orange," legal measures were taken to break up her establishment.^[22] Shortly thereafter, six men entered the "recently abandoned brothel at 44 Orange," destroyed approximately $100 worth of furniture, and then proceeded to 133 Reade Street, where most of Miller's belongings had been moved for an upcoming auction. Miller and a servant were alone at the Reade Street house when the men broke through a window, assaulted Miller with an iron bar, destroyed furniture and other items worth more than $400, and took $140 in cash. Miller pressed charges against the men and was awarded $700 in damages. The incident apparently failed to deter her trade, however, and a few months later officials renewed their own anti-prostitution campaign against her establishments, raiding and arresting the inhabitants of her "branch brothel" on Mott Street.^[23]

Throughout the remainder of the 1830s, Miller kept a "quiet" house at 133 Reade Street, and by this time she had accumulated $5,000 in personal property, a tenfold increase in her personal wealth from the

time she began as a prostitute in the early 1820s. One 1830s source claimed that the combined worth of her real-estate properties throughout the city was as high as $100,000.^[24]

In the early 1840s Miller operated a brothel at 134 Duane Street for about three years and then moved to 130 Church Street. During this period, she apparently supplemented her brothel income by offering an extra item for the "sex trade," a "flash publication." In 1842 the printer of the publication sued her to collect $750 she owed him for printing costs. Miller claimed the plaintiff had gone back on a promise to let her pay off the debt in weekly installments, but the plaintiff said she instead had tried to settle the debt by giving him an old printing press of hers. Miller was ordered to pay her debt. A couple of years later, however, her finances seemed stable enough for her to lend $500 to a fellow prostitute, Eliza Clark. When Clark tried to "skip town" without paying, Miller had her arrested.^[25]

By the mid- 1840s, Miller appeared to have improved her relationship with the police. Police investigator Robert Taylor mentioned in his diary at least five visits to her brothel seeking information about various cases on which he was working. For a while it seemed she also had improved her image in the press. In March 1849, the Police Gazette made her the heroine of a story about a sixteen-year-old virgin/orphan who came to Miller's brothel to begin a career in prostitution. After Miller was unable to dissuade the girl, she locked her up overnight and took her to the police the following morning, and the girl was saved from ruin by being sent to the Home for the Friendless. Miller's good press did not last long, however. A few weeks later the Police Gazette reported she was in court on charges that she was forcing young women to stay in her brothel. It was said that Miller would threaten her boarders when they did not pay what they owed her for board and clothing, and that she was "bad enough to do anything." Miller was able to get the more serious "conspiracy" charges dropped, but on the charge of "operating a disorderly house" she posted bail and was released on good behavior.^[26]

By 1855 Miller owned the property she had rented at 130 Church Street, which was valued at $5,000, and Boyd's New York City Tax Book of 1856 listed Miller's total tax assessment as $16,500, a significant net worth for that time and about $825,000 in current dollars.^[27] Miller's name disappears from city directories after 1860, presumably because she either retired with a new identity, moved to another location, or

died. Her nearly four decades in the profession had illustrated prostitution's possibilities for financial rewards, but her experience also demonstrated some of the occupation's ever-present hazards, notably vulnerability to violence and legal harassment. Miller seemed able to withstand the difficulties, however, and assuming that she reported her true age to census takers in 1850, she would have been eighty when she disappeared from the public scene, ending a very long, and on the whole successful, career in prostitution.

To what extent were Townsend, Berry, and Miller representative of the thousands of New York women who worked as prostitutes? As will be demonstrated later in this chapter when we turn to data that suggests the general contours of a collective profile of prostitutes, Townsend, Berry, and Miller stayed much longer in the profession than was typical and perhaps were exceptionally career-oriented, adopting a businesslike commitment to the trade. Most prostitutes never achieved as much success financially or developed as much stability and security in their social situations. Of course, the same might be said of most non-prostitutes of the time: in the mid-nineteenth century, working women rarely enjoyed opportunities to work their way out of poverty, much less develop economically rewarding careers. In important respects, however, the life stories of Townsend, Berry, and Miller reflect challenges and limitations they shared with many other prostitutes and with working women generally. By also reviewing the personal experiences of several prostitutes who did not rise to management positions in the trade, we can begin to appreciate the options these women perceived in life and the variety of approaches they took to shaping their lives.

Two young women who practiced prostitution for only a few years were the Utter sisters, Mary Ann and Ann Jeanette. Two years apart in age, the sisters were born in Connecticut and New York respectively. Both parents were alcoholic; their father, a basketmaker, had abandoned the family, and their mother had been sent to the penitentiary.^[28] By the time the sisters were sixteen and fourteen they had already worked at a number of different jobs before being hired together to pick peas in Williamsburgh. Their free time (Saturday nights and Sundays) was spent in New York City, and during one of these weekend jaunts they and a friend were arrested for using abusive language and throwing stones at a woman who hit them with a broom for taunting her child. All three girls were placed in the House of Refuge. According to Refuge records,

the youngest, Ann Jeanette, was already a "deep, knowing and brazen girl" who came into the House with an "unfeeling brazen manner." The older sister, Mary Ann, had stayed with boys, and the Refuge officials were fearful they could not do much for her because "she knows too much." After a year, Mary Ann was of age (eighteen), and so was sent to friends in Connecticut. Shortly after her release she was reported to be "on the town," living in a bad house, being kept by a man.

