3
"No Work, No Money, No Home"
Choosing Prostitution

In April 1839, Catherine Paris and one of her two children attended chapel at the House of Refuge. The entry in the Refuge's journal noted that Paris was respectably married to a confectioner and living at the corner of Broadway and Duane. Nothing in the notation indicated how different Paris's life had been three years prior to that month. In April 1836, Paris, known then as Elizabeth Salters, was one of Helen Jewett's colleagues in Rosina Townsend's brothel. On the day of the famous murder, Paris and Jewett had spent the afternoon together on an outing in lower Manhattan, and Paris was one of the prostitutes who testified at the trial.

For the two years preceding the murder, from age seventeen to nineteen, Paris was a prostitute, living most of the time at Townsend's establishment. Before coming to New York, she lived in Albany with her mother, a tailoress and domestic who was twice widowed before Paris was nine.

Paris's life history and the circumstances surrounding her decision to become a prostitute are similar to those of many other women. As a thirteen-year-old, living alone with a mother who was employed full-time, Paris began to run around at night with companions whom the Refuge called "bad girls." Because of her behavior, she was sent to the Refuge. The matrons described her as good-looking and said she appeared older than her age. The only problem mentioned in her records was that she and a group of girls tried to escape from the Refuge the year

after she arrived. At age fifteen Paris was indentured by the Refuge to a man in Susquehanna County, who wrote favorably of her work and behavior and said he was recommending her as a candidate in the Presbyterian church. The next year, however, she returned to her mother in Albany and not long afterward came to New York. There she boarded for a short time at Mrs. Berger's prostitution house on Church Street, and then at Mrs. Townsend's on Thomas Street.^[1]

Although prostitution was not a lifetime career for Paris, neither was marriage. In 1849, in a story about the Jewett murder, the Police Gazette reported that Catherine Paris, alias Elizabeth Salters, had lived with her confectioner husband for only a few years and had then "eloped" from him.^[2]

Why did Paris become a prostitute? Her background suggests no single motivating factor. It is possible that she became familiar with the life of prostitution during her years in Albany, and she could compare the lifestyle with that of women like her widowed mother who worked in menial trades. Furthermore, as an indentured worker from the Refuge, she learned the demands and rewards of "honest" hard work. Thus, by the age of seventeen, when released from the Refuge, Paris chose to be independent of her mother in Albany and moved to New York City, where she began working full time as a prostitute. Though it appears that she practiced the trade for only a couple of years, she may have returned to prostitution after leaving her husband in the 1840s.

Paris's story shares several elements with many other accounts of nineteenth-century prostitutes: economic need, a desire to be independent of familial constraint, and lack of comparatively well-paying and comfortable alternatives. Another young prostitute summed up such a combination of factors as prompting her to choose prostitution: "No work, no money, no home."^[3] The central point that Paris's and other prostitutes' life stories illustrate about nineteenth-century prostitution is that most women do not appear to have entered the profession for a single reason, but, rather, because of a complex combination of factors. And although contemporaries tended to enshroud motivation in a mantle of moralism that often obscured real causes, it is important to view nine-teenth-century prostitutes' choices and responses within the context of the time, considering fully the variety of influences brought to bear on their decisions. We should consider not only the conditions of these women's lives but also society's attitudes about women, sex, morality,

family, and work that made prostitution a reasonable occupational option for so many.^[4]

In the early years of the nineteenth century prostitutes were believed to practice their profession not because they were attempting to cope with difficult situations but because they were depraved women who suffered from character defects—they were victimizers who corrupted others in society. Although some observers noted that prostitutes were very poor, their poverty was regarded less as a cause of prostitution than as related to bad character and moral weakness. In 1818 the New York Society for the Prevention of Paupers issued a report citing ten causes of poverty and pauperism in New York City, among which was the influence of "houses of ill fame," which corrupted the habits and morals of "a numerous class of young men, especially sailors and apprentices."^[5] In this formulation, prostitution was a cause of poverty, not one of its results. Prostitutes were morally depraved women who, in turn, corrupted morally weak men.

The Reverend J. R. McDowall's work among prostitutes in the early 1830s also reflected a belief that women who became prostitutes were morally ignorant and corrupt, and "cause the seduction of heedless youth.... A few courtesans corrupt whole cities."^[6] Prostitutes were women of "the worst character ... malevolent, cruel and revengeful," and their lives were the necessary result of voluntary vice.^[7] Hence, McDowall and his early followers believed that the way to abolish prostitution and effect the reform of the women who practiced it was to hold prayer meetings with prostitutes in brothels, jails, and almshouses; to distribute bibles and tracts; and to instruct the women in religious and moral teachings. Reclaiming "the crown jewels from the sewers," as another nineteenth-century reform group articulated its mission among the lost, might be accomplished only through moral conversion and proper training.^[8] But McDowall's report, though it centrally enshrined the established moralistic victimizer thesis, also acknowledged an idea that would gain support with time: that "sheer necessity" drove many women to prostitution.

Although McDowall's society disbanded, both church-affiliated and secular groups of middle- and upper-class women and men continued his work in other reform societies in New York and throughout the country. Through their efforts to convert and reform prostitutes, reformers came to realize they were working with only part of the problem,

and they expanded their objectives to stress the need for moral purity in all members of society. Women's moral-reform societies in particular were quickly persuaded that reform would only be accomplished by revolutionizing the relationship between the sexes and by eliminating the double standard of sexual morality. This new thrust reflected an important change in the public's perception of the role of the prostitute. In 1835, women of the Moral Reform Society unanimously adopted a resolution that articulated the new attitude: "Let the condemnation of the guilty of our sex remain entire; but let not the most guilty of the two —the deliberate destroyer of female innocence—be afforded even an 'apron of fig leaves,' to conceal the blackness of his crimes."^[9] No longer was the prostitute viewed as the victimizer, but rather as the victim—the person seduced or raped and then scorned by a society that tolerated the debauchers in its midst. Such moralistic reinterpretation led to a change in the focus of moral reformers' efforts from reform to prevention. To eradicate prostitution by prevention, however, reformers had to clarify social causes and educate the public about them. It was through efforts to identify the causes of prostitution that many reformers began to look beyond the lives of individual sinners, female and male, and beyond the issues of morality and purity to larger contemporary social problems, such as poverty, of which prostitution was only one manifestation. This notion that prostitution had socioeconomic roots became a basic tenet of the "scientific" school of reformers, even though the assumption that poor character was often related to poverty never totally disappeared from nineteenth-century thinking.^[10]

After the 1830s, however, those who studied prostitution as a social problem, those who worked to reform prostitutes, and the general public began to see prostitution's causes first in more sympathetic and then in more environmental terms. Depraved men and socioeconomic structures became the two favorite explanations. That women could easily become the victims of unscrupulous men was widely accepted because of commonly held assumptions about the fundamental natures of men and women. Nineteenth-century moral reformers, like the general public, came to believe that women were by nature pure, trusting, affectionate, and open-hearted, and that they responded to men only out of romantic love, not carnal desire. Men, on the other hand, were thought to be lechers, controlled by base sexual drives that they often either could not or would not control. The will of a determined male, once sexually

aroused, was believed to be far stronger than that of a female. Furthermore, women, especially young rural and immigrant women, were believed to be naive and susceptible to trickery and deception. Prostitutes, in this scheme, were victims taken advantage of or destroyed by the "awful deception of a brute in the shape of a man."^[11]

Though not wholly rejecting a moralistic framework, other social reformers put greater emphasis on socioeconomic causes, especially the lack of economic alternatives. Scientific investigators in Europe and the United States differed from one another slightly in their evaluations of the various causes of prostitution, but all stressed the role of poverty and lack of employment. In his study on the prostitutes of New York City, Sanger found that slightly more than one-fourth of his interviewees gave "destitution" as the reason they entered prostitution, making it the most often-cited cause. "It is unquestionably true," Sanger stated, "that positive, actual want, the apparent and dreaded approach of starvation, was the real cause of ,,^[12] degradation. Women became destitute, he observed, because they did not have "sufficient means of employment" and because their employment was "inadequately remunerated."^[13] "Unhesitatingly and without fear of contradiction," he reported, "were there more avenues of employment open to females there would be a corresponding decrease in prostitution."^[14]

