Prostitution and Antiprostitution

Prostitution and Antiprostitution. Prostitutes—persons who provide sexual services for payment—may be of either sex and may serve clients of either sex but historically were women who promiscuously provided sexual services to men.

Colonial Era to 1890.

In colonial America, prostitution was confined mainly to ports. In the 1820s and after, as the nation became urbanized, prostitution increased, fostered by the anonymity of city life. In 1831, the Reverend John R. McDowall, an antiprostitution crusader, claimed that New York City, with a population of some 250,000, had 10,000 prostitutes. The New York Female Moral Reform Society (1834), led by the wife of revivalist Charles G. Finney, spearheaded an early effort to combat prostitution.

By the mid–nineteenth century, authorities no longer prosecuted illicit sexual activities, as they had in the Colonial Era, provided those activities occurred out of public view. Brothels were tolerated if they remained confined to informally designated “red light” districts. Open street prostitution was sporadically suppressed, but from the 1850s until around 1910, virtually every American city of even modest size had its bordello district. The more expensive bordellos in major cities were elaborate affairs and attracted an elite clientele. Brothel districts such as Chicago's Levee, San Francisco's Barbary Coast, Washington, D.C.’s “Hooker's Division” (sometimes said to commemorate the Civil War general Joseph Hooker), and New Orleans's Storyville (named for the alderman who introduced the legislation setting its boundaries) were well‐known and even clandestine tourist attractions. Some brothels, such as Chicago's Everleigh Club, run by Ada and Minna Everleigh of Omaha, were elegant and opulent establishments.

In the nineteenth century, prostitution in itself was not illegal. Prostitutes who solicited openly on the streets might be arrested as “vagrants,” but those who worked inside were generally safe from arrest. Although brothels by common‐law tradition were classed as “public nuisances,” city officials rarely exercised their authority to close them. By the 1870s, many progressive municipal leaders favored the European approach of legalizing and regulating bordellos, an innovation adopted in St. Louis in 1870. This campaign, however, triggered a protest movement led by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the so‐called Social Purity movement, which sponsored annual conferences and published antiprostitution periodicals. Such groups opposed legalization and demanded instead that brothels be closed. Throughout the Gilded Age, the suppressionists and the regulators debated prostitution policy.

1890 to 1960.

The tide began to turn in favor of suppression in the 1890s. The English reformer William T. Stead, having documented the prevalence of prostitution in London in an 1885 magazine article, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, brought his crusade to America in the muckraking exposé If Christ Came to Chicago (1894). American attitudes and laws regarding prostitution changed greatly during the Progressive Era as the public‐health movement spread and the relationship of venereal disease (VD) to sexual activity became more clearly understood, thanks to such works as Social Diseases and Marriage (1904) by the prominent New York physician Prince A. Morrow. Among the hazards was the risk that a man who contracted VD from a prostitute might infect his wife and, through her, their future children. The American Social Hygiene Association (1913), funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr., spurred the antiprostitution campaign through its periodical Social Hygiene.

A kind of moral panic known as the “white slave” hysteria gripped the United States in these years, as millions of Americans became convinced that vast numbers of innocent young women were being abducted and forced into brothels. While brothel owners or their agents did sometimes prey on naive young female immigrants, the panic in retrospect seems primarily an irrational response to urbanization, immigration, and the new phenomenon of unchaperoned working women. At the time, however, Americans took “white slavery” very seriously, as novelists, politicians, moviemakers, and muckraking journalists hammered away at its horrors. In response, Chicago and many other cities appointed vice commissions to investigate prostitution and make recommendations. These commissions found few “white slaves,” but did document the prevalence of prostitution and bordellos. Prodded by public opinion and by such reports, municipal officials launched a wave of brothel closings that crested in 1909–1912.

At the federal level, the government had played little role in prostitution policy in the nineteenth century; indeed, only in 1875 did immigration officials begin to bar prostitutes seeking entry to the country. In response to the white‐slave hysteria, however, Congress in 1910 passed the Mann Act, named for its sponsor, Illinois congressman James R. Mann. Designed to combat the white‐slave trade by prohibiting the transport of prostitutes across state lines, it was sometimes used selectively to harrass private citizens, including the African‐American boxer Jack Johnson. During World War I, the War Department closed red‐light districts near military installations and warned doughboys against prostitutes through posters, lectures, and films.

The closing of traditional bordellos and red‐light districts did not end prostitution, but only dispersed it. The more expensive prostitutes, now designated “call girls,” made appointments by telephone and met their clients in hotel rooms. Other prostitutes worked out of bars or hotels, or on the streets. During the 1920s, many states criminalized prostitution, and over the following decades it became officially illegal almost everywhere. Enforcement of these laws varied widely, however, depending on the local climate. Prostitutes who too freely congregated on street corners might be driven into bars by a police campaign stimulated by a journalistic exposé or a wave of reform. Some jurisdictions periodically cracked down on bars that harbored prostitutes, usually by revoking their licenses.

Prostitution in Late‐Twentiety‐Century America.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s, with its climate of permissiveness, undermined traditional forms of prostitution by easing taboos on sexual activity outside marriage, but also gave rise to a new phenomenon: “massage parlors,” “health clubs,” facilities offering “private lingerie modeling,” or other euphemistically named establishments where, for a series of escalating fees, topless or nude women provided sexual services to male customers. By the 1970s, these small‐scale, low‐cost operations had become ubiquitous in American cities. In contrast to the old‐style bordello, the women worked part‐time; they were usually not professionals; and they set the terms of the encounter in the process of negotiating the client's “tip.”

The differences in legal regulation were important as well. In principle, at least, the traditional brothel became illegal with the criminalization of prostitution. Massage parlors and their ilk, by contrast, were technically legal even though they were often covers for prostitution. Charges brought against such establishments were often dismissed because the plain‐clothes police officer had first suggested explicit sexual activity, enabling the defendants to plead entrapment. By the end of the twentieth century, stricter zoning and licensing regulations, coupled with fears of AIDS and other sexually‐transmitted diseases, had reduced the number of such establishments.

The post–1960s women's movement spurred both antiprostitution campaigns and efforts to improve the status and occupational conditions of “sex workers.” Some feminists, citing the health risks, physical abuse, and economic exploitation endured by prostitutes, campaigned for more strenuous repressive efforts, including the arrest of male customers. Some municipalities placed provocatively dressed young women in areas known for prostitution and arrested the men who solicited them. These latter‐day antiprostitution activists also criticized movies such as the Julia Roberts vehicle Pretty Woman (1990) for romanticizing a dangerous and often debasing way of life.

But calls continued to be heard for the legalization and regulation of prostitution. Organizations of prostitutes such as PONY (Prostitutes of New York); HIRE (Hooking Is Real Employment) in Atlanta; and COYOTE (Call off Your Tired Old Ethics), with branches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, campaigned for legalization and for better working conditions. Despite considerable publicity, these efforts enjoyed little success. As the twentieth century ended, the cultural context of prostitution had changed dramatically from a century earlier, but it remained an important if clandestine feature of American life.
See also Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome; Feminism; Muckrakers; Temperance and Prohibition; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

David J. Pivar , Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1858–1900, 1973.
Mark Thomas Connelly , The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era, 1980.
Allan M. Brandt , No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880, 1985.
Barbara Meil Hobson , Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition, 1987.
David J. Langum , Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act, 1994.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle , Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity, American Historical Review 104 (February 1999): 117–41.

David J. Langum