Younger sister Ann Jeanette, after a few months in the Refuge, was believed to have improved enough to be indentured to a family in New Jersey. She remained at her place of work only three months before running away to "go on the town" and perhaps join her sister. Both sisters were known to be practicing prostitution for the next year and a half. Nevertheless, Refuge officials decided to reclaim Ann Jeanette, and in the early hours of one morning they went to New York's "Hook" and entered a brothel "filled with families." They arrived before the women were dressed, and Ann Jeanette asked them to leave the room while she clothed herself. She then used this opportunity to leave and "ran half-dressed through the streets and escaped." Afterward, she changed addresses, evading officials for a time. The Refuge recorded that Ann Jeanette was "a real old bawd," but interestingly noted that "If we didn't need her help she would by no means be a desirable inmate." They located her again, sent a police officer with two men from the Refuge, and brought her back. Six months later Ann was seventeen, and officials thought her conduct was "pretty fair," but, since she was "cunning and prudent," they felt they "could not with confidence rely on her stability if [they] parted with her." A few months afterward, however, she had improved sufficiently to be indentured successfully to a farmer in Dutchess County.

By the time Ann Jeanette was twenty-one, she had married and was thought to be doing well. She later had a child and visited the Refuge chapel. Officials recorded on the occasion of that visit that she was "considered to be, looked on, as a respected and worthy woman." Sixteen years later, in her late thirties, Ann Jeanette, or Mrs. Sarles, again visited the Refuge and according to the daybook, "gave a good account of herself."

The Refuge kept notes on sister Mary Ann's post-Refuge life and progress for only a few years after she left. She had entered prostitution shortly after her departure, and the last recorded entry about her indi-

cated she was still practicing that occupation. Perhaps the Refuge lost track of Mary Ann, though they could have solicited information about her during one of her sister's visits, or perhaps they did not spend time doing follow-up studies on women they considered their "failures."^[29]

House of Refuge records detail many stories similar to that of Ann Jeanette Utter, involving young women from straitened families who practiced prostitution for a few years before returning to "respectable" society.^[30] Two such young women who went on to other trades were Sarah Van Norden and Mary Jane Box. Van Norden's father was a boat builder, and her mother was a tailoress; when Van Norden was in her mid-teens, she was learning tailoring from her mother, who was described as "a very pious woman." Sarah did not get along well with her mother, whom she believed was too critical of her. She left home and went to board in a brothel on Walnut Street. Her parents then had her sent to the Refuge, and six months after being admitted she was indentured to a farmer in Westport, Connecticut, where she worked for over a year, receiving good reports. Several years later she visited the Refuge, and officials there were pleased to learn she was then working as a milliner.^[31]

Mary Jane Box lived with her widowed mother until she was seven, when she was put in service. Although her mother worked as a tailoress and had three grown children who were employed, they were all so poor that Box had to be put to work also. In her first two years as a servant she lived at eight different locations. Her Refuge case history, written when she was sixteen, said, "It would be too tedious to mention all the places she has been at. She has been wandering about in this way for several years, has been she thinks at more than 50 different places. At none of which she stayed more than 7 or 8 months."^[32]

When Box was thirteen her mother died of cholera, and Box began going out with boys and men to houses of assignation. For the next three years she practiced prostitution and/or worked as a servant. Box was unhappy at the Refuge and after several months' residence tried to escape. She was indentured to a family in Norwalk, Connecticut, but after only nine months they sent her back, saying her conduct was far past endurance. About a year later she was indentured to a farmer in Fishkill, was happy with her position there, and stayed on for several years. Five years later, in her mid-twenties, she was described as "re-

spectable" and was living at her sister's in New York, planning to return to Fishkill to work at her old job there.^[33]

Hannah Rice's career as a prostitute was also briefly documented by the House of Refuge. Rice was almost seventeen when she was brought to the Refuge. Her father, a cooper, had died a couple of years before, and her mother was supporting the family by taking in washing. Rice was described as "lazy," a girl who "would rather do evil to gratify her pride than work," and it was noted she had a "wrestless [sic ], uneasy turned mind."^[34]

Rice had been a prostitute for more than a year when she was admitted to the Refuge. She entered prostitution by soliciting on the street— "going with young men to private places for night walkers"—and then boarded with Abby Meade (Myers), who kept a brothel at the corner of Grand and Wooster streets.^[35] Following her stay at Abby Meade's, Rice was kept by a Colonel Lee, and afterwards by a Captain Myers, who worked for a steamboat company.

Rice contracted the "bad disorder" (venereal disease), and her mother had her admitted to the Female Magdalen Society home on Bowery Hill. She was not happy there, tried unsuccessfully to escape, and finally agreed to try the House of Refuge to see if she liked it any better. Shortly after her admission, the matron's report noted the "girl is greatly disappointed in the change because she feels she has to work too hard." In over a year at the Refuge, Rice was never indentured, and when she turned eighteen she was released "at the strong solicitation of her mother." For several months after her departure, Rice made return visits to the Refuge. Within a year of her release, however, she was "back on the town" in prostitution.^[36]

When Mary Anthony entered the Refuge at age fourteen or fifteen, the admitting matron noted that "there is a mistery [sic ] . . . hanging about her parentage. She never saw her mother but says she saw her father about two years ago."^[37] Anthony told Refuge authorities she had been born somewhere in Kentucky. Before she could remember, however, she had been left in the care of Patience Berger, who brought her up in her house of assignation at 202 Church Street. The Refuge suspected that Anthony may in fact have been Berger's daughter.