Though widely accepted, the economic explanation never went unquestioned. Indeed for some analysts it remained unrecognized. A doctor in the late nineteenth century claimed that his thirty-city survey, which showed that most prostitutes were former factory, shop, or servant girls, proved that "public occupations are dangerous. A woman who works outside the home commits a biological crime against herself and her community."^[15] Even for more serious thinkers, the economic argument had troublesome implications. Those who portrayed prostitutes as moral victims could and did see solutions in control of male passions and in discrediting a double standard. Those who stressed economic victimization could and did urge better wages for women, but none envisioned the kind of broad economic changes that would have made prostitution anything but a rational marketplace choice for millions of females. In fact, strong elements of social conservatism contributed to the victimization thesis. If these women were hapless victims who were not responsible for their lives in the profession, they posed no real challenge to the idealized view of women portrayed in the cult of true

womanhood, for so long as prostitution was seen as a forced rather than chosen option, the notion of woman as pure and in her proper place as mother and mistress of the hearth was unshaken. Also, victimization denied all positive appeal of the career—the financial and familial independence, the social life, the short-term comforts, and the long-term economic benefits. Such attractions were, in fact, the nasty secrets of prostitution; women became prostitutes not out of inevitable necessity, but because the profession was a comparatively attractive option from among the constricted choices society offered. Given the limits of nineteenth-century women's occupational opportunities, for some women in some circumstances, prostitution seemed and perhaps was the best alternative. As has been noted by historian Barbara Hobson, prostitution was a reasonable choice in an irrational social universe:

one in which social and economic conditions forced some women to earn a livelihood but fostered an ideology that denied them decent wages; one that censured only women in illicit sexuality but insisted that they were the weaker parties unable to protect themselves against male sexual advances; and one that idealized motherhood but did not provide social services for single women who had to raise children.^[16]

Without perhaps fully understanding the social, economic, and psychological complexities that underlay the choice of prostitution as a profession, nineteenth-century prostitutes and their observers offered many reasons why women entered prostitution, reasons that reflected the shift in emphasis from causes stressing moralistic factors to those stressing socioeconomic forces.^[17] If one were to skim the early- and mid-nineteenth-century popular literature and newspapers, one might believe that seduction and abandonment ranked first as a cause of prostitution, followed by entrapment and trickery, and then, less often, unfortunate or unhappy home lives, the influence of others in the profession, a woman's self-image, poverty and the need for income, and a desire for economic enhancement.

The Causes

Early nineteenth-century reformers, popular literature, and even some of the more scientific studies stressed seduction and

abandonment as a major cause of prostitution, a reason that accorded with some prostitutes' explanations. In the typical scenario, women were portrayed as pure, trusting, and affectionate, while men were characterized as unprincipled lechers. An example of this sentimental approach to seduction is found in Sanger's mid-century study:

A woman's heart longs for a reciprocal affection, and, to insure this, she will occasionally yield her honor to her lover's importunities, but only when her attachment has become so concentrated upon its object as to invest him with every attribute of perfection, to find in every word he utters and every action he performs but some token of his devotion to her.

Love then became a "passion" and an "idolatry" that developed gradually in the woman "until the woman owns to herself and admits to her lover that she regards him with affection." Although such an acknowledgment should have inspired the lover with high resolve to protect her, it frequently became instead

the medium for dishonorable exactions ... fatal in consequences to her, [as he] tramples on the priceless jewel of her honor.

It should be remembered that, in order to accomplish this base end, he must have resorted to base means.... Pure and sincere attachment would effectively prevent the lover from performing any act which could possibly compromise the woman he adores.^[18]

There were usually two possible endings to the typical story of deception: the young girl was immediately forsaken after the illicit sex, or she was induced to elope with the young man and shortly afterward abandoned and left to fend for herself in a new city. It was said that most of these young women then turned to lives of prostitution, either because they had lost all self-respect or because their families and friends, on learning of their sins and indiscretions, disowned them and turned them out. In April 1834, the New York Sun carried a story about a baby left on the steps of a respectable home on Grand Street. A note from "Maria," the baby's mother, said she had run away from home with a man who proved to be a villain, and she could not return home because she had been so disgraced. Because she must resort to an "abode of infamy to get bread," she was leaving the child to the respectable family in hopes that "the blessings of Providence [will] attend the guardian of my child."^[19]

7.
Its Beginning.
A Morality Tale In the typical nineteenth-century tale 
of seduction, an innocent, unsuspecting young woman was 
persuaded or tricked by flattery and false promises of love 
and marriage into having premarital intercourse. She then was 
abandoned, usually in poverty, to care for herself and her 
offspring. (Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, New York City)

Many stories of seduction reinforced the popular notion that men, even apparently trustworthy men, were really lechers. The New Era in October 1837 told of Mary Burke, a victim of a variety of men across the professional spectrum, who was arrested in a Walnut Street brothel. Burke told the judge that she had been born in Ireland, where her schoolmaster had seduced her when she was fourteen. Because of her sin, she was thrown out by her father. She bore a child and moved to Quebec, where she became intimate with her confessor, a Catholic priest, which resulted in another child. She then moved to Montreal, was seduced by a constable, had a third child, and eventually went to the Grey Nunnery with her children. Later, she came to the United States with another man who abandoned her in New York, and there, because of economic need, she began a "business of her own." Burke provided the names of all of her seducers, but her tale of "multiple seduction" did not move the judge to dismiss her case.^[20] Nevertheless, few explanations of a woman's fall could elicit as much sympathy as that of seduction and abandonment. Seduction certainly played a decisive

Its End.

role in causing some women to enter prostitution, but its frequency was probably overstated by reformers and possibly by the women themselves, who may have wanted to justify their situation to reformers who favored such explanations. In Sanger's study of 2,000 prostitutes, approximately 13 percent gave "seduced and abandoned" as their reason for entering prostitution. A few more said they were "seduced on board emigrant ships" or were "seduced in emigrant boarding houses," but the total number reporting seduction as a reason still represented only 14.5 percent of the cases (table 8).^[21]

Entrapment and trickery, followed by rape, was another scenario said to lure women into prostitution, one believed especially effective with immigrants and young women from rural areas. Joe Farryall was a typical "professional" recruiter whose guile was said to have caused the ruin of many innocent young women. Farryall and his wife, Phebe, operated a house of prostitution on Franklin Street and kept it supplied with inmates from as far north as Vermont. Periodically, Farryall trav-

eled through the countryside and, either through his charms or by promises of a better and more exciting life, persuaded young women to follow him to New York, where they were raped or intimidated into sexual compliance. Men like Farryall were rumored to be getting from $50 to $500 per recruit.^[22] Another method of tricking young country girls and newly arrived immigrants was by promising training and work in millinery or other trades. Only after arriving at the designated employment address in the city would a woman discover the true nature of the establishment.^[23]

It was said that agents and madams seeking new recruits also operated in conjunction with employment businesses, known as intelligence

offices, where women would be told they were being hired as seamstresses, milliners, or domestics. The Advocate of Moral Reform reported that many houses of infamy were connected with millinery establishments, partly to conceal the true character of the houses from the young women hired and from the public. Reformers also claimed that unsuspecting young women were lured into brothels in response to advertisements for rooms "to let"; once inside, the new boarders were allegedly drugged and then seduced or raped so that they agreed to become prostitutes because of their shame. Employers' sexual use of women, especially servants, was also said to contribute to prostitution; many females learned through force or ultimatums that sexual favors were an expected part of employment, and failure to cooperate might result in their dismissal.^[24]

In the Sanger study, the twenty-seven interviewees who said they were "violated," or who were immigrants seduced en route to America or in "emigrant boarding houses," possibly were victims of such methods of trickery or entrapment rather than of emotional attachment to a "heartless seducer." But only a tiny fraction of the women Sanger interviewed—2.5 percent—reported experiences that might be interpreted as entrapment, despite the emphasis on such cases in the writings of reformers and the popular press.^[25]

