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.