Berger sent Anthony away to school for four years, beginning when she was about ten years old, but following her return to New York,

Anthony became a prostitute. An acquaintance, a mantuamaker who had also formerly been a prostitute, gave her the name of a local gentleman who would help her find a position in some other profession. Anthony did not tell the gentleman, a Mr. Green, that she had practiced prostitution, but rather that she wished to avoid the fate that staying in the Berger household would surely cause. Green placed her with a family in Oneida County, urging them to watch over her and not let men seduce her. She was shortly returned to Green because it was reported that she was not honest and stole money, and that her "propensity" was such that "she would be the one to seduce young men first." Still wishing to "save" Anthony, Green had her admitted to the Refuge.

After six months there, Anthony was evaluated as "an artful deceptive creature in whom we have no confidence." After a year and a half, however, she must have improved, because she was indentured to a man in Geneva, New York. She stayed on in Geneva after her indenture ended, and at age twenty-three, while on a trip to New York City, she paid a visit to the Refuge. The Refuge authorities appeared to have some doubt whether Anthony had completely abandoned her old way of life, because the entry describing her visit stated, "She looks rather gay for a girl who does housework." Five years later, however, when Anthony was in her late twenties, the Refuge recorded that the man to whom she had been indentured informed them that she was married to a respectable mechanic and was living happily in Geneva.^[38]

Less is known about Patience Berger than about her ward, or perhaps daughter, but information suggests the general pattern of the Townsend-Berry careers. From the 1820s to the 1860s Berger ran either an assignation house or a brothel in lower Manhattan. In the 1830s her house at 202 Church Street was described as "a quiet house," and, except for the Advocate of Moral Reform calling her "a wretch of a woman," she appears to have continued to operate quietly with little notoriety or publicity throughout her career. By 1840, Berger had accumulated enough money to own a house at 132 Church, assessed at $8,000, and she also had $3,000 in personal property. Her personal-property assets appear to have fluctuated between 1840 and 1860; the $3,000 declined to $400 by 1845, then rose to $6,500 by 1848 and stayed there until 1856, when it again dropped to $500. Although her financial situation reflects some degree of change, on the whole, prostitution provided

Patience Berger with a long career of relative security and financial success.^[39]

Although black New Yorkers suffered discriminations greater than most other groups in the population, their life stories illustrate the same kinds of circumstances that prompted so many other young women to become prostitutes. Julia Ann Smith was born in Baltimore and moved to New York with her family. Her father died in the cholera epidemic of 1833, when Smith was twelve. Her mother attempted to support the family by doing day work, but young Julia also had to go into service at a gentleman's boardinghouse on Beekman Street. While working in the boardinghouse, she met a white man, a Captain Armstrong from Liverpool, who started taking her to an assignation house on Catherine Lane that was managed by a black woman. Captain Armstrong paid Smith $4 to $5 a night for several weeks, a large sum to be earned by a girl just reaching her teens and considerably more money than she was making as a domestic. Smith left her domestic service position and, according to the Refuge, began "strolling about from pillar to post for two or three years . . . staying in this private way with white men." Refuge officials recorded that Smith said she would "have nothing to do with colored men." At one point Smith worked out of the U.S. Hotel at West Point for several months and then accompanied a friend to Pennsylvania for a few weeks. Afterward, she returned to New York and became a servant to a black prostitute at the Franklin House on Broadway, earning $1 per week. When her family learned of her return to New York, her mother became alarmed by her daughter's lifestyle and "the character of the place" where she worked; Mrs. Smith asked the police to arrest her daughter and send her to the Refuge. Entering the Refuge at age fourteen, Smith was described as "one of the closed mouthed knowing ones," whose conduct was described as "pretty fair, but if out of humor she [would] swear." At the end of a year the Refuge indentured Smith in Otsego County, New York, and after that kept no more records on her. Since biracial marriages were infrequent in the mid-nineteenth century, if Smith continued to "have nothing to do with colored men" she probably eliminated marriage from her available options, leaving menial trades, service, or prostitution as her most likely opportunities.^[40]

Like many other Irish females, Eliza Brakey came to America in 1846 to escape difficult conditions in Europe. Immigration was perhaps par-

ticularly compelling for Brakey's family because her father had died in Ireland. Arriving in America, mother and daughters went to live in separate places—the mother in New York City and the daughters in service positions on Long Island. Brakey worked for two-and-a-half years for one family but apparently became unhappy with the post and left Long Island for Mrs. Smith's Elizabeth Street brothel in the city. She worked as a prostitute for half a year, until friends discovered her and had her committed to Blackwell's Island. As soon as she had served her six-month sentence, Brakey returned to prostitution at Adeline Miller's brothel on Church Street, where she was satisfactorily residing until her friends again found her and had her sent to the penitentiary for six more months. After her second jail term, Brakey went to live with her sisters on Long Island, but after a short while she again escaped to the city and Mrs. Smith's brothel. This time her mother had her arrested for vagrancy and committed to the Refuge. Brakey's persistence in pursuing prostitution caused Refuge officials to write: "This is a hard case! & we fear beyond the hope of Reform." After fifteen months at the Refuge, Brakey was indentured in rural New Jersey. Six months later Refuge officials recorded that Brakey had "left her place," possibly returning for the fourth time to the "unreformed" life she seemed to prefer in the city.^[41]

The preceding cases suggest some tentative observations. The young women who entered New York City prostitution generally came from poor families or from families torn by conflict. Many teenagers seemed to prefer prostitution to the work and protection of the House of Refuge or other reform institutions. Some women provided well for themselves in the trade and thus made a long-term career of prostitution; others found it an easy occupation to pursue if they temporarily fell on hard times. Most of those who can be followed go back into respectable marriage or career situations, but some of them simply disappear from historical sight, possibly returning to prostitution. Of those mentioned, only Jewett, so far as is known, died young.