A few stories of seduction by trickery or entrapment also appeared in House of Refuge records. Elizabeth McNeal said she had been in service for eight years, but was forced to seek new places on many occasions. One place of employment she had obtained through an intelligence office turned out to be a brothel. Although McNeal said she left this employment after learning the nature of the place and claimed she did not have "criminal connection" while there, her record noted that she frequently had been in the "company of bad girls" and had stayed at two other prostitution houses.^[26] Angela Hadden stated that at age sixteen she had left her Westchester home for a nearby community to learn the tailoring trade and get away from her father, who drank too much and was "ugly." One of the customers of the tailoring establishment, a druggist, said he knew of a woman in New York City who wanted help and would hire Hadden. Learning that her father planned to come get her, Hadden went into the city and sought out the druggist to pursue the job opportunity. He took her to a house on Mott Street and there, according to her Refuge ease history, Hadden and the druggist "were

locked up, and he succeeded after many threats and much struggle in seducing her, he left her in this bad house and never saw her again. She attempted to escape, but was watched and kept very closely, until she became broadly on the town, where she has been in practice for two years."^[27] Joe Farryall, on one of his tours through New England, was reported to have persuaded his orphaned and impoverished fifteen-year-old second cousin, Mariah Hubbard, that she was working too hard and ought to come to New York, live with his family, and become a "lady." Delighted to leave her place of service for such wonderful prospects, Hubbard accompanied Farryall to New York, was seduced en route, and was taken to his Franklin Street brothel, where she said she was forced to begin prostituting herself.^[28] Two other young girls, Sarah Buchanan and Frances Day, told of being first seduced by their employers at places of service when each was but twelve years old. Day continued working for her employer, the deputy sheriff, until she was fifteen, but Buchanan reported the incident to her mistress, which ended the employer's marriage and cost Buchanan her position. Employees at the House of Refuge were suspicious that Buchanan's and Day's unfortunate initial sexual encounters had led to further ones, since each girl had had later associations with brothels. Buchanan eventually returned to her mother, who ran a prostitution house, and there, in company with the prostitutes, she began "walking" and going to the theater in the evenings. Her grandmother intervened and had her sent to the Refuge. Frances Day later went to work in a brothel, where she said she was employed as a chambermaid, but she told Refuge officials she only stayed there a short while because of the "bad" nature of the house. Police said they found her wandering the streets with "no friends and no clothes" and therefore committed her to the Refuge.^[29]

In the cases of entrapment, as in those of seduction and abandonment, women were usually portrayed as naive victims who, because they were "tarnished," were left with few options in life but prostitution. The women were doubly victims, first of seducers or rapists who took advantage of them and second of the upstanding, respectable members of the community who shunned them. Many nineteenth-century commentators emphasized the role played by respectable society in causing prostitution by not forgiving sexual transgressions or not offering a helping hand when needed. One former prostitute, Susan Striker, was indentured by the House of Refuge to a family in Ithaca, New York. Her

behavior was reported to be exemplary, and the family found no fault with her, but a year after her indenture the mistress of the house returned her to the Refuge upon learning that Striker had once been a prostitute. Another young girl, fifteen-year-old Susan Badger, reported that she lived in service with a family in the country for eight months until they learned her mother was a prostitute, and she was sent home.^[30]

Perhaps even worse than the seduced woman's rejection, critics argued, was a double standard under which an offending male, recognized as a seducer, would be accepted by society while his hapless victim would be allowed no option but prostitution.^[31] One writer reflected on the pernicious effect of this double standard in 1869:

Vice gives a woman's nature a more terrible wrench than a man's. It is harder for her to draw a veil over the past; it seems constantly to come back to her to rebuke her and to overwhelm her with disgrace. Her opportunities to rise are not comparable with the boy's, who finds a hundred doors opening before him, while she finds nearly every honorable door closed. Most ladies are less patient with the frailties of their sex than men.^[32]

Although nineteenth-century society may not have been as harsh on "dishonored" women as sources or "ideals" seem to imply, rigid attitudes about female chastity and the acceptance of a double standard probably had a role in causing some seduced women to enter prostitution. Many of these women may have believed prostitution to be the most "appropriate" occupation available to them because they internalized the feelings of guilt and shame expressed by society in comments or actions that indicated they had been "ruined" or "dishonored." Current research indicates that sexual experience, even a terribly traumatic experience, might also indicate to a young woman that "regardless of her other attributes, she can serve as a sexual partner should she wish to," thus establishing prostitution as a possible option for an occupation.^[33] Therefore, though seduction and entrapment most likely did not directly create as many prostitutes as contemporary literature would suggest, the seduction experience and the response of others to that experience may have led some women to reevaluate their opportunities and limitations in life, thereby influencing decisions to become prostitutes.

Another way in which women, as victims of circumstances, were said to be led into prostitution was through unfortunate home lives. Although the home as a secure respite from the harsh world was idealized

in the nineteenth century, and reformers' reports often described in detail longings they were certain prostitutes felt for the lost warmth and love of their families and homes, most reformers also realized that many prostitutes came from domestic situations that were unhappy, strife-ridden, and oppressive to the degree that prostitution seemed a favorable alternative. Often such homes had a single parent or perhaps no parent at all. Among Sanger's interviewees, more than 67 percent had lost their fathers, and almost 62 percent had lost their mothers.^[34] Among New York City girls admitted to the Refuge for suspected prostitution, at least 50 percent had lost one or both parents, usually the father, and for the year 1830, the figure was 69 percent. Parental death obviously forced a change in the family structure, and it commonly entailed the loss of the major economic provider, with frequent family impoverishment and a need for girls to go to work at a very young age, often in service, where they were sent away from family and home. As a result, many suffered from loneliness and a lack of love and affection. Mary Jane Box, profiled in Chapter 2, was sent out to service at age seven and spent the next few years at approximately fifty different places of employment, never staying more than a few months at any one. Box was "led astray" at age thirteen, about the time her widowed mother died. Not surprisingly, the young orphaned teenager stated that "it was her passion for company that led her to do as she did, and not the love of money."^[35]

Many prostitutes told of abusive and cruel treatment by parents or spouses. Over 8 percent, or 164, of Sanger's interviewees said they became prostitutes because of "ill-treatment of parents, relatives, or husbands." In response to a question about marital status, 103 said they had separated from their husbands because of "ill-usage"; it is not known if these 103 considered the abuse to be the reason they entered prostitution and are included in the 164 who gave ill-treatment as the major cause. Several Refuge girls also told of physical abuse by parents. Mary Power, whose family ran a boarding house, said her parents repeatedly accused her of sleeping with young male boarders and would beat her for it, until she finally decided she could take it no longer and ran away from home. Her plan was to go to New Orleans to earn high wages through what Refuge officials described as a "bad life."^[36]

Other prostitutes said they had suffered unhappy home lives because their parents were alcoholic. In Sanger's study, 30 percent said their fathers drank intemperately, and 17 percent said their mothers did.

Refuge records also show alcoholism in many of the young prostitutes' families, with the father's intemperance mentioned twice as often as the mother's.^[37]

Another abuse influencing some young women to enter prostitution was described by a Refuge officer as "what the thickest darkness ought always to cover," incest.^[38] Mary Ann Ray, who was brought to the House of Refuge because she had been "broadly on the town," was first seduced by her father's brother, and even her father had tried to seduce her. Phebe Huson said her first sexual experience was with her brother when she was between twelve and thirteen.^[39]

"Respectable" upbringings also appeared to drive some women to prostitution because their home lives seemed too restrictive. As a general rule, young girls in the nineteenth century were not allowed much independence. Many thought it was dangerous for a young female to travel alone on omnibuses, steamships, or other public transportation, or to be without supervision at public amusements, picnics, or on the streets at night since these were the places it was believed women would be "led astray" or even molested. Although this protectiveness may have reflected a middle-class apprehension, the general acceptance or tolerance of this attitude can be seen in the fact that, under the law, any woman alone on New York City streets at night could be arrested as a prostitute.^[40] There were legitimate reasons for parental curbs on personal freedom, but many adolescent girls and single women resented the restrictions. Refuge records indicate generational problems also existed over issues such as parental discipline, strict moral values, and requirements that young working women contribute all or most of their income to the family coffers. Such domestic conflict led some to leave home and support themselves by becoming prostitutes.^[41]

A final incentive to leave home and enter prostitution was that the life of a prostitute offered the opportunity to meet new people outside one's family or neighborhood. Some may have hoped that a brief period in prostitution would increase their chances of attracting a husband, either through contacts or savings, which could mean economic security or even upward social mobility.

Although nineteenth-century reformers believed that men were largely responsible for the recruitment or "downfall" of most prostitutes, they recognized that women often had some responsibility also. For the most part this was said to be the work of women who were already in

the profession who had lost all decency and morality. William Sanger believed prostitutes persuaded others to enter the profession because of "a fiendish desire to reduce the virtuous of their own sex to a similar degradation with themselves."^[42] Although there is a lack of evidence to support this theory of devious motivation, there is evidence that prostitutes did recruit others. Much to the dismay of reformers, prostitutes usually did not seek out strangers, but rather recruited those closest to them—their daughters, sisters, or friends. Such women appear to have been motivated not by desire for vengeance, as Sanger would have it, but by their sense of the advantages of their trade.

