History and Archeology of Sex Work

- 1980s: New historical scholarship that expands into social/cultural aspects of history - Archeologists follow a year later Primary Source Challenges Regarding Sex Work - Many sex workers in large urban areas used false names and left very few records - Purposely messed with and falsified records to mask their identities - Best records are from the Progressive Era - Valuable sources are court records (census, magistrate, arrest, jury trial) - Many of these were destroyed, especially in large cities - Trial records still provide names, addresses, outcomes, testimonies, ect - Published accounts (newspapers, reform organizations) - New records include land ownership for the vice districts - Triangulate records with ancestry research and census records - Lots of archeological research has been conducted through Cultural Resource Management (CRM) - Involved archaeological testing and mitigation of future sites of modern development - Brothel is an easily accessible aspect of historical research for archeologists - Walking, street trade and less formal forms of prostitution don’t leave much trace - All sources will have heavy bias, makes research difficult - Trouble preserving sources (inheritance, poorly stored, general wear and tear) Primary Themes, Point of Origin - Historical and archeological research are both heavily influenced by feminist theory - Involves humanities and social sciences - Prior to 1980s, US historians rarely paid attention to brothels, sex workers, red light districts, ect - 1960s/1970s, historians expanded research and focused on understudied areas - Social concerns; education, labor, social movements, gender, race, ethnicity - Bottom-up, emphasis on the common people - 1980s-present, focusing on gender, labor, race, crime, reform, regional/national perspectives - Archeological investigations by CRM brought sex work to archeology in 1980s, but little was published beyond site reports - Lots of stuff went unpublished and henceforth is hard to access - Archeologists adopted post modern and feminist perspectives 1990s Focus on Women, Gender and Sexuality - Feminist scholarship picked up in the 80s and 90s - Emphasis on lived experiences of women in the sex trade - - The Lost Sisterhood (1982) by Ruth Rosen - Prostution was a short term economic solution - Growing middle class pushed vice reform to cure the “social evil” of prostitution Middle/Upper class women had work related to the domestic sphere - - - - Not a lot of options for lower class women Cultural history of women and leisure touched on changing dating practices and marginalization of prostitution - Working class youth moved away from formal dating to casual sex, which increased premarital sex - “Treating girls”, women who traded varying degrees of sexual attention for gifts/dates Archeologists focused on sexual health - Medical bottles, syringes, douches, evidence of abortion tools and infaticide based on neonatal remains - Late 1800s; Comstock Laws limited access to contraception Men involved with sex work aren’t as focused on as women - Interactions through law enforcement and reform efforts - “Sporting men,” (pp.9) men who were returning customers and were “infatuated” with promiscuous behavior Class - Research on Madams, helps with research on brothel hierarchies - After 1820s, prostiution rose with growing industrialization and provided a variety of choices for various economic classes - Sex work hierarchies, parlor houses to single women on streets - Women descended as they aged - Sex work cannot be properly examined without studying labor, social climate and politics - Middle class women organizing based on prostitutes earning their own wages Societal Context - By the turn of the 20th century, prostitution was considered a necessary evil, legally and culturally - Red light districts were tolerated - In some areas, prostitution was regulated by local law enforcement - Reformis pushing against prositution, seeing it as a “social evil” - Moralistic approach to a business approach - Red light district were monopolies and places of political corruption that needed to go - Prostitutes represented loose morals, disease, political/urban corruption - Reformers failed because they weren’t focusing on people affected by prostitution (the prostitutes themselves) - “White Slavery”, sex trafficing of white women, crucial to progressives attempts to stop prositution (pp.12) - Any legislation brought because of white slavery was a way to police women’s sexuality - Forced workers out of red light district and into a shadow economy Place and Space - Place: area imbued with cultural meaning (archaeologist definition) - Historians focus on urban areas and red light districts Frontier prostiution (1870s) (pp14) - Prostitutes were not living at the edges of society but deeply woven into it - Difficult, competitive lives, violence and addiction were very common Race - Mostly historians, not so much archeologists - Archeologists mention race, but seldom expand on it - Mid 1800s - Strong systemic bias against black women - How this bias sheds light on current disproportionate arrest/incarceration rates (pp.16) - Post Civil War - Southern Black women were held to a convoluted standard on sexual behavior - Some harnessed these stereotypes for business - Strip teases, “exotic” behavior Thematic Framework (of the entire book, not the chapter that we just read, these are themes of future chapters) - Primary goals: Bring archeologists and historians into dialogue with one another - Overlapping methodology - Mix methodology together - Prostitution in urban areas, power imbalance - Criminal charges to explore legal and social landscape - White slavery - How women used tactics to help construct physical/social landscapes in large urban areas - Race and who is included in sex trade research - Presence of children in brothels - Ida Dorsey: Black madam in upper midwest (St.Paul and Minneapolis) - Melvina Massey: Black madam in Fargo, North Dakota - Men in the sex trade - Tom Savage: Saloon owner in LA, gendered realities of who controlled the flow of money