Although there are dozens of other personal profiles that give insight into the lives of prostitutes and could demonstrate further the diversity of the individuals who worked in the profession, the tentative observations above do help delineate some of the common characteristics of the New York women who practiced prostitution. To gain a clearer focus on these women, we turn to a statistical generalization, or collective profile, of New York prostitutes as a group.

[Full Size]

6.
Hooking a Victim. In the 1830s prostitution became much more 
visible in New York City. This mid-century print, depicting respectable-
looking women "hooking victims" on a public thoroughfare, illustrates 
a situation New Yorkers felt had become a public problem. (Lithograph
& Publisher, Serrell & Perkins; gift of Karl Schmidt. Courtesy Museum 
of the City of New York)

The Collective Profile

William Sanger's 1858 study offered a general profile of the New York City prostitute: she was young, foreign-born, unmarried, had borne a child, came from a poor working-class family, and had experienced economic and/or other problems at home before entering prostitution. Furthermore, Sanger believed the average prostitute spent only four years in the profession before the hard life caused her to die prematurely. This profile did not differ on the whole from what the majority of New Yorkers believed about the prostitutes in their midst, and it also resembled the conclusions of other nineteenth-century social investigators who were concerned with prostitution.^[42]

New Yorker Charles Smith, writing a decade before Sanger, also had offered a general portrait, noting that though prostitutes came from

every age group and "every rank in life," the majority were poor, had been raised in rural areas, and suffered social disadvantages. Many had worked previously as domestics or in a trade, and almost all were uneducated and because of ignorance had experienced their "downfall."^[43] Though Smith and Sanger agreed on issues of age, socioeconomic background, and previous employment, Smith, like several European social investigators, noted that prostitution was usually a temporary occupation, not the final stage of a woman's life.^[44]

The nineteenth-century data—particularly Sanger's study, which was by far the most extensive and detailed—can be reevaluated today in light of other evidence. Information from censuses, arrest records, and contemporary newspapers permits us to test the accuracy of Sanger's portrait of the young, foreign-born, desperately poor social outcast who died a few years after becoming a prostitute, thus allowing us to clarify or redefine his profile of the mid-nineteenth-century prostitute.^[45]

Most characteristic of the average mid-nineteenth-century New York prostitute was her youth. Youth was a definite asset in the profession, but the late teens or early twenties also represented a stage in life when a young woman might well be needing a job, gaining independence from her family, and making new acquaintances on her own before marrying and having a family. The overwhelming majority of mid-nineteenth-century prostitutes were twenty-five years of age or under. Sanger found 74 percent in this age group, and of the prostitutes identified in the 1850 and 1855 censuses, 74 and 72 percent, respectively, were under twenty-five. Very few prostitutes were over the age of thirty—only 12 percent in Sanger's group, and 10 and 16 percent in the two censuses (table 4).^[46]

These figures include both brothel-keepers and common prostitutes, but the two groups can be distinguished on the basis of age. In the 1850 and 1855 censuses, the average age of the brothel-keepers was eight to twelve years higher and their median age eight to eleven years greater. Brothel-keepers were typically in their early to mid-thirties, though the youngest manager was nineteen and the oldest seventy (table 5). Although the madams or brothel managers were generally veteran prostitutes, they were not necessarily older women nor the oldest in the profession; twenty-six of the eighty madams identified (32.5 percent) were not the oldest prostitutes in their respective houses.^[47]

If one excludes brothel-keepers from the two censuses studied, the average age of prostitutes was approximately twenty-three.^[48] The young-

est prostitutes listed in both the Sanger study and in official censuses were fourteen and fifteen, the approximate age at which most girls physically matured in the mid-nineteenth century. There were, however, many cases of children below this age who practiced prostitution.^[49] House of Refuge records list several girls as young as eight who were admitted for suspected or undoubted prostitution; in fact, more than one-third of the Refuge's prostitution-related cases in four selected years involved girls between the ages of eight and fourteen.^[50] Police records and newspapers also report instances of very young girls being taken from brothels. Police in the sixth ward found an eleven-year-old girl working as a prostitute in the brothel of Bridget Mangren near the Five Points. Joe Farryall, a notorious recruiter of prostitutes, was arrested with his wife for keeping a disorderly house, and one of the inmates arrested with him was ten years

old. In court Farryall was accused of having nine young girls in his house, two of whom were under twelve.^[51]

Charles Smith, in his book on prostitution, also noted that police arrested prostitutes who were as young as ten to fourteen, who had been led astray, he believed, by men well advanced in age.^[52] In 1835, for example, three young girls were taken from Eliza Webber's assignation house on Church Street, where they had been found "going to bed with grey-haired men."^[53] A neighbor testified in court that she had seen the girls enter the house on eight to ten occasions and once had seen a very small girl, accompanied by a middle-aged man, come to her own house before the man realized they were at the wrong place. The Webber arrest led to an investigation of the extent to which young daughters of the poor were being recruited for prostitution. According to the Sun , clandestine meetings were arranged by omnibus ticket boys, who were paid by men seeking assignations.^[54]