House of Refuge records list several cases of mothers practicing prostitution with their daughters. One such case was that of Charlotte Willis, who was reported to have become a common bawd after leaving the Refuge. Charlotte's father, who ran a boarding house, tried to have her readmitted to the Refuge but was refused. Later the Refuge recorded that Charlotte's "mother has left her husband, took up with another man, keeps a bad house, and the above daughter is one of her sluts." Susan Brown employed two of her daughters in her establishment at Cotlears Hook, and Bridget Mangren's two daughters were prostitutes in her brothel on Worth Street. House of Refuge records also document many cases of sisters working together in prostitution. Julia Decker and her older married sister were arrested by the New York police for being common prostitutes. According to the Refuge journal, the sister had left her "lazy" husband and returned to her former prostitution profession in partnership with Julia. After their arrest, the police released the sister, but Julia, a minor, was committed to the Refuge. In another example of sibling recruitment, the Advocate of Moral Reform reported that a prostitute enticed her sister to join her in New York by sending her a silk dress with a note telling her of the good wages she could make there through prostitution.^[43]

Friends, probably more than relatives, were responsible for introducing young girls to "the sporting life." Mary O'Grady was sent to the Refuge by her father for staying a week in a brothel. O'Grady said she had gone there to stay with a friend who had once boarded in her home. She claimed she "did not stay with men" while at the house, but several years later, after being released from the Refuge, she was reported to be a "girl of the town doing as bad as she knows how."^[44] Frances Sage and

Delilah Harvey were also friends who entered prostitution together. According to a rambling account in Refuge records, Frances's

first difficulties arose from being induced to attend the chatham Theatre by other girls, by that means she got acquainted with the play actors, who gave her and other young things a general pass, and the actors would stay with them. therefore she increased in ludeness. took board in church st. and also in white st and 3 avenue. was taken up as a girl of the town, and sent here accordingly, I learn from Delilah Harvey . . . that Frances was the first one that caused her to stay with a man.^[45]

Another young woman, Sarah Denny, was brought to the police station by the madam of a Church Street brothel who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade young Denny to return home. Denny told police she had been well-treated and happy at home but had received a letter from a friend who described in glowing colors the pleasures and enjoyment of her life of prostitution, so she had come to New York to join her friend in her exciting life.^[46]

Sanger's study indicated that seventy-one women, or 3.5 percent, had entered prostitution because they were "persuaded by prostitutes," and an additional eighty-four, over 4 percent, were influenced by "bad company," which probably meant companions who were prostitutes, who frequented places prostitutes might be found, or who observed a more relaxed moral code of conduct. The designation of "bad" companions most likely reflects a value judgment by the interviewers, not the interviewees, and probably represented a woman's close associates or those she considered her friends. Still, a combined total of 7.5 percent in Sanger's study who attributed the cause of their prostitution to the influence of companions or others in the profession does not represent a large percentage of prostitutes. As a secondary cause of entering prostitution, however, the influence of friends and companions probably played a much larger role than Sanger's statistics indicate. If a woman had left home, was abandoned, or was economically destitute and was deciding what to do with her life, the example or encouragement of a prostitute friend or acquaintance might help make prostitution appear to be the best or easiest option. House of Refuge records support this assumption. Intake officers at the Refuge do not appear to have asked directly what caused a girl to begin prostitution, but the "influence" of

friends and associates said to be of questionable character was listed as a contributing factor in the prostitution or suspected prostitution of a majority of the cases of New York City girls who entered the Refuge.^[47] Current sociological research also supports these findings. Studies indicate that when a woman is under economic stress and has experienced a change in her life (death of a key family member, divorce, a move, leaving home, a new job), and when this change results in her isolation, the disruption of old relationships, and the loss of her network of social support, then contact with persons in the prostitution business may take on a special significance. If the woman is in a position to observe the life of prostitution, she may see "that prostitutes earn large sums of money, that the occupation is not as dismal and degrading as she may have thought, and that the work provides opportunities for excitement, status, friendship, and perhaps even love."^[48]

In cases where seduction, entrapment, unhappy home life, or associates were given as causes of a woman's prostitution, nineteenth-century records usually portray the woman as a victim whose "fall from virtue" was the result of the actions or influence of others. Reformers and investigators preferred and doubtless to a degree encouraged such a portrayal because then the woman's role in the decision to become a prostitute, or the fact that she exercised some element of choice, was obscured. More notable, however, are those cases in which women implied or expressed that their decisions were the result of a willingness to become prostitutes or of their enjoyment of the lifestyle of prostitution, remarks that reformers and commentators tended to neglect. Since such a woman was supposedly a victim, and since a female's sexuality was usually denied, commentators provide no analysis of the fact that a woman may have viewed her decision as a positive one. Some women in the Sanger study expressed their choice positively as a wish to be free from limitations. Nine percent of the women said they entered the profession because of "drink and the desire to drink," 6 percent wanted an "easy life," and 1.5 percent said they were "too idle to work." Prostitution obviously appeared to offer the hours, resources, and opportunities for one better to enjoy life as one wished, and it did not require as much hard work as conventional professions. It was not work at all in the usual sense.^[49]

A much larger number, slightly under 26 percent, listed "inclination" as their reason for choosing prostitution. These women may

have given this answer because they thought the interviewers believed them to be "depraved," or the comment may have reflected a prostitute's self image, her notion that she chose an occupation appropriate to her character or nature. It also may have reflected her belief that the profession was one in which she could do well, or that it was one she preferred to the others available. Sanger observed that the response also might mean "a voluntary resort to prostitution in order to gratify the sexual passions" but dismissed this interpretation as implying an "innate depravity, a want of true womanly feeling, which is actually incredible."^[50]

The single cause of prostitution that probably influenced more nineteenth-century women than any other was economics. For most commentators, economic influences were interpreted in negative terms—women were forced into prostitution because of destitution and economic need. Sanger's study reinforced this point in its conclusion that over 26 percent of New York's prostitutes at mid-century were in the profession because of "destitution." Yet Sanger's and others' descriptions of many prostitutes' lives as well as information in prostitutes' tax records indicate that there was another side to economic causation. Prostitution had very positive rewards for some women. Many chose the occupation because it offered a better life a more comfortable lifestyle and the means to accumulate savings. Though not all of the women who sought these benefits in prostitution gained them, the possibility of significant economic rewards served as a strong incentive in pulling women into the profession.

Both the positive and negative economic reasons for choosing prostitution become clearer when one considers the limited occupational opportunities and wages available to nineteenth-century women. Nineteenth-century writer Virginia Penny, in How Women Can Make Money , described wages and conditions in traditional female occupations in New York City in the period 1859 to 1861. Penny noted that most of the jobs open to women were over-filled. She argued this was partly because 100,000 New York men were in pursuits well-adapted to women, jobs such as printing and manufacturing. She also noted that, as a rule, a man earned two to three times the salary a woman might earn for the same job. Although Penny described wages and conditions in over five hundred occupations, most women were employed in a small number of skilled and unskilled trades, notably domestic service

and sewing, that had been practiced by working females for several decades. These same limited women's occupations and their inadequate pay had been described by Matthew Carey in the 1830s in Plea for the Poor, and little had changed for working women in the three decades between Carey's and Penny's publications. In some trades, such as shirt-making, women's wages had actually declined in this period.^[51]

The two mid-nineteenth-century occupations engaging most New York City laboring women were the sewing trades and domestic service, occupations from which women frequently moved into prostitution. Approximately 49 percent of the prostitutes interviewed by Sanger had been employed as domestic laborers before becoming prostitutes, and another 21 percent had been in the sewing trades. Leaving aside the 25 percent of the interviewees who either had lived at home or had not been employed at all prior to becoming prostitutes, 70 percent of all prostitutes with previous labor-force experience had worked in these two trades.^[52] The conditions and wages in needlework and domestic service in the period 1830 through 1870 make clear why women found it so difficult to support themselves in both trades, and why prostitution offered comparatively a good livelihood.

