Getting Screwed (4 page)

The walls and ceiling were absolutely black with smoke and dirt, excepting where old, stained newspapers had been pasted on them . . . to exclude rain and melting snow. Around the walls were disposed innumerable unwashed and battered tin cooking utensils, shelves, for the most part laden with dust, old clothing, which emitted a powerful effluvium, hung from nails here and there, or tumble down chairs, a table of very rheumatic tendency, on which broken cups, plates and remains of food were scattered all over its surface. An empty whiskey bottle and pewter spoon or two. In one corner and taking up half the space of the den was the bedstead strongly suggestive of a bountiful crop of vermin, and on that flimsy bed lay the corpse of the suicide, clad in dirty ratted apparel, and with as horrid a look on her begrimed, pallid features as the surroundings presented. No one of her neighbors in wretchedness had had the sense to open either of the two little windows in the room to admit pure air, hence the atmosphere was sickeningly impure and almost asphyxiating. “My God,” exclaimed Coroner McHatton, used as he is to similar scenes and smells in his official capacity. “Isn't this awful?
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While some prostitutes led very difficult lives and suffered greatly, others turned the economics of commercial sex to their advantage. In the smaller mining towns, some single working-class women ran saloons as independent prostitute-proprietors. In Butte, Montana, some prostitutes were the widows of miners, and they worked out of cribs during the day while their children were in school.
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According to historians, there was a certain respect for the place of prostitutes in mining economies. They were not the same as “good proper wives,” but they held a certain status.
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Julia “Jule” Bulette, for example, was one of the first unattached white women to arrive in Virginia City, Nevada, after the Comstock Lode silver strike in 1859. Bulette, described in various accounts as beautiful,
slim, and full of good humor,
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had left an abusive husband behind in New Orleans, and she became a favorite of the Comstock miners. She owned her own cottage in Virginia City, and like Molly b'Dam, she became known for feeding the poor and nursing sick and injured men back to health. Because of Bulette's donations to the Virginia City fire department, local firefighters made her an honorary member of the Virginia Engine Number 1, and on July 4, 1861, Bulette rode the fire truck as Queen of the Independence Day Parade.
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Yet six years later, Bulette, then thirty-five, was murdered, and all her valuables were stolen. A French drifter was arrested and hanged for the crime, although he maintained his innocence to the end.
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Molly b'Dam also died young but not by violent means. In 1886, smallpox swept into Murray. Residents of the small mining town barricaded themselves behind closed doors in a futile attempt to keep the scourge at bay, and bodies began piling up everywhere. Molly Burdan took charge, calling a town meeting and berating the town's residents for their cowardice. With the help of her girls and a few other volunteers, she cleared out the hotels and turned them into makeshift hospitals for the sick, and Burdan and her girls became nurses. “It has been said that Molly worked tirelessly. She was everywhere, nursing patients until she could no longer stand. She barely ate and didn't take time to even change her clothes,” Seagraves writes. “The town survived — but Molly was never to be the same.”
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In October 1887, she developed a constant fever and hacking cough, and on January 17, 1888, Molly Burdan died of what was then called consumption and is now known as tuberculosis. On the day of her funeral, more than a thousand people came from the surrounding area to bid farewell to a prostitute whom they admired and loved. Today, in the few remaining saloons of Murray, Idaho, a song written in her honor,
The Legend of Molly b'Dam,
is still sung.
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A few years after Molly died, Veronica Baldwin was discharged from the Napa state asylum. In the 1890s, she turned up in Denver, Colorado, with the means to open an upscale brothel on Market Street. “It was said that Lucky Baldwin provided her with the money she needed,” writes
Seagraves in
Soiled Doves.
“It was also said that the lady displayed no evidence of insanity.”
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The years, however, had left their mark on Veronica Baldwin: “Although Veronica was still young, lines were etched upon her comely face, her hair was prematurely gray, and she walked with a slow measured step. She was no longer the same person that California newspapers once described as ‘the most beautiful girl on the Pacific Coast.' ”
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In her upscale Market Street brothel, Veronica Baldwin, dressed in royal purple with a touch of white lace, served her customers imported delicacies (including fresh oysters in season) and fine French wine in crystal glasses. Her clients were wealthy businessmen, mining owners, real estate investors, and politicians, and they came by invitation only.

According to several accounts, Veronica hired only beautiful, educated women who were experienced in matters of sex. One evening in 1898, a pretty young woman turned up on her doorstep in the company of a “notorious procuress,” the
Rocky Mountain News
reported. When Veronica Baldwin found out that the girl was a virgin and had no idea what she was getting into, she convinced her to go home to her family and then notified local police, who placed the girl in a “respectable dwelling” for the night, according to the
Rocky Mountain News.
The paper concluded its April 28 story with the news that “[the girl]was sent away to her relatives, the police department bearing the cost of transportation.”
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What this and other news reports of the time indicate is that Veronica Baldwin, like many successful madams and prostitutes of the nineteenth century, had a close and mutually beneficial relationship with local law enforcement. They paid the police and local politicians handsome bribes to look the other way, and in return, the police protected their establishments from drunken gangs and abolitionists who wanted to eliminate prostitution once and for all.

In the 1870s, William Sanger and other medical professionals (backed up by the American Medical Society), together with law enforcement, had pushed to legalize and regulate prostitution in the United States for public health reasons. As Sanger argued, regulating prostitution would enable the authorities to test and treat prostitutes for venereal
disease and clamp down on child prostitution. But several bills in the New York legislature failed because of opposition by suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony. Anthony and others who were campaigning for equal rights believed, as some feminists do now, that prostitution victimized all women and that it was a “social evil” that had to be eradicated. Suffragettes joined forces with Christian social purity reformers, and in the face of their concerted opposition, only a few cities in the United States, including New Orleans, San Francisco, and St. Louis, passed ordinances to legalize and regulate prostitution, limiting it to specific red-light districts.