Some professional child prostitutes continued working in the business into their adult years. One twenty-three-year-old veteran stated that she had been a prostitute "ever since it took a yard of cloth to make me a petticoat."^[55] The majority of young girls involved, however, like most of their adult counterparts, were not fully professional prostitutes but practiced casual prostitution at intervals, or on occasion, to supplement other earnings. Many were street hucksters whose activities presented opportunities for sexual contacts; the money they earned from one encounter with a man was far more then they might earn peddling fruit or flowers. This type of juvenile street prostitution was described in an 1849 report by New York Chief of Police Matsell, who stated that more than two thousand young girls between eight and sixteen years of age were "addicted to immoralities of the most loathsome description."^[56]

Their ostensible business is the sale of fruits, socks, tooth-picks, etc., and with this ruse they gain ready access to counting-rooms, offices and other places, where, in the secrecy and seclusion of a turned key, they submit their persons for the miserable bribe of a few shillings, to the most loathsome and degrading familiarities.^[57]

In this way a young girl might earn two to three dollars a day, sometimes given to her parents, sometimes used to purchase some small luxury for herself.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, observers noted a substantial increase in childhood prostitution. This growth of juvenile prostitution and pedophilia, in both the United States and Europe, is an aspect of Victorian life that has not yet been fully explored, particularly with respect to the various social and psychological influences on the men involved. We can readily understand, however, why many young girls were easy prey during this period: the compelling social realities of working-family and tenement life made their labor a necessary part of a family's economy, and their unchaperoned huckstering in the streets made them "available" to men seeking young partners. Statistics from child molestation and rape cases support the police chief's observation that sex with female children was very much a part of urban street life in the mid-nineteenth century. Given the security gained from class as much as gender, well-off men with a "taste" for children had substantial protection in pursuing street-exposed girls of the poor. Fur-

thermore, the low age of consent (ten years) implied a legal sanction of sexual relations with children, providing, of course, that the young girl was said to be a willing participant. Many young girls, and sometimes their families, may have been led by ignorance, desperate want, or an experience of forced sex into accepting sexual encounters where they could earn a little extra money.^[58]

Contemporary claims that most prostitutes were foreign-born cannot be confirmed as readily as generalizations about their youth. Sanger wrote that it was "frequently remarked and as generally believed ... that a very large majority of the prostitutes in New York are of foreign birth."^[59] The association of prostitution with immigrants was part of an overall linking of foreigners with crime and corruption. Immigrants were thought to be the castoffs of other nations, a "constant flood of immigration" that Sanger noted "leaves a mass of debris behind it."^[60] New York's mid-century mayor, Fernando Wood, stated: "An examination of the criminal and pauper records, shows conclusively, that it is but a small proportion of these unfortunate who are natives of this country."^[61] The increase in New York crime in the mid-1850s, he believed, could be traced directly to the influx of immigrants.

New Yorkers' tendency to blame evils on foreigners can be explained in part by population changes in the city in the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1860 New York's population more than quadrupled, largely as a result of immigration from Europe. Foreign-born residents constituted 34.5 percent of New York City's inhabitants in 1845, 46.8 percent in 1850, and over half the population, or 52.3 percent, by 1855. Many other foreigners did not settle permanently in New York but landed at the New York port in these years and stayed in the city for a while before moving on. Over a million immigrants arrived in the decade after 1840, and almost two million between 1850 and 1860. In the single month of May 1849, 32,700 aliens landed in New York City, the next month 33,000 came, and, in the peak year of 1851, 289,601 immigrants arrived.^[62] The presence of a majority of the population with strange customs, often different faiths and languages, and a need to work cheaply threatened many native-born New Yorkers, who sometimes responded by discriminating against the immigrants in jobs, wages, and housing. Some law-enforcement officials also may have demonstrated discriminatory

biases. A study of police docket and arrest records in the 1850s indicates that a woman was most likely to be arrested as a prostitute if she was in an ethnic neighborhood and was foreign, especially Irish.^[63] Because immigrant women were usually poor and were not as highly esteemed as native-born women, they may have had more difficulty in finding well-paying jobs and thus possibly turned to prostitution in greater numbers than did their' American-born sisters.^[64] It is also possible, however, that the high percentage of prostitution arrests of women with foreign names reflects a bias against foreigners, a disregard for their legal rights, or simply their tendency to solicit more often in the streets.^[65]

Sanger found that 61.9 percent of the prostitutes he interviewed were of foreign birth. He was impressed by the lowness of this figure—"that five-eighths only [italics mine] were born abroad."^[66] This was, however, almost 10 percent higher than the proportion of foreign-born in the general population. In contrast, prostitutes identified in wards five and eight using census data include many fewer foreign-born women: 23.9 percent of these identified in the 1850 census and 25.4 percent in 1855. The discrepancy may represent a difference in the types of prostitutes located: almost all of the women identified in the two censuses were from brothels or prostitution boardinghouses, while Sanger's interviewees were not necessarily from establishments. It is possible that immigrants were not considered as desirable as native-born women when hiring for brothels, so that their numbers in prostitution houses would be lower than they would be in the overall prostitute population. Also, though wards did not differ greatly from one another in terms of immigrant population, wards five and eight were in the lowest third of wards in housing foreign-born inhabitants. The overall foreign population of these two wards was 45.2 percent, as compared to 52.3 percent for the city as a whole.^[67]

Irish women accounted for the largest immigrant group in both the prostitute population and the general population. In 1855, Irish immigrants represented 28.2 percent of New York City's inhabitants, and 21.7 percent of the residents in wards five and eight. Yet Irish prostitutes, as the largest foreign-born group, comprised only 12 percent of all the prostitutes in these two wards, while they accounted for 35 percent of Sanger's city-wide study done at approximately the same time (table 6).