A chronically depressed trade, needlework was oversupplied with semi-skilled women and girls who were forced to accept subsistence or less than subsistence wages. Increasing immigration after 1840, and the transition from hand to machine work after the patent of the sewing machine in 1846, exacerbated the problem of labor oversupply in the sewing trades. Furthermore, women in needlework, like other laborers, had to contend with cycles of depression and periodic unemployment, while inflation reduced the value of their already inadequate wages.^[53]

In the 1830s, for example, Carey reported that seamstresses were paid from 6 cents to 12-1/2 cents per shirt; depending on her skill, a shirt-maker could produce about six to nine shirts per week, thus earning 36 cents to $1.12 per week. Writers for the next two decades continued to quote the payment for shirts at 6 cents to 10 cents each, with the best seamstresses making two, or perhaps three shirts per day if they worked from sunrise to midnight. Some women working in overcrowded slum tenements were said to be earning as little as 4 cents a shirt.^[54] By the time Penny wrote in the 1860s, women were still earning approximately 6 cents per shirt and, on the average, were making from 75 cents to $1.08 per week. After the Civil War wages dropped even lower. If a woman

had the opportunity to make linen pleated shirts, she might work fifteen to eighteen hours a day for two days in order to make one shirt, but she would get 50 cents for the finer product and consequently could earn as much as $1.50 per week.^[55]

Poor wages were not the only source of hardship for shirtmakers. Their long hours left them with little or no free time, and they frequently suffered from poor health and distorted posture as a result of sewing for hour after hour with neck and arms bent forward. Some seamstresses, such as Rosina Townsend, suffered from eyesight problems probably caused by sewing all day and into the night with poor lighting. Fraud and abuse were common; for example, employers might ask two hundred women to make free shirts to demonstrate their skills and then hire only twelve women from the group. Some employers would require a deposit for materials taken home, from which they would then deduct a sum when the shirt was returned, claiming some fault in the work.^[56] And sometimes seamstresses were required to give sexual favors in order to keep their jobs.

Shirtmaking was among the worst paid of the needle trades, but the slightly higher wages available for other kinds of sewing were often offset by long periods of seasonal unemployment. Living conditions for all types of seamstresses were usually miserable. Wages did not keep up with rising food prices and rents, forcing many sewing women into confined and depressing quarters, as noted by the New York Tribune in 1845:

These women generally "keep house"—that is, they rent a single room, or perhaps two small rooms, in the upper story of some poor, ill-constructed, unventilated house in a filthy street, constantly kept so by the absence of back yards and the neglect of the street inspector . . .. In these rooms all the processes of cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, working, and living are indiscriminately performed.^[57]

Although reportedly many laboring women felt needlework was more respectable than domestic service, household service did not require as much training and thus was a type of employment open to more women. In the 1850s, in one of the poorest areas of New York, the sixth ward, 45 percent of the women under thirty were employed in domestic and personal services. They were usually required to work as much as fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, sleeping in cramped quarters and eating leftover food from the family table. Domestic wages generally were from

$1 to $2 a week, with room and board provided. Many servants complained of long hours, lack of free time, and insulting attitudes on the part of employers' families.^[58] A woman with dependent children or others to care for could not live out in domestic service, though she might do housework by the day, earning $3 to $6 a week, virtually all of which went for lodging and food.^[59]

Jobs in domestic service were not always easy to get. Because of the oversupply of women laborers, especially after the heavy Irish and German immigration began in the 1840s, there were always more women seeking domestic positions than there were jobs available, and replacement servants were readily available if a woman displeased her employer in any way. As early as 1846, before the influx of the largest groups of immigrants, the New York Tribune reported that at least one thousand women were looking unsuccessfully for employment in household service. By the 1850s, it was estimated that approximately one-fourth of the domestic servants in New York City were constantly out of work.^[60]

Even at their best, positions in the sewing trade and domestic service did not provide much financial support or security for a woman. For the average worker, these employments probably did not pay enough for a woman to maintain herself, much less children or dependent adults. Sanger found that 65 percent of the women who had worked before becoming prostitutes had earned between $1 and $2 per week, and 75 percent of those employed had received less than $3 per week.^[61]

Such wages were inadequate to support a family. Matthew Carey calculated the annual expenses faced by a woman with two children:^[62]

Working five days a week, for 18-3/4 cents per day, such a woman would earn $48.94 for the year, resulting in a yearly deficit of $84.66, which had to come from some other source. If the woman had a working husband, Carey calculated, and if expenses were increased only slightly to support a family of four, the husband would need to be earning

approximately twice what his wife was earning, if she continued to be employed, and three times the amount of her salary if she was not.^[63]

Carey apparently was calculating expenses for a very poor family living at a minimum subsistence level. The amount he estimated necessary for a person's daily food supply in the late 1830s was 6 cents, and by the 1850s the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor was estimating a necessary minimum of 10 cents a day. Carey also calculated rent at a low 50 cents per week. Other sources from 1830 to 1870 indicate rents were usually higher. Two poor women in 1834 were quoted in the New York Sun as saying they would do almost anything to earn enough to pay their weekly board of $3. (In contrast, Carey estimated an individual needed 92 cents a week for room and board—42 cents for food and 50 cents for rent.) The New York Tribune reported in 1845 that working women usually had to pay at least $1.50 a week for poor accommodations they shared with others, but that some of the filthiest and worst boarding houses charged as little as $1 per week. In the late 1850s a general survey of New York showed that working women paid $1.50 to $3.50 for room and board with washing occasionally provided, but fuel was never included for that sum. Furthermore, the poor often had to pay more for expenses such as fuel because they purchased such necessities by the item instead of in bulk.^[64]

Because most laboring women could not hope to command as high a salary as that needed for a family to live "moderately," a woman could only hope she would continue to be completely or partially supported by a parent, spouse, or relative. Otherwise, she would have to seek supplementary income elsewhere. Reformers and charities stressed that they offered assistance and refuge to prevent women from feeling they had no choice but prostitution, but there were limits on this type of help. Rescue homes often would not take a woman if she was pregnant, had a child, was diseased, or seemed "unsuitable," regardless of her great need. Even if a woman met the specifications for admission to the home, strict requirements, daily regimen, and religious training may have made the asylum appear to be more of a punishment than temporary prostitution would be. Furthermore, available public and private charities were not abundant. In 1837, after much publicity concerning the economic plight of the estimated 20,000 poor seamstresses and tailoresses in New York, a benefit evening was held at Hannington's Diorama to raise funds to assist poor needlewomen to keep them from starving or

turning to prostitution. The benefit received much publicity in the daily press, yet the total amount raised for the cause was only $70.65, a sum a single seamstress easily could have earned by prostitution in a few weeks. More established forms of temporary aid were available to the needy through societies such as the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. In the 1850s, the Association estimated that it gave temporary aid to 30 percent of the sewing women of the city. Nevertheless, the AICP's officers calculated there were 195,000 men, women, and children in absolute want in New York City and stated that it would take at least 10 cents a day to supply each with the necessary food. In its role as the disbursing agent of city relief funds appropriated by the Common Council, the AICP expended a total sum of $95,018.47 for the year November 1, 1854, through November 1, 1855, but this amount was $41,500 less than they estimated was required to feed those in absolute need for only one week.^[65] Certainly women had reason for doubting that public benevolence could alleviate their destitution.

Thus, when most jobs meant long, hard hours at little pay, when no jobs were available for a woman to fill, or when no friends, relatives, or benevolent groups supplemented inadequate funds, prostitution may have seemed both the easiest and most promising option available. There was always a market for prostitution, and the profession seemed to be convenient because a woman did not have to leave her home and children for long periods of time. It also meant less time on the job than did working in a factory, as a seamstress, or as a domestic. Prostitution especially may have appeared to be an easy alternative or solution for a woman who was being sexually exploited in her job. Those who were expected to extend sexual favors to their employers simply to keep their employment with its meager wage may have decided they might as well be paid for something they were being forced to give away under abusive circumstances.^[66]

Some of the women who entered prostitution for economic reasons found that their life situations did not improve—in fact, they sometimes became worse. Though nineteenth-century observers stressing socioeconomic factors pointed to destitution as a cause of prostitution—the only economic alternative left for some women—observers stressing moralistic causes reversed the argument and claimed that destitution and utter debasement often were the results of a woman's choice of a life of

prostitution—the dream of a better life gone afoul. Nineteenth-century sources contain vivid descriptions of extreme cases of prostitutes whose lives were in decline. In the dens and thoroughfares of the Water Street area, these prostitutes were said to have "rot[ted] to death . . . [f]oul, bloated with gin and disease, distorted with suffering and despair, the poor creatures do what they can to hasten their sure doom."^[67] For women like these whose lives were tangled in a web of alcoholism, poverty, illness, and despair, or who were at the margin of existence, destitution and degradation may have been the results of prostitution— inevitable results according to moralists. Nonetheless, for women who, for whatever reason, found themselves in society's lowest stratum—both those already working as prostitutes and those contemplating the practice—prostitution served as an opportunity, possibly the only way to earn enough for a daily living.

