The History of Crime and Criminal Justice Series David R. Johnson and Jeffrey S. Adler, Series ...

191 Pages·2007·10.87 MB·English

The History of Crime and Criminal Justice Series
David R. Johnson and Jeffrey S. Adler, Series Editors

CONTROLLING

VICE

Regulating Brothel
Prostitution in St. Paul,
1865-1883

JOEL BEST
Ohio State University Press • Columbus
© 1998 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Best, Joel.
Controlling vice : regulating brothel prostitution in St. Paul,
1865-1883/Joel Best,
p. cm. — (History of crime and criminal justice series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8142-0807-X (cl: alk. paper). —ISBN 0-8142-5007-6
(pa: alk. paper)
1. Prostitution—Minnesota—Saint Paul—History—19th century.
2. Sex oriented businesses—Law and legislation—Minnesota—Saint
Paul—History—19th century. 3. Prostitutes—Legal status, laws
etc.—Minnesota—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series.
HQ146.S25B47 1998
306.74'09776'581—dc21
98-26486
CIP
Text and jacket design by Paula Newcomb.
Type set in Adobe Trump Mediaeval by Nighthawk Design.
Printed by Bookcrafters, Inc.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

Preface / vii

Acknowledgments / xiii

1. Regulating Deviance / 1

2. Controlling Brothels in St. Paul / 14

3. Careers in Brothel Prostitution / 35

4. The Culture of the Brothel / 58

5. Respectable Responses to Regulation / 79

6. Officials and the Decline of Regulation / 101

7. Social Control: Strategy, Practicality, and Morality / 117

Appendix: Principal Brothels in St. Paul, 1865-1883 / 141

Notes I 143

Index I 171

PREFACE

In 1871, a group of respectable ladies risked their reputations to
visit several brothels in Washington, D.C. They asked the establish­
ments' madams about the realities of prostitution, its causes, and
the prospects for reform. The ladies were "fully convinced that jus­
tice had never been done these women, and that the only way to as­
certain their real condition, or to reclaim them, was to recognize
them as sisters, women to be visited, to be conversed with, to be
treated with consideration and respect."1 This was not the last at­
tempt to forge a bond of sisterhood between prostitutes and women
reformers. A century after the Washington ladies' visits, the promi­
nent feminist activist Kate Millett edited The Prostitution Papers,
statements by two feminists and two prostitutes. Echoing the
Washington ladies, Millett called for "a dramatic shift in perspec­
tive in the world of 'straight' women, historically divided from the
prostitute by their respectability. There must be a new climate of
awareness, of trust and self-respect between women, a feeling of
community."2
A similar impulse helps explain the recent revival of scholarly
interest in prostitution's history. Popularized histories of vice are an
old, established genre—winking, romanticized narratives stringing
vn
viii / Preface
together anecdotes emphasizing the brothels' elegance, the madams'
refinement, and the prostitutes' beauty. Focusing on vice's naughty,
titillating aspects, these accounts traditionally mixed fact, rumor,
and outright fiction.3 However, the new social history's emergence in
the 1960s inspired a new generation of more professional historians.
Calls to write "history from the bottom up," using census schedules,
city directories, and other documentary evidence to reconstruct ordi­
nary lives, led historians to study previously neglected sectors of so­
ciety, including the working class, ethnic minorities, immigrants,
and the underworld. In turn, in the 1970s, when public—and schol-
arly—attention began focusing on gender, feminist researchers relo­
cated the history of prostitution, shifting it away from the history of
crime or sexuality, redefining it as a part of women's history .A grow­
ing body of case studies that carefully mine local records now offers
detailed—and very often feminist—analyses of prostitution in vari­
ous cities.4 Several recent titles invoke the familiar imagery of sister­
hood: Their Sisters' Keepers; Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery; The
Lost Sisterhood. These feminist analyses view prostitution as gen­
dered criminality, a reflection of the limited choices available to
women in a patriarchal society.
Studying gender requires examining men as well as women. The
bedrock finding in criminological research is that crime tends to be
committed by young males. Immigration—disproportionately young
and male—ensured that males outnumbered females throughout the
nineteenth century. Unable to afford marriage, many of these young
men remained single, increasing their risks of becoming involved in
crime and deviance. They formed the core of the nineteenth cen-
tury's "bachelor subculture," a segment of the population prone to
trouble, the core constituency of not just the jail but the saloon, the
gambling hall, and the brothel. Thus, prostitution's history reflects
both women's and men's history.5
Focusing on gender helps us address some—but not all—of the
interesting issues raised by prostitution. For feminist activists and
scholars, but also for legislators, police officers, and the general pub­
lic, prostitution remains a knotty problem, symbolizing not only so-
ciety's exploitation of women but also the more general threat of
urban disorder. Prostitution raises issues of gender, but it also raises
