From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

This history of prostitution in nineteenth-century New York is quite an eye-opener. The most striking thing about it is how public and open the sex industry was.

Prostitutes were everywhere: on the streets; in brothels, boarding houses, hotels and tenements; in saloons, cabarets, theatres and museums; and even in barbers, cigar shops, lunchrooms, soda water stores, bakeries and delicatessens! In the plush parts of town there were luxurious and exclusive brothels in close proximity to splendid mansions, while in parts of the poorer areas most dwellings were devoted to the sale of sex. There were women sitting naked or half-naked in windows or on their porches, and couples could be seen having sex through open windows or even on the front porch. Many of the prostitutes were teenage girls from 12 to 15 years, some brothels specialised in 10-14 year-olds, and some girls were as young as 9! (Until 1889, the age of consent in New York was 10.) The account books of brothels show that business could be brisk: one girl had 273 men in two weeks (an average of 19 a day), taking 28 on one day; another had 49 in one day; while one had 58 different men in a three- hour period (one every three minutes).

Although some women made prostitution their career (and some of these went on to become wealthy and celebrated madams), many women engaged in prostitution only for a short spell or only part-time to supplement their income. Prostitution was often a family affair, with husbands hiring out wives, and parents hiring out their daughters. In nineteenth-century New York, around 5-10 per cent of females between the ages of 15 and 30 prostituted themselves. Prostitution offered them a high remuneration for an easy activity that to many of them did not seem like work. While many of these prostitutes were immigrants, the majority were born Americans, often from the countryside; and they came from families with a wide range of occupational backgrounds, with nearly 75 per cent coming from stable families of an agrarian or artisan type, and about 6 per cent from families which enjoyed high status or wealth.

The clients of prostitutes came from all social classes, were of all ages (some as young as 15), and were often married. From 1820 there developed a "sporting male" culture, organised around various forms of gaming, gambling and communal drinking, which promoted male sexual aggressiveness and promiscuity, and which defended prostitution as a part of personal freedom.

A salient feature of this commercial sex was the mixing of races: white men with black women, black men with white women, not to mention men and women of other races too. Indeed, some brothels offered exclusively inter-racial action. Another notable feature was the tolerance of homosexuality, with some brothels offering male homosexual prostitutes as well as females.

From 1850, in addition to intercourse, many other sexual services came on to the market, including abortion, pornography, striptease and other sex shows (in brothels and concert halls), museums covering salacious topics, and the "sporting" press. There were guidebooks to brothels, literary works dealt with sexual themes, brothels and abortionists advertised their services in the New York daily newspapers, and employment agencies recruited girls for brothels.

Side-by-side with the growth of public commercial sex there was the growth of opposition to it. Many people complained about the lewd and unruly behaviour of prostitutes and their clients in their vicinity; and some puritans wanted to put a stop to prostitution, or to its public visibility, altogether. However, prostitution was a lucrative business in which many wealthy landowners and businessmen, as well as politicians, were involved. Furthermore, despite its prevalence and openness, prostitution was actually illegal, but the law was not properly enforced because of the widespread corruption of policemen, judges and politicians who used the illegality of prostitution as a way of extorting money from those involved in it.

Anti-prostitution campaigns were short-lived and ineffective until after the Civil War. Then came the rise of puritan vigilantes who took it upon themselves to enforce the law, raiding (and wrecking) brothels and seizing pornographic material. Many of these vigilante groups won vague law-enforcement responsibilities from the state and competed with municipal agencies in the "war against vice". In the 1890s, two of New York's mayors mounted crusades against prostitution, and various anti- vice laws were passed before and after the turn of the century.

The effect of these repressive campaigns was not to curb prostitution but to alter the institutions through which it operated, making it less visible. Thus brothels tended to be supplanted by tenement or hotel prostitution. Later, after the rise of skyscrapers (with private apartments) and the introduction of the telephone, came the more discreet "call girls". And large parts of the business of prostitution, including brothels, came under the control of violent criminals. In consequence, commercial sex became much more furtive, securing a prostitute required a diligent effort, and politicians and the police distanced themselves from prostitution. As a result, by 1914, campaigners could declare that New York was "the cleanest city in the world".

The first two chapters of Mr Gilfoyle's book are given over to a description of sex districts and are pretty dull. In fact, if I had not been reviewing the book, I would have got no further. However, from the third chapter onward, the descriptive parts of the book (which make up the bulk of it) are very informative, entertaining and enlightening, despite a lot of repetition (which seems to arise from a desire to keep each chapter relatively self-contained).

In contrast, the analytical passages are, for the most part, difficult to take seriously. Mr Gilfoyle seems to be some kind of Marxist: his analytical paragraphs are cluttered with phrases such as "sexual and economic exploitation", "gender solidarity", "male sexual supremacy", "bourgeois rule of appropriate conduct", "misogynist, masculine recreation", "inherent contradiction in New York's market economy", "cultural construction", "the selection of a spouse was subject to the vagaries of the market" (a reference to personal ads), and other such wordy nonsense. For example, his explanation of the spread of the "sporting male" culture refers, amongst other things, to the increasing exploitation of wage labourers by their employers which, he says, left these labourers too poor to support a family (p.113). These, remember, are men who spent their evenings drinking and gambling and fornicating with prostitutes! They were that poor? Besides, as Mr Gilfoyle himself points out, many of the "sporting male" whoremongers were wealthy, and large numbers of them were married men. His risible reference to exploitation and poverty would seem to be merely a genuflexion to Marxist orthodoxy.

In fact, the quality of his attempts at analysis had been presaged by the concluding remark of his Introduction, where he says that "whenever a civilization relies upon the market to determine its major priorities, the social by-products are never 'free' or without cost". However, provided one does not take them seriously, his analytical passages and his crass demonisation of market forces can be as entertaining as the better descriptive parts of the book.

Danny Frederick