Prostitution in the 19th Century

The differences between City of Dreadful Delight and City of Eros are not confined to the fact that the former deals with London prostitution in the late Victorian era and City of Eros deals with New York prostitution from the Federalist period to the first postwar period of the 20th century. Indeed, the manners, mores, and commercialism of urban sexuality that Walkowitz and Gilfoyle take as their subject share a background of industrial urbanization of culture and a social landscape marked by relatively rapid environmental change and relatively sharp differences between social groups regarding access to material benefits and life options in the urban environment. New York between 1790 and 1920 was marked by the kind of change that paralleled the myriad changes, including massive urbanization and immigration, of Am

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e of the public sphere. It is one explanation, too, of how an ethos of a double sexual standard could have a market-centered rather than morality-centered provenance, with women having unequal access to the whole range of social experience. It became increasingly obvious, during what Gilfoyle refers to as the "halcyon years" of commercial sex in New York, that socially, women could be either respectable or not, either wives and mothers or whores. At the same time, men could productively straddle the mainstream and the demimonde. Meanwhile, the more socially prominent and wealthy the family, the more likely family commercial interests were to straddle both respectable and unrespectable holdings. In a series of maps of Manhattan, Gilfoyle describes the geography of New York prostitution throughout the 19th century that show it to have been geared more or less for neighborhood (= equivalent socioeconomic class) use. Both "good" and "bad" neighborhoods appear to have been served by brothels, theaters, and saloons, and Gilfoyle makes the point that "contemporary observers so often understood prostitution in spatial terms" (222). The less wealthy the neighborhood, the more likely prostitution was to have an institutional component (hier
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Approximate Word count = 3956
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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