other issues, as evidenced in the tangled, contradictory history of re­
form campaigns to address the problem, to "do something" about
prostitution.
Preface / ix
Throughout American history, reformers have agreed on the
need for new policies toward vice but disagreed about the nature of
those policies. One reform tradition demands more aggressive poli­
cies aimed at eradicating and prohibiting prostitution. In colonial
America, and in many cities during the early nineteenth century,
angry mobs attacked brothels, destroying the buildings and forcing
the women to flee. Later, ministers, respectable women, and other
reformers began to speak out against prostitution, first in the late
nineteenth century's social purity crusade, then as part of the Pro­
gressive movement. While condemning the prostitute, they typi­
cally viewed her as a victim, and concentrated their attacks on her
exploiters—madams, pimps, white slavers, and the male customers
who made vice possible. The movement to prohibit prostitution
continues: during the 1970s, ministers sought to rescue teenaged
girls who left the Midwest to become streetwalkers on New York
City's "Minnesota Strip"; a decade later, the threat of AIDS led to
new calls for eradicating prostitution.6
An opposing reform tradition seeks, not prohibition, but changes
in the enforcement of antiprostitution laws. These reformers argue
that laws against prostitution create more problems than they
solve. Efforts to prohibit vice drive prostitution underground, where
the lack of legal supervision fosters the spread of sexually transmit­
ted diseases (now including AIDS), the involvement of pimps and
organized criminals, and other social problems that arguably have
consequences more serious than those of prostitution itself. These
reformers believe that society would be better served if prostitutes
operated openly, albeit under supervision. A landmark statement of
this position was Dr. William Sanger's The History of Prostitution,
published in 1858. As the administrator of New York City's vene­
real hospital, Sanger saw former prostitutes dying in misery; at­
tempts at prohibition had not protected them, or the city's health.
He urged that the government regulate vice, requiring regular med­
ical inspections for prostitutes. During the late nineteenth century,
reformers in various cities pressed for such regulation: the Washing­
ton ladies thought brothels should be licensed; in St. Louis, the
1870 Social Evil Ordinance required regular medical inspections;
and New Orleans formally designated Storyville as its red-light
district. These experiments were controversial. Advocates of prohi­
bition attacked regulation as immoral, a compromise with evil. The
Progressives' campaign for prohibition, coupled with demands, as
x / Preface
World War I approached, that soldiers and sailors be protected from
disease and moral corruption, ended most local efforts to regulate
vice. With the exception of Nevada, where prostitution is legally
regulated in some counties, modern America is officially commit­
ted to a policy of prohibition.7
Still, some contemporary reformers continue to advocate regula­
tory policies. Modern feminists, like the Washington ladies before
them, object to existing policies that punish women but not men. Al­
though antiprostitution laws usually make it an offense to patronize
a prostitute, customers are arrested and prosecuted far less often than
prostitutes. This double standard of justice disadvantages women,
even in periods when society's sexual attitudes are relatively liberal.
In response, some feminists argue that prostitution should be decrim­
inalized so that prostitutes at least have protection from discrimina­
tory law enforcement. Organizations such as COYOTE (Call Off Your
Old Tired Ethics), a prostitutes' guild, seek to unite feminists and
prostitutes in social action to change the law, partially fulfilling the
Washington ladies' dream of sisterhood.8
Concern over prostitution, then, appears repeatedly in American
history, yet vice has remained an intractable social problem. Al­
though respectable people ordinarily preferred to ignore it, prostitu­
tion never disappeared from American cities. Nor did it ever disap­
pear as a focus for policy debates. For nearly two centuries, the
police and other legal authorities have remained caught in the mid­
dle of the issue, trapped between reformers who demand that offi­
cials crack down and eradicate vice, and reformers who urge that
some sort of regulation, rather than prohibition, should be the goal.
Each side presents its own program as the only workable plan, and
each points to fatal flaws in both the status quo and its opponents'
proposals. The policy adopted in a given community—particularly
in the nineteenth century—depended upon the relative influence of
these competing factions; a city might experiment with regulation
for a time, then give in to a moral crusade demanding prohibition,
then return to largely ignoring prostitution, while still giving lip
service to prohibition.
Although policies toward prostitution varied from one city to
the next, reflecting local patterns of political influence, it is possible
to speak of a national trend. During the second half of the nine­
teenth century, and into the first decades of the twentieth when the