Interestingly, in 1860 New York's Irish community was the city's only national group in which females outnumbered males. Irish women outnumbered Irish men in New York City at that time by about one-third, or more than 30,000, a number greater than the combined total of all other foreign-born females except German. Within her own ethnic neighborhood, an Irish woman was more likely to remain single than were women of other nationalities.^[68]

The relatively low proportion of Irish women among prostitutes in wards five and eight partly reflects those wards' relatively low overall population of foreigners, including Irish immigrants. But it also probably indicated a preference on the part of the ward's brothel-managers for hiring native-born prostitutes. This assumption was supported by the observations of a German visitor to New York in 1858 that Irish and German women generally were excluded from the finer brothels in the Mercer Street area, where Americans and a few Frenchwomen predominated.^[69] If we could obtain data on streetwalkers and independent prostitutes that is as complete as the census data on the brothel-based population, it is possible that the foreign-born percentage of prostitutes would appear much higher. The periodic sweeping arrests of streetwalkers may have included many innocent women, but those arrested were mostly Irish and other foreign-born females (table 7). Nevertheless, because the information on nativity from wards five and eight challenges Sanger's and others' assumption that most prostitutes were immigrants, no straightforward conclusion is possible concerning whether the typical New York prostitute was foreign- or native-born.

Uncertainty concerning the nativity of the majority of New York prostitutes does not extend to race: most prostitutes were white. Although black New Yorkers were even lower on the socioeconomic scale than immigrants and were excluded from most occupations except menial labor, black women still comprised a small part of New York's prostitution community.^[70] The small number of black prostitutes may be explained partly by the small proportion of black residents in the city in general: black New Yorkers accounted for no more than 5.5 percent of the city's population at any time during the period 1835 to 1870 and had declined to only 1.5 percent by 1860. Also, prejudice played some role in limiting the chances that black women could improve their economic situations through prostitution.^[71]

Certainly there were black prostitutes and black brothels, some of which were successful and mentioned in brothel guidebooks.^[72] The 1853 Fast Man's Directory and Lover's Guide to the Ladies of Fashion highly recommended the brothel at 196-1/2 Church Street run by Sarah Sweet:

This lady is a Southern Creole and her lady boarders are the same; they are very beautiful. It is the only decent Creole house in the city.... Southern gentlemen will find this a very fine resort, and will feel quite at home.^[73]

Much of the success of a brothel depended on the mystique surrounding the establishment, and Sarah Sweet cleverly played to the fantasies held about illicit sex in the South. According to the 1850

census, the "Southern Creole lady" was actually a mulatto from Rhode Island and her four Southern creole boarders were mulattos from Massachusetts and New York.^[74] Miss Sweet's house and "pretty brunette boarders" were described again in an 1859 brothel directory along with two other "creole" houses.^[75] One of these, Virginia Henriques' house at 103 Mercer, was said to be "one of the best conducted houses of its kind in New York," with "six pretty brunette boarders who ... adhere strictly to the rules of good breeding."^[76]

Of the eighty brothels identified in wards five and eight in the 1850 and 1855 censuses, only two were black houses. Sarah Sweet's house with five black prostitutes was listed in 1850, and Jane Hill's brothel with ten black women was recorded in the 1855 census.^[77] Nineteenth-century newspapers mention a few black prostitutes and black assignation and prostitution houses in columns on arrests and court proceedings, but even in wards five and six, where many blacks lived, the daily police docket records few arrests of black women for prostitution/ vagrancy or streetwalking. One 1849 ledger, which included 117 arrests for common prostitution/vagrancy, recorded only 3 arraignments of black women, and the 1850 books listed only 20 black suspects among 482 charged with the same offense. Black women were 3 percent of the overall population at the time, and black men and women represented 7 percent of the total population of wards five and six, where most of the arrests were made. Arrests of black women in the ledgers of wards 5 and 6 represented 4 percent or less of total arrests for prostitution/ vagrancy. Because police regularly brought in many more black residents on charges of drunken and disorderly conduct, the low percentage of arrests for prostitution is a further indication of blacks' scarcity in this profession.^[78]

Black women may have avoided prostitution more than white women because they were discriminated against by clients, or because they feared racially motivated abuse by customers as well as legal harassment and reprisals by the police and courts. The same 1853 brothel directory that recommended Sarah Sweet's establishment made racial slurs against other houses. Mrs. Bennet's house was described as "a very low place, formerly filled with niggers," and Jane Frances's brothel was said to be "a quiet place but too many niggers are around here."^[79] Another establishment was described as a "vile crib. It is a resort for niggers and pea-nut girls."^[80] Newspapers were often even cruder in their descrip-

tions than were the directories, such as in a Herald account of a raid on a brothel:

A Black "Crib" Broken Up

At the watch returns yesterday morning, the Police Office presented a rich group of niggers, of all sizes and colors—black, white, and grey—but the odor was not quite as agreeable as the sight was amusing, to observe the different countenances, with their big lips. It was really laughable.^[81]

