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Two Books on Prostitution

This research will examine two books that deal with issues relating to the phenomenon of prostitution in 19th-century London and New York City, City of Dreadful Delight by Judith R. Walkowitz, and City of Eros by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, respectively. The research will set forth the general pattern of ideas in each of the works and discuss in detail the similarities and differences in the methods and narratives of social history that each book uses to give an account of the culture, physical environment, and personalities informing the shape that sexual praxis in general and prostitution in particular took in the centers of the English-speaking world during the period.

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 America's Industrial Revolution.

The pattern of Gilfoyle's presentation is one of a triangle embedded into a sphere. Facts and figures are on one side, spatial representations of experience on another, and human-interest presentations on a third side. Encasing all is what amounts to a spherical density comprising accretion of statistics, multiform human experience and perception, and the geographic distribution of the artifacts and environments of an ever-incre...

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Two Books on Prostitution. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 22:12, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711945.html