Controlling Brothels in St. Paul / 14 3

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 98765432 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 scholarly—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 century'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 society'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

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