By the 1880s, these abolitionist groups began to gain the upper hand. Religious groups had long promulgated a view of marriage to a “good” woman as a respected social arrangement (because it was the primary means through which erotic expression was linked to reproduction). Sex outside marriage threatened that social order, and sex for money was shunned because it completely divorced sexual intercourse from the goal of reproduction.
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Protestant groups were particularly vocal in their condemnation of prostitution because their religious tenets urged sexual satisfaction within the marriage and viewed infidelity more harshly than did Catholicism. And in fact, it was an alliance of evangelical Protestants and newly empowered suffragettes who led the campaign to outlaw alcohol and prostitution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These reformist groups wielded a potent weapon: the panic over “white slavery” that was sweeping the nation, fueled by salacious and largely erroneous newspaper accounts of the hordes of young white women, both foreign- and native-born, who were being forced into sexual slavery. Even the great literature of the day, such as Stephen Crane's 1893 book,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
, portrayed young white women as innocent victims seduced or forced into prostitution by evil pimps and madams.
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The image of the white slave, however, was largely myth. Several studies at the time showed that most young women selling sex were doing so to earn better wages than they could in domestic service or factory work. For example, the sociologist Kathleen Davis's 1912 study of 671 prostitutes showed that many of them also worked at low-paying
jobs (as store clerks, servants, or factory workers). Many of the women who had chosen to sell sex came from broken or low-income homes and needed the money.
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Even so, the hype over white slavery had its intended effect, as far as the reformists were concerned. It led to a series of state and federal laws that made it increasingly difficult for brothels and other forms of prostitution to operate as openly as they had before. In Colorado, gangs encouraged by antiprostitution and prohibition crusaders burned down a number of red-light districts in mining towns such as Colorado City and Cripple Creek in the early years of the twentieth century.
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In New York, laws pushed through by an alliance of purity reformers, settlement-house workers, and wealthy industrialists imposed fines on owners of apartments and buildings who rented to brothels and prostitutes.
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In 1910, the federal government passed the White Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act (named after Congressman James Robert Mann), which prohibited the transport of women from state to state for “immoral purposes.”

A Military Clampdown

As World War I approached, the clampdown intensified. Federal authorities, fearful that American soldiers would be laid low by disease-carrying prostitutes, began pressuring state officials to close down red-light districts throughout the country. By 1915, most red-light districts in the United States, including the famous Barbary Coast in San Francisco, the Levee district in Chicago, and Storyville in New Orleans, had been shuttered. Denver's red-light district was also closed, and Veronica Baldwin's brothel with it. Baldwin moved into one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods and continued to live a “quiet dignified life,” according to news reports of the time.
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Prostitution, of course, didn't disappear. It simply moved underground. After decades of visibility in theaters and concert halls and on the streets, prostitution became a clandestine activity. “Call girls” operated out of private apartments, and as prostitutes found themselves more
vulnerable to abuse from police and clients, pimps became a permanent fixture, providing women with protection, emotional support, and legal assistance.
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Once Prohibition became the law of the land, in 1920, prostitutes also began to operate out of the illegal speakeasies that were popping up in basements and private clubs all over the United States. Prohibition and the speakeasies had the paradoxical effect of breaking down the taboos against men and women drinking and dancing together in public. As Gilfoyle notes, the “sporting male culture” was replaced by more heterosexual forms of entertainment.

At the same time, attitudes toward enjoyment of sex in and outside marriage began to change — sex was increasingly seen as a basic expression of love within marriage — and premarital sex became more common. The increasing availability of birth control contributed to this profound shift in American attitudes. As a result, visits to prostitutes declined. In his seminal 1948 report,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
Albert Kinsey reports that the frequency of American men's sexual intercourse with prostitutes declined by as much as one-half to two-thirds between 1926 and 1948.
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The Prohibition-era speakeasies, of course, were largely run by organized-crime groups, which imported bootlegged alcohol and paid cops to look the other way. Organized-crime syndicates also controlled prostitution after World War I. As Nickie Roberts, author of
Whores in History,
puts it, “After the First World War, [organized-crime] syndicates dominated the sex market in
US
cities, securing their positions in alliances with local elites — the police and politicians who had earlier made fortunes out of the segregated red-light districts. . . . In all of this there was only one major victim: the whore.”
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This reality is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the story of Polly Adler, a Jewish émigré from Russia who was sent to the United States at the age of thirteen by her tailor-father in 1913. He intended to follow with the rest of the family, but World War I intervened. Once war broke out, her father could no longer get money to America to pay for her upkeep (she had been living with friends of friends in Holyoke, Massachusetts),
so she was pulled out of school and put to work in a paper factory at the age of fourteen. After two years of grueling labor, she fled to New York, where she found a job in a corset factory and roomed with a cousin in Brooklyn. By the time the United States entered World War I, in 1917, the corset factory had closed, and Polly Adler was working in a factory that made shirts for soldiers. At the age of seventeen, she was raped by the factory's foreman, who beat and impregnated her. In her memoir,
A House Is Not a Home,
Adler described how she obtained a back-alley abortion and how the experience changed her. “I had lost heart, I no longer had hope,” she wrote.
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The foreman continued to harass her, so Adler was forced to find a job at another factory, where she worked until January 1920. In her memoir, she recalled those months as a time of “unrelieved drabness, of hurry and worry and clawing uncertainty. . . . It was a bitter, hope-quenching, miserable sort of existence for a girl of 19.”
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