On Christmas Day in 1872, the atmosphere was restive among the forty female residents of a medical institution on the outskirts of St. Louis. The women were patients, not prisoners, so they wondered why they were obliged to spend the holiday as they would any other day: confined to their wards, knitting or chatting, without music or revelry of any kind. Half a dozen of the boldest ones took it upon themselves to defy the steward and the matron, and to circumvent the gatehouse guards, who were ostensibly there to prevent undesirable visitors. The women made a break for more entertaining precincts downtown, “bent on a regular old-fashioned ‘bender,’ ” as the Missouri Republican reported at the time. But the authorities quickly tracked them down. Four of them were brought back to the institution, while the remaining two—perhaps in an unruly state of intoxication—were, as the newspaper dryly put it, “left in the calaboose to ruminate upon the inscrutable ways of Providence and the police.”
The institution from which the women escaped was the Social Evil Hospital, an isolation hospital for female sex workers who had tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases. The hospital had been discreetly established in the suburbs of St. Louis the previous year, as part of an innovative attempt to regulate prostitution in the city. The furnishings of the main building, where white women dwelled, were tasteful and comfortable, albeit sparely decorated. Black women were quartered separately, on the second floor of the gatehouse. The food was plentiful if plain: no oysters were served in the dining room, to the annoyance of the residents. They also chafed at the rule against smoking, and regretted the absence of a common room. Largely, though, they were reportedly more or less satisfied with their environs.
Despite its moralistic and stigmatizing name, the Social Evil Hospital was not dedicated to reforming the characters of the women who lived within its walls, sometimes for more than a year. There was no religious instruction, no curriculum of improving lectures. The staff members were civil, even kindly, forbidden to express disapproval of the way of life that had brought their patients into their care. The two-year-old daughter of the steward and the matron, who were married, scampered around the wards and played with the residents. The prevailing atmosphere was calm, with the steward exhibiting Solomonic judgment in internal affairs: when dealing with a quarrel between two women, he ordered that the clothes and shoes of one be taken away, so that she was obliged to stay in bed, then directed the other to wait upon her.
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The Social Evil Hospital was brought into being by St. Louis’s Social Evil Ordinance, passed in 1870 in response to the fact that, as the city had expanded, so had its sex trade. The ordinance, modelled on European examples, gave St. Louis the distinction of being the first city in the United States to legalize prostitution. Women who sold sex were required to register with the police, to submit to regular testing for venereal disease, and to pay a monthly fee of six dollars. More than twenty-six hundred women were registered between July, 1870, and March, 1873, and their levies funded the hospital. As a result, St. Louis’s sex workers saw the hospital as their own property; some of them voluntarily retreated there to give themselves respite from their labors.
A few days after the Christmas breakout, the mayor of St. Louis, Joseph Brown, paid the hospital a visit, and offered some words to the residents. “Some of you seem to think that the city is treating you unfairly in not letting you go where you please, and do as you please,” he said. “You probably have the right to think that, in view of men being permitted to do as they please and go where they please.” Assuring the women that “you are no worse than the men who came to see you,” he offered a frank justification for the inequity: “To control the men, as we are at present controlling you women, we should have to have a policeman at every door.” There was the rub. “We cannot get at the men,” he explained, “and hence we have to take charge of you.”
The St. Louis episode is among the many fascinating experiments in the regulation of prostitution explored in “Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution” (Princeton), by Eva Payne, a historian at the University of Mississippi. Payne seeks to reveal the often conflicting ways in which cities, states, and the federal government attempted to control the sale of sex, both in domestic contexts and overseas, when it was determined that American interests were at stake. (Payne focusses almost exclusively on the sale of sex by women to men, in common with the authorities whose actions she is concerned with—the appropriate balance of attention, given the prevalence of the trade.) In most instances, the difficulty of “getting at” the male consumers of prostitution resulted in the surveillance, restriction, and sometimes punishment of the women who provided the services.
Ideas of American exceptionalism, Payne argues, extended to the sex trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the combined efforts of social reformers and government officials drew upon notions of sexual continence as a moral strength with which Americans were especially endowed, thereby justifying an expansion of American power in areas well beyond the governance of red-light districts. With the stationing of U.S. troops overseas, particularly in what was known as “the tropics”—the Philippines in the eighteen-nineties, the Panama Canal Zone in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Dominican Republic in the nineteen-twenties—Americans invoked an ethic of strenuous sexual self-mastery that justified their mastery over others. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that “as a nation we feel keen pride in the valor, discipline, and steadfast endurance of our soldiers, and hand in hand with these qualities must go the virtues of self-restraint, self-respect, and self-control.”
American schemes were informed by French and British models of managing prostitution—either by regulating it or by trying to eliminate it. They were incorporated into America’s often confused sense of itself as a nation built upon red-blooded masculinity and upon high-minded righteousness. Where did women who sold sex—women who, even the sympathetic (and unnamed) reporter from the Missouri Republican suggested, tended toward idleness, frivolity, subversiveness, and the transactional—fit in?
The first efforts to contend with the issue of prostitution in America were, Payne shows, influenced by British campaigners who drew strength from incipient feminist activity but who also rooted themselves in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-prostitution campaigners referred to themselves as “abolitionists,” and likened the trade of women for sex to the transatlantic trafficking of people into slavery. Payne notes that, at first, such campaigners were explicitly concerned with advocacy for women’s rights. They opposed regulated prostitution, of the sort that would be attempted in St. Louis, because it infringed upon the liberties of women by permitting the state to interfere in their lives. These abolitionists argued that among the causes of prostitution were the social, economic, and political limitations that curtailed women’s opportunities in other spheres. The flesh trade was unlikely to lessen while women like the residents of the Social Evil Hospital could earn from sex many multiples of what they could make from, for example, sewing.