It is possible there were more black prostitutes and brothels than public records indicate because white officials may have ignored sexual commerce between black males and females unless it created a public disturbance in the community. Because white New Yorkers commonly assumed an innate "loose morality" among black people, black prostitutes serving black clients may have been disregarded. Nineteenth-century racism also assured that black males usually had access only to black brothels and streetwalkers, or to those integrated houses that were part of the lowest echelons of the trade.^[82]

In spite of blatant public racism, officers sometimes protected the interests of black prostitutes. In the Court of Special Sessions, James Woodruff was charged with "taking advantage" of a Negro at a house of ill-fame and was remanded for a week.^[83] An article in the Sun related that Ebenezer Barney, who visited Eliza Fisher's black brothel to enjoy the company of two of the prostitutes, went to the police to file a complaint that his pocket book with $40 had been stolen in her establishment. According to the Sun , Justice Wyman, apparently more offended by the mixing of races than by the commission of the alleged crime, gave Barney "an appropriate lecture on the white gentleman's perversity of taste and his penchant for 'woolly headed quails.'" According to the newspaper, Barney was "compelled to pocket his loss and lose the contents of his pocket for his folly."^[84] It seems telling that even black prostitutes, despite doubly deep prejudices, were able to face the law with some hope of protection.

Many black women, too, played significant roles in the daily operations of New York's brothels. Most of the brothels located in wards five and eight had servants, largely black. There were 89 brothel residents in addition to the 310 prostitutes in the 1850 census, and 77 of these were black. Sixty-four were female servants, 7 were male servants, and 6 were black children. In the 1855 census, there were 69 residents in

addition to the 264 prostitutes, 44 of whom were black.^[85] There were probably many other black household workers who did not live in. Moreover, it was sometimes possible for black women to improve their positions and earnings by increasing their responsibilities and authority as servants. An 1870 directory, describing Kate Austin's brothel, said it was:

A second class house of six boarders ... [which] seems to be managed by the colored servants. One can never see the proprietor who is concealed somewhere behind these sable breast works.^[86]

Of a first-class house, it was said:

The landlady is never seen. It is impossible to say who is head of the house. The door is guarded by a grouty old dame from the south of Africa, whose assumed dignity is so over powering that most people suppose that she runs the establishment.^[87]

These black women appear to have been servants, but they evidently assumed some of the management responsibilities of madams, maximizing their roles in a business where black authority commonly had to be oblique.

The statistical profile of the New York prostitute indicates that she was single as well as young and white. Sanger found 61 percent of his interviewees had never married, and 79 percent of the prostitutes working in brothels in wards five and eight in 1855 were unmarried. Of the large group of streetwalkers arrested on one evening that same year, 59 percent said they were single. Some single women probably claimed to be widowed or married, especially if they had children, and brothel madams sometimes went by the title "widow" or "Mrs." even if they had not been married. A widow might have become a prostitute, though, if she experienced an abrupt change in her family's economy on the death of her husband. Both the Sanger study and the 1855 census identified 14.7 percent of the prostitutes as widows. Sanger was surprised by the fact that 25 percent of the prostitutes he interviewed said they were married, and he was appalled to learn that 14.5 percent of these women were still living with their husbands while they practiced prostitution.^[88]

Almost half of the Sanger interviewees had had children—about three-fourths of the widows and married women, and about 30 percent of the single women. A little over 40 percent of the widows' and married

women's children were illegitimate, however.^[89] The children of these prostitutes appear to have had a very high rate of mortality—62 percent overall and an even higher rate among children of single mothers. Sanger assumed that most of these deaths must have occurred before the children were five years old, so he compared his figures to death rates of New York children in the same age category. Because he was certain the women had not admitted to having many abortions, he inflated his figures to account for this omission and concluded that the mortality rate for prostitutes' children was four times as great as that for the average New York child. This conclusion is a statistical invention, though the mortality rate for prostitutes' children probably was somewhat higher than that of the city as a whole. His decrial of the "sacrifice of infant life " as "one of the most deplorable results of prostitution" (italics added) also flies in the face of his own observation that 43 percent of the prostitutes' children were born before their mothers became prostitutes.^[90]

Most New York prostitutes had worked in low-paying trades before entering the profession, and many were still so employed while practicing prostitution to supplement their incomes. Not surprisingly, the practice of part-time prostitution was more typical of streetwalkers than of brothel workers.^[91] Of the thirty-nine women arrested for streetwalking on May 24, 1855 (see table 7), a majority listed occupations other than prostitution, perhaps because they indeed practiced prostitution as a second profession but perhaps too because they may have claimed other occupations in hopes charges against them would be dropped.^[92] Seventeen of those arrested (44 percent) said they worked in households, or as domestics, and six were from the sewing trades (15 percent). In contrast, only 15 percent of the 2,000 prostitutes in Sanger's study said they were supporting themselves by means other than (or in addition to) prostitution. In listing their prior professions, however, almost half of Sanger's interviewees said they had worked as domestic/household laborers, and another 21 percent had been in the sewing trades.^[93]

Although the responses to occupational questions in official censuses depended very much on the census-takers' thoroughness and the questions they asked, some prostitutes indicated they were continuing to work in other professions. In the census of 1855, most of the ward five prostitutes identified themselves as such. In ward eight, however, only 39 of the 158 women responded to the question on employment. Thir-

teen gave prostitution as their profession, and 26 listed other trades, mostly in sewing.^[94]

The occupation of a woman's father seems to have been only vaguely related to whether the woman became a prostitute. Sanger found that most prostitutes' fathers held working-class occupations—as laborers, masons, blacksmiths, farmers, and sailors—but some were clergymen, lawyers, physicians, school teachers, policemen, and men of property. More important than the father's occupation was paternal economic setback, death, or familial alienation.^[95] Some women clearly became prostitutes in response to familial need, and others joined the profession because of a break with family, which was sometimes precipitated by perceived or actual sexual indiscretion. Economic stresses that might require wives and children to go to work to help support the family were more likely to occur in working-class families than in families at higher socioeconomic levels, but sexual indiscretions might be committed by a female from any family. The effect of the double standard and social pressure on a young woman who had been sexually promiscuous and thus alienated from her family meant that she, regardless of class, had few options for supporting herself besides prostitution.