For a broader group of women with limited economic resources but a narrow range of occupational choices, however, the most compelling reason for choosing prostitution was that it was the most lucrative of the available alternatives. As one prostitute said her aunt once told her, "Every young girl is sitting on her fortune if she only knew it."^[68] Little education was necessary for a woman to make comparisons between the income offered by the daily wage in any of the trades open to females and the price being paid for "going to bed" with a man a single time. True, lucrative was a relative term. For some women in low brothels or at the bottom levels of streetwalking, prostitution's wage may have been only a little more than they might earn in another trade. For others, however, it offered not only the opportunity for earning more on a daily or weekly basis but also the possibility of accumulating some money for the future. Either way, a woman's choice of the occupation was often an economically sound decision.

Prostitutes were, of course, paid variously for their services, from those who worked in the finest parlor houses in better neighborhoods to streetwalkers in the poorer wards of the city. Payment of less than $1, however, appears to have been considered low for a New York prostitute's services. Even reformers who worked at the House of Refuge seem to have had some idea of what was a "disgracefully" low price to be paid in the trade. Giving the case history of one of the eighteen-year-old inmates at the Refuge, the intake officer commented that the young

woman had been working as a strumpet "and I judge as low a thing of the kind as we ever had for she would sell herself for a shilling if she could get no more."^[69]

Other sources indicate that a woman could generally count on earning quite a bit more than a "shilling" per customer. In calculating the weekly income in a first-class brothel, Sanger estimated that each prostitute probably entertained at least two customers an evening and seldom took in less than $50 a week, suggesting a charge of several dollars per customer. In calculating the average weekly income of all the New York public prostitutes of all classes, Sanger used a figure of $10 per week.^[70] In 1847, another source reported that a man could expect his purse to be $5 to $10 lighter if he spent the night in a brothel, and a decade earlier, Mariah Hubbard told Refuge officers that, while practicing prostitution in a Franklin Street brothel, she had earned from $3 to $10 per customer. One of Helen Jewett's patrons once chastised her that she "might be anyone's for $5," an indication that this was probably less than the going rate at her establishment.^[71] By the 1870s, sources reported that prostitutes could earn $20 a week in the less fashionable houses, $30 to $40 in middle-class houses, and $150 a week in the finest houses.^[72]

A woman who used prostitution to supplement her income from another profession, who practiced it occasionally when other work was not available, or who did not wish to have to share income with a brothel's management, might operate her business out of her own room or might utilize an assignation house. In 1835 Rachael Near said she was being "kept" by a doctor who visited her two times a week and paid her $5 to $7 a night; with additional customers on alternate nights, she sometimes was able to earn $40 to $45 per week.^[73] Other women who used assignation houses and private rooms said they earned from $1 to $5 each time they entertained a customer. Sarah Williams, a black prostitute, said she charged all customers a flat fee of $2 and always had plenty of money.^[74]

Although these wages indicate that prostitutes could earn more per week than could other laboring women, and dramatically more than unskilled laborers, a prostitute's expenses were higher. Rents in both brothels and assignation boarding houses were more than in regular boarding establishments, though a part-time or independent prostitute might operate out of quarters no different from, or more expensive than, those used by laboring women. Information in newspapers and reform-

ers' records indicates that most prostitutes in the 1830s were paying between $3 and $10 a week for board. The New York Magdalen Society reported that prostitutes in what they ranked as fourth-class houses paid $3 weekly in rent, third-class houses charged $7, second-class houses, $10, and first-class houses, $15 a week.^[75] In the 1860s the more established of the lower-class houses were said to be charging $10 a week, middle-class houses $20 to $25 per week, and the higher-class houses $40 to $50 weekly. In addition to these rental costs, prostitutes living in brothels usually had to pay the madam or management a fee for each visitor they entertained.^[76]

Because personal attractiveness was an asset in the business, most prostitutes spent more on clothing than did the average woman. Many newspaper accounts of professional prostitutes describe them as "attractively dressed in the latest fashion," although other prostitutes, especially in the cheaper brothels and rougher neighborhoods, were said to look tawdry and cheap. Expenditures for one's appearance included not only clothing but jewelry, perfumes, and hair dressing. Sanger reported that prostitutes in the higher-class brothels were visited daily by hair dressers, a service that cost them $2 to $3 per week.^[77] Although a prostitute might have to be prudent in her expenditures on clothing and personal adornment in order to be able to put money aside, her chances of earning more than expenses were greater in prostitution than in alternate work.

Prostitution's high level of business expenses attests to both ample income and a reasonably comfortable standard of living for many women. Even though in most cases those who achieved significant economic and material comfort were either managers or re, sidents of established houses, their lifestyle was visible to surrounding community residents, and their working conditions must have appealed to other women. Many prostitutes began their day at noon and worked from approximately six o'clock until an hour or two after midnight. In brothels, meals and housecleaning were provided, and women often had assistance with dressing and hair arranging. Although laboring women had little leisure time, prostitutes considered being seen at the theater or strolling in the afternoon on Broadway as public exposure helpful in their business as well as enjoyable entertainment. A prostitute's clothing, whether flashy or fashionable, was better than that of other laboring women, and brothels, attractively or ostentatiously furnished, were more comfortable than the crowded attic rooms and damp cellars that

housed the city's poorest workers, male and female.^[78] Even the less established prostitutes who worked independently or occasionally may have been able to earn just enough to have some extra necessities and a modicum of free time not available to those females who were trapped in the seemingly unceasing, low-paying labors practiced by most working women.

It is true there were dangers in prostitution for all its practitioners: possible arrest, violence, undesirable company, and disease. Those women who sank to the bottom levels of prostitution usually had these dangers compounded by economic insecurity, additional health problems, discrimination because they were poor, and, thus, limited prospects for improving their lives. But poor women not in prostitution also faced dangers, problems, and limited possibilities in their jobs that may have seemed equal to, or even worse than, those of the least fortunate prostitutes. Laboring women who worked long hours under poor conditions seldom could afford a nutritious diet or medical care, and hence suffered from poor health. Job security was at the whim of an employer, and young working girls had little recourse in the face of employer abuse or cruelty but to run away. In the event of theft at one's place of employment, the burden of proof usually lay on the employee. Consequently, when a poor woman compared the relative wages, hours, conditions, and dangers, prostitution compared very favorably with other professions available to women. More importantly, prostitution offered prospects for improving or enhancing one's economic situation in several ways, including discretionary income above necessary expenses, a long-term higher level of economic comfort, and an opportunity to accumulate savings for the future.

Nineteenth-century reformers often claimed that women went into prostitution in order to have extra funds, or "pin money," to indulge their "love of dress," "love of finery," or "desire to go to immoral places such as the theater." Even though critics may have viewed such desires as moral weaknesses, working women, like the rest of society, commonly wanted to be able to have more goods, better living conditions, and more money to spend on entertainment and themselves. By practicing occasional prostitution in addition to another job, a daughter could make extra cash that could be spent on herself, while her regular wages would continue to help support her parental family.^[79]

Prostitution also offered some hope for economic and social mobility and a long-term higher level of economic comfort. Some women hoped to achieve this by meeting better "prospects" for a husband. Whatever the marital disadvantages of prostitution, its practitioners, unlike most other working women, did meet men on the job, and often prostitutes married. Also, some prostitutes raised their standard of living in the trade or even achieved notable economic mobility. If a woman were successful in the profession, her income could rise sharply, and she might accumulate enough capital to set herself up in business, either where she had lived or in a different location with a new identity. Most prostitutes, of course, did not fare so well, but it was one of the few jobs that offered women some possibility of sharing in a "rags to riches" story, or its more reasonable "impoverished to comfortable" variant.

Prostitution also offered some hope for future savings. Insurance against old age or provision for future security was beyond the means of most working people in the nineteenth century. A factory worker or a domestic servant might worry just as much as a prostitute about her physical decline as she aged. In each case, aging could mean a woman would become less "efficient" at what she was doing, leading to a loss of income. But compared to other working women, prostitutes had a greater opportunity to accumulate capital and assets against these threats, and at an earlier age.