Foremost among these campaigners was Josephine Butler, a fearless advocate for women’s rights who lived in the British port city of Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century. Butler was outraged at local laws that, in the name of public hygiene, permitted compulsory genital inspections of women suspected of being prostitutes, while leaving unmolested their suspected clients—surely no less a vector of potential infection. In an essay published in 1871, she asked, “Shall we have liberty in lust, or shall we have political freedom? We cannot retain both.”
In 1875, Butler formed an organization with the cumbersome name of the British, Continental, and General Federation for the Abolition of Government Regulated Prostitution—later wisely abbreviated to the International Abolitionist Federation—which disseminated her case in the United States. Among the abolitionist victories was the repeal of St. Louis’s Social Evil Ordinance, in 1874, only four years after its enactment. Toward the end of the decade, in a letter to the Annual Meeting of the National Suffrage Association held in that city, Butler cited the coalition in England of “powerful women” and “pure, self-governed men, of the real old Anglo-Saxon type,” who together could fight against the dehumanizing acceptance of sex as a commodity.
Payne cites these words of Butler’s to highlight the easy conflation among nineteenth-century activists of the idea of sexual purity with that of racial purity—a tendency that continued into the twentieth century, when attention fell on so-called “white slave traffic,” a term predicated on ideas of untainted white womanhood. But she also acknowledges that Butler was specifically contrasting Anglo-Saxon men with Continental Europeans, among whom a different attitude toward prostitution had long obtained in public policy. (Butler’s other target for criticism was the degenerate upper-class Englishman, of whom she wrote, “There is no creature in the world so ready to domineer, to enslave, to destroy.”) As Payne demonstrates, the notion of American sexual exceptionalism set the U.S. apart from another nation accustomed to thinking of itself as exceptional: France.
The association of Frenchness with sexual libertarianism runs deep in the Anglo-American psyche. Payne observes, “Since the late nineteenth century, the ‘French’ method had been slang for fellatio, syphilis was termed ‘the French pox,’ ‘French pictures’ referred to pornography, and ‘French letters’ was a euphemism for condoms.” Licensed prostitution prevailed in France, largely supported by the general public, who, Payne writes, understood it as “necessary for the health of society, a means for men to release sexual energy while keeping their wives and children safe from the dangers of rape and venereal disease.”
The official position of the U.S. government, at least with regard to the troops it stationed in France during and after the First World War, rejected such accommodations. General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, argued that “sexual continence is the plain duty of members of the AEF, both for the vigorous conduct of the war and for the clean health of the American people after the war.” American soldiers were expected to be ready to sacrifice not only their lives for their country but their sex lives, too. Pershing maintained that “sexual intercourse is not necessary for good health, and complete continence is wholly possible.” This was a turnabout for a commander who, Payne notes, previously endorsed the quiet regulation of red-light areas patronized by U.S. soldiers during the Mexican border war of 1916. (During earlier military service in the Philippines, Pershing had lived with a local woman and fathered two children with her, further evidence that sexual continence was easier recommended than performed.)
In France, the American military leadership faced the problem of enforcing sexual restraint in a country where prostitution was permitted. Unable to regulate the prostitutes, Pershing was obliged to regulate his soldiers, subjecting them to compulsory lectures on the dangers of consorting with sex workers. Payne reproduces an exhibition card that was displayed in military camps, depicting a soldier’s apron-wearing mother, besuited father, docile-looking wife, and young child clustered around a cake newly baked in his honor—about as sexless a scenario as can be imagined. Beneath the image was a lurid warning: “The Folks at Home—They are waiting for you to come back with an honorable record. Don’t allow a whore to spoil the reunion.” For any soldier who spurned this promise of cake and contracted a sexually transmitted infection, there was the threat of punishment by court-martial. The divergence between the French and the American approaches to prostitution was summed up by a French military doctor: “These gentlemen do individual prophylaxis, we do collective prophylaxis.” American sexual exceptionalism was accompanied by American sexual individualism—the wishful conviction that each man was morally sturdy enough to regulate and govern himself.
There was, however, considerable evidence to the contrary. In the port city of Saint-Nazaire, one prostitute reportedly serviced sixty-five Americans in a single day. U.S. officials became concerned that French prostitutes were introducing their soldiers to “unnatural methods”—that is, oral sex. Although Americans initially responded to these invitations “with disgust and contempt,” one medical officer reported, they soon came around and were “indulging in perversions almost as willingly and as frequently as the French.” There was alarm at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning to the U.S. with such degenerate experience under their belts, and presumably spreading these habits among hitherto innocent American wives.
The medical officer who wrote up these findings didn’t lack for industriousness: he had interviewed close to two hundred and fifty sex workers in five cities. Indeed, American authorities, while they abhorred legalized prostitution, were indefatigably committed to underwriting long, sometimes international fact-finding tours to take its measure. In the mid-nineteen-twenties, under the auspices of the League of Nations—of which the U.S. was not itself a member—a number of experienced U.S. investigators took part in a three-year survey of prostitution in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. One of them, who was charged with exploring a brothel in Havana, discovered sexual exceptionalism of another kind. He had, he reported, danced with “the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in any house of prostitution anywhere. . . . Neck of gown was cut low; breasts exposed.”
It’s easy to wonder about the unconscious motivations of such upright investigators, as they set about uncovering what the targets of their probes were uncovering. But the conscious motivation was to expose and eradicate the trafficking of women for sex, a mission undertaken both for the safety of the women themselves and for the welfare of the larger population. By the nineteen-tens, anti-prostitution measures were being deployed in the name of combatting “white slavery”