The length of time most women stayed in prostitution was an issue debated by nineteenth-century observers of the profession. Sanger believed that most New York prostitutes died after approximately four years, in other words, that one-fourth of all New York prostitutes died every year. McDowall had stated a similar conclusion twenty-five years earlier, and William Tait, writing on Edinburgh prostitutes in 1840, interpreted their short careers (no more than four years) as an indication of their early demise. Another observer, Samuel Prime, in Life in New York (1847), agreed that prostitution led to death but stated that the average life expectancy after commencing prostitution might be as long as ten to fifteen years.^[96] In contrast, physician Charles Smith, writing the same year as Prime, while agreeing that there was a turnover in the profession every few years (approximately five to seven), argued that this was not attributable to death. Although some died of disease and dissipation, he believed that at least two-thirds of the women left the profession to marry, take a lover, set up a business, start another trade, or migrate to the South or West. Smith's analysis closely resembles Parent-Duchatelet's 1836 study of French prostitutes, which found that the profession was usually a temporary occupation practiced for one to

four years before returning to old trades or choosing new professions or lifestyles. Physician William Acton's study of London prostitution also supported the idea that prostitutes had short careers not because of untimely deaths but because they reintegrated themselves into respectable society. Some married; others had accumulated enough savings to be able to go into a trade, establish a shop, or open a boardinghouse. In fact, many of the prostitutes he had treated continued visiting him as patients after leaving the profession.^[97]

Although drawing different conclusions, all the commentators agreed that, on the whole, prostitutes practiced their profession for only a few years. Data taken from New York City public records, although selective, reveals little repetition in names of the 310 prostitutes identified in the 1850 census when compared to the 264 in the 1855 census. Most of the women who are found in both censuses appear to have moved "up," or into managerial posts. This finding does not preclude the possibility that other women may have stayed in prostitution for a longer period, perhaps by moving "down" into less desirable situations than those of the brothels in wards five and eight; certainly, however, the data does not confirm their deaths. In fact, a review of the records from 1850 to 1855 produces few names of prostitutes who have been identified from that period. To support Sanger's assumption about prostitution causing early death, prostitutes' deaths would have had to account for approximately one-sixth of all female deaths in the city each year, which is not at all the case; in New York, deaths for females between ages ten and thirty (the age category including approximately 88 percent of all prostitutes) amounted to only one-sixth of all female deaths. It is impossible that almost all women who died each year in this age group, which comprised the earliest and heaviest childbearing years, were prostitutes.^[98]

Unfortunately, there is little information about the lives of prostitutes after leaving the profession. House of Refuge records reveal that a few of the prostitutes who were admitted there did die young, usually of disease, and a few returned to prostitution. Others, however, left the Refuge to work as chambermaids, milliners, seamstresses, or industrial workers, and some married and had children. If the stint in prostitution had not afforded the security of marriage or an improved economic position, then most of these women found that their life options had not really changed much: menial labor, the hope of a future marriage, or

a return to prostitution. Having learned the economic advantages of prostitution, however, some probably did move in and out of the profession over the years until age or illness diminished their marketability in that occupation, just as it did in other trades.

Attempts to profile the nineteenth-century New York City prostitute can never be definitive, but they can enable us to draw a limited portrait of these women as a group. Although most women entered the occupation when they were very young and practiced it only a few years before moving back into respectability, some women did grow old in prostitution. Contrary to Sanger's profile, most New York prostitutes did not die after only a few years in the trade, but moved on to other jobs or married. For many, prostitution was not far removed from viable "respectable" alternatives, and thus it was taken up by a relatively broad group of women. Prostitution was not an occupation for only the most desperately poor and outcast but was an easy one to pursue if a young woman fell on hard times or wanted to establish her financial independence. Neither personal stories nor the available statistical data permit us to determine the percentage of foreign-born and black women, those New Yorkers lowest on the socioeconomic scale, who worked as prostitutes, but the ethnic spectrum of women in the occupation was probably broader among streetwalkers than among brothel-based women, because streetwalking did not usually involve so major a lifestyle change or so definite an occupational commitment. Nevertheless, those who worked in houses, a higher percentage of whom were native-born, probably were better off than streetwalkers: less desperately poor, better protected legally and medically, and better paid.^[99]

It is important to know the similarities of women who chose pros-titution-the statistical significance of certain personal and background traits or characteristics—but it is equally important to know something about these women's motivations. Because there was a social stigma associated with prostitution, some set of circumstances, some combination of experiences and needs, had to motivate a woman to practice prostitution instead of a more respectable occupation. The reasons why a woman chose prostitution and why she remained in the profession add another dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth-century New York prostitute.