Certainly, not all prostitutes achieved one or more of these benefits. Those who made a long-term career of prostitution were most likely to reap its greatest rewards. Nevertheless, the achievement of a small temporary benefit as well as the hope for improved long-term prospects were both encompassed in the positive pull or "dream" that brought women into prostitution on an occasional or a lifetime basis.

Achieving the Dream

Some women grew gray in prostitution. Usually those who chose the profession as a lifelong career became madams of brothels or worked as managers of assignation houses or prostitution boardinghouses. Although successful career prostitutes constituted a small pro-

8.
Scene in a Brothel. Although life in a brothel was publicly portrayed in terms of 
debauchery and sin, many women perceived it as promising greater independence, 
escape from poverty, and the possibility of marriage and upward mobility. 
(Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, New York City)

portion of the number of women who practiced prostitution at some period in their lives, the achievements of these successful prostitutes pointed out the possibilities that inspired others to work in the field. Most often, a woman became a madam or prostitution boardinghouse keeper after working as a prostitute, but there were some who entered the profession by discovering that renting a room to a woman

or couple for sex might be more profitable than other rental arrangements. Whether a woman operated discreetly as an assignation-house keeper, or notoriously as a brothel madam, her primary goal was to run a profitable business and earn a good living. In spite of certain impediments, this was a realizable goal.

It is difficult to determine what proportion of prostitutes stayed in the profession on a long-term basis. Contemporaries mistook many prostitutes and managers of brothels for ordinary boarders or boardinghouse keepers. J. R. McDowall complained that brothels were able to exist in respectable neighborhoods "under the mask of boardinghouses.^[80] Another source, describing nineteenth-century New York boardinghouses, stated:

It may be safely asserted that the boarding-houses into which improper characters do not sometimes find their way are very few. . .. If the adventuress wishes to maintain the guise of respectability, she must have a respectable home, and this the boarding-house affords her. One is struck with the great number of handsome young widows who are to be found in these establishments. Sometimes they do not assume the character of a widow, but claim to be the wives of men absent in the distant Territories, or in Europe. . .. The majority of these women are adventuresses, and they make their living in a way they do not care to have known. They conduct themselves with utmost outward propriety in the house, and disarm even the suspicious landlady by their ladylike deportment. They are ripe for an intrigue with any man in the house, . . . their object is simply to make money.^[81]

A prostitute might carry out her charade of widow or forsaken wife in a female boardinghouse as well as in a mixed boardinghouse. Furthermore, not only might a respectable boardinghouse keeper rent one or several rooms to prostitutes, but a prostitute, looking for a means to support herself on a long-term basis, might decide that renting rooms to other prostitutes was an easy and profitable way to retire from active prostitution. Unless an establishment became notorious or earned the reputation of being an undesirable place, the position of boardinghouse keeper allowed a woman to appear reputable and merge with respectable society. In mid-century New York City directories, known prostitutes often are listed simply as boardinghouse keepers, though other sources make it possible to identify a sample of prostitutes large enough to provide some indication of how they managed their economic lives.^[82]

In contrast to later periods, management of the prostitution business in the early and mid-nineteenth century was very much dominated by women. Women owned or managed the businesses as madams or prostitution boardinghouse keepers, and the prostitute employees generally worked directly for these female managers without the interference or exploitation of third parties or middlemen. Nineteenth-century real estate records indicate that most madams did not own their own brothel properties but rented the buildings from landlords, both male and female. These landlords were able to exact high rentals from the madams, and, even though periodically there was a public outcry that the landlords were a part of the system, as guilty of immorality and illegality as the prostitutes themselves, there is no evidence that landlords commonly had any direct share in the actual profits of the businesses.

Records show that some men owned or managed brothels, often in husband-wife operations or as part of male-owned saloons or bars.^[83] The pimp system, however, did not become a major part of New York City's prostitution business until the late nineteenth century. References are made in early nineteenth-century sources to prostitutes' "lovers," who were lavished with affection and gifts and were even supported by prostitutes, but these lovers do not appear to have played a brokering role or to have controlled prostitutes' incomes the way pimps later did.^[84] On the contrary, mid-nineteenth-century prostitutes appear to have been brokers of their own sexual goods in an open marketplace, whether they operated in a casual manner, soliciting on their own while working out of private rooms, or worked in a more structured arrangement as brothel employees. Even when employed in the organized brothel arrangement, prostitutes appear to have had some control over their employment and were able to move from one brothel to another with much freedom.

In spite of this overall freedom of operation, a madam could exercise a large amount of control over her brothel inmates through financial indebtedness while increasing her own profits. A madam, like a mistress of an assignation house, usually charged high rents for rooms, and madams often would provide clothing or other in-house services to prostitutes at prices far above going rates. The madam also levied a fee for each customer a prostitute entertained. Beyond what the prostitutes paid, a madam was able to further increase her income by selling liquor to guests at two or three times its cost to her. Moreover, some women owned or managed more than one brothel at a time, and at least one,

as a side business, operated a printing press for publishing pornographic literature.^[85]

Clearly, one reason many women spent most of their working lives in the prostitution business was that it was profitable. Evidence of its potential for profitability is found in nineteenth-century New York City tax records, which make it possible to compare the assets of many prostitutes with those of other women living in similar neighborhoods. Such comparison confirms that women could improve their overall economic situations by being in prostitution.

Until 1859, residents of New York City were taxed on their personal property as well as their real estate, though ward ledger books indicate that a very small percentage of New York's population owned taxable personal property—less than 3 percent in most of the residential/small business wards, and approximately two to three times that number in commercial or wealthier wards. Although women comprised approximately fifty per cent of New York City's population between 1830 and 1860, married women's assets and wages were legally the property of their husbands, and thus the great majority of property holders at the time were men. Even though this legal discrimination distorts the actual economic contribution and position of nineteenth-century women, it remains possible to identify from tax records the property of single and widowed females, thereby evaluating the amount of assets that could be accumulated by non-married women who were providing for themselves or their families.^[86]

During the first half of the nineteenth century, New York City's prostitutes lived and practiced their trade in all wards of the city. There were no segregated prostitution areas, or red-light districts, but the fifth, sixth, and eighth wards, all predominantly residential, were described by contemporaries as neighborhoods marked by the city's most visible prostitution activity. All three were situated along Broadway, New York's major commercial thoroughfare, with small businesses fanning out from this artery to streets on either side. Much of the prostitution reputation of the sixth ward rested on the fact that it was the location of the Five Points, a small area well known for its streetwalkers, gamblers, drunkards, and criminal element. The activities of these groups around the Five Points seemed to overshadow the fact that the sixth ward was also the home of many lower-middle-class and laboring persons, especially immigrants, who were family oriented, hard-working, and respect-

able.^[87] The sixth, like other lower Manhattan wards, had suffered a socioeconomic decline in the first few decades of the century as the location of the more fashionable neighborhoods followed the population growth in newer wards to the north. In line with this trend, many sixth-ward brothel owners also began moving northward in the late 1830s into wards five and eight, leaving prostitution in the sixth ward to the streetwalkers and the rougher element of the Five Points. Although not as notorious as the sixth ward's Five Points, wards five and eight became known as the main centers of organized brothel activity from the 1830s to 1860.^[88]

City tax records illustrate the economic significance of prostitution when women's property ownership in these districts is compared with that in wards fourteen and seventeen, which were also residential-commercial districts where women might have owned small businesses, but not districts that were noted for prostitution establishments (see map).^[89] Women comprised only a small proportion of personal-property owners in all these wards (less than 10 percent), but wards with the highest percentage of women on the personal-property rolls were also the wards with the highest concentrations of brothel-based prostitution businesses—wards five and eight (table 9). Some of the female personal-property owners in these wards must have been non-prostitutes, but at least 26 percent of women on the personal-property rolls, and in some years as much as 60 percent, resided on the particular streets notorious as brothel locations (table 10). Based on tax, census, and brothel directory data from the early 1850s, it is possible to identify 40 percent of the female property-owners in ward five and 58 percent of those in ward eight as known prostitutes. Some of these prostitutes held real estate as well as personal property, and their holdings demonstrate the opportunities presented by their profession—and recognized by the general public at the time—for significant accumulation of wealth.^[90]

It seems to have been generally believed among contemporaries that many nineteenth-century New York prostitutes had become very prosperous through their profession. Sanger stated that one prostitute was "positively affirmed to be worth over one hundred thousand dollars, . . . and many more are reputed to be rich."^[91] Another former madam was said to be living in one of the Italian cities enjoying a large income from the lease of her New York brothel property. House and furniture were being rented to a new proprietor for $9,100 annually.

New York City wards and areas where prostitutes 
lived or congregated between 1830 and 1870.

An 1860s source reported that one popular belle was earning $30,000 per annum, which, it was noted, was a "sum exceeding considerably the salary of the President of the United States."^[92] Contemporaries may or may not have exaggerated prostitutes' incomes and their overall wealth, but they did not exaggerate the fact that prostitution was a means of accumulating property.

Patience Berger, who previously was mentioned as the guardian of Mary Anthony and madam of a house where Catherine Paris lived, spent over thirty years of her working life in the prostitution business. Before 1830 she ran a small prostitution establishment in ward five, but by 1840 she was able to purchase her own establishment at 132 Church, a property which initially was assessed at $8,000 and later at $8,500. She also accumulated personal property, valued at $6,500 by 1855.^[93] Using historian Edward Pessen's formula for calculating the true value of

nineteenth-century assessments, one can estimate her 1850 worth at approximately $50,000 and her equivalent worth in 1988 dollars at approximately $844,000.^[94]

Mary Gallagher, a friend of Rosina Townsend's at the time of the Jewett murder, also worked in the prostitution business for over thirty years. She owned property in ward five at 122 Chapel from 1830 to the mid-1840s, and then at 90 Chapel from the 1840s through the 1860s. Gallagher's house was assessed at $3,000 in 1830 and by 1840 was listed at $6,000. She had personal property of $3,000 in 1830, and in 1843 the tax assessor penciled in by her name that she had "gone to Urope," so apparently she felt prosperous enough to take a continental tour.^[95] She returned to her 122 Chapel house by 1846 and in 1848 purchased the 90 Chapel (West Broadway) property, assessed at $4,800. At this point, when Gallagher was fifty-four years old and perhaps no longer eager for the demands of running a house with fifteen prostitutes, she turned the management of her property over to Rebecca Weyman for about a decade, and then to Caroline Hathaway. During the time others were managing her brothel, Gallagher lived at establishments in both ward six and ward eight, possibly assignation houses or respectable boardinghouses. By 1863, however, the City Directory lists her back at her West Broadway address, which by the 1860s was assessed at $8,000.^[96]

Rebecca Weyman, who managed Gallagher's property from 1848 to 1857, had owned 62 Mott Street in ward six from the late 1830s through most of the 1840s. In 1845, her Mott real estate was assessed at $4,700 and her personal property at $2,700. She may have taken over the management of Gallagher's property because it was at a more prestigious address, or she may have felt she would have more opportunity to advance in the new location. Right after the move, her personal property was listed at $ 5,000, but the next year an assessment challenge reduced it to $2,000, where it remained unchanged for nine years. According to the 1850 census, one of the prostitutes in Weyman's house was a thirty-year-old woman from Vermont, Caroline Hathaway, who followed Weyman in 1857 as manager of Gallagher's property. Her first year in charge (and the last year the city assessed personal property), Hathaway was assessed for $1,000 in personal property. She continued to manage 90 West Broadway for several years (table 11).^[97]

Gallagher's tax history illustrates not only how women were able to accumulate property but also how their careers might progress in the

Table 11 Gallagher Property

business over a period of years. It appears one could work up from prostitute to manager of an establishment, and eventually might take over ownership of the property. One's female friends and associates also appear to have been important in helping one move up, or laterally, in the profession.^[98]

Another example of friendship networking, advancement, and property accumulation by prostitutes is found in the complicated relationships of Sarah Tuttle, Fanny White, Kate Hastings, Jenney Englis, and Clara Gordon. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s Sarah Tuttle is listed in city directories as a manager of various boarding houses. In 1843, while she was living at 136 Duane, her personal property was assessed at $3,000. By 1845 Tuttle was able to purchase a brothel at 50 Leonard, valued at $12,000, and was managing at that address. In 1848 Tuttle turned over the management of her house to Kate Hastings, a young prostitute who had been with her off and on for three years. Hastings had $5,000 in assessed personal property in 1848 and by 1850 was able to purchase Tuttle's house. About this same time, in the mid-1840s, Fanny White was living in a brothel across the street from Hastings. In 1851, White purchased brothel property at 119 Mercer and for the next two years managed the property, which was large and very well known. In 1853, a year in which White was assessed for $11,000 in real estate and $5,000 in personal property, she left for Europe with her lover, a married man named Dan Sickles, who had been appointed secretary to James Buchanan, minister to England. During White's absence, Kate Hastings moved to 119 Mercer and ran White's brothel. Management of her own brothel at 50 Leonard (which was assessed at $13,000 in 1853, $14,000 in 1855, and $15,000 in 1859) was turned over to Jenney Englis, who ran the establishment for a couple of years. (Englis had $1,000 in personal property during that time.) In 1855 Englis was followed as madam of 50 Leonard by Ellen Hamilton, who had been managing a brothel at 45 Mercer for several years, and when she took over Hastings' Leonard Street property, Hastings moved into Hamilton's old boardinghouse at 45 Mercer. (Each had personal property—Hamilton, $3,000, and Hastings, $2,000 assessed on Mercer in addition to her real estate on Leonard.) Fanny White, meanwhile, returned to New York from Europe in 1854, and resumed management of her own brothel. In 1856 she again turned it over to new management, and moved with two "lady boarders" to a residence on Twelfth Street. By this

time it was said she owned several houses in the city, which were allegedly gifts from suitors, as well as a $5,000 annuity and a real-estate lot reportedly given to her by a male friend. Shortly after her move uptown, White married a lawyer, Edmon Blankman, and she gave up her life as a prostitute. When she died in 1860, she was said to own "three fine city mansions, besides other property. The value of her property was variously estimated from $50,000 to $100,000."^[99] At the time of her death her Mercer street property was being managed by Clara Gordon, who had been a prostitute in Kate Hastings' house on Leonard Street in 1850 (table 12).^[100]

Many other women in the prostitution business who could be cited from nineteenth-century tax records as possessing much property illustrate the fact that women in the profession for many years were able to accumulate assets. At least twenty-four known prostitutes were assessed for $5,000 or more of real and personal property during these years (table 13), amounts which, especially in light of the practice of assessing property at only a fraction of its actual value, were certainly large enough to establish them as wealthy citizens. When converted to 1988 dollars, their holdings amounted in many cases to one-half million dollars or more. And when their incomes and assets are compared with those of women working in other trades or occupations, prostitution appears to have been an economically sound choice of a profession, financially the best of the limited occupational alternatives available to nineteenth-century women.

The profits of prostitution did not, of course, make the choice of the profession a pleasant one for many. Some tolerated the opprobrium and unpleasant aspects of prostitution because they believed the profession was temporary, and indeed for the great majority it was apparently practiced for only a few years, chosen for the income it could provide or for the economic, social, or sexual freedom it seemed to offer. Also, contrary to what most nineteenth-century literature says, prostitution did not always mean a woman became a social outcast. There is evidence that in some working-class neighborhoods, the temporary or occasional practice of prostitution was viewed as an acceptable means of supplementing one's income when necessary.^[101] Furthermore, some women probably felt as much pride in practicing prostitution as others did in working as menial laborers; it was not so different, after all, from most other women's trades in the sense that like them it was concerned

Table 12 Tuttle, Hastings, and White Property

primarily with providing for the needs, or for the service and care, of others, especially men.

The reasons nineteenth-century New York women gave for becoming prostitutes were many and diverse. Clearly, economic motivations were often crucial and were, perhaps, particularly acute in the nineteenth century, when few or no well-paying jobs were available to women. In addition, some social or psychological motivation had economic roots. A woman might say she became a prostitute because she was seduced and abandoned, but, in effect, that meant she had to provide economically for herself and dependents through one of the limited occupational options available, of which prostitution appeared to be the best option. Economic causes or motivations should not be overemphasized, however. Many women comparable to prostitutes in their needs, problems, stresses, or desires did not become prostitutes, and some prostitutes came from comfortable or middle-class backgrounds, choosing the profession despite adequate resources to care for themselves. Cases differ. Economic motivation may well have been the predisposing factor in a majority of nineteenth-century cases, but it cannot be isolated from social influences or from the personal assessments a woman made of herself, her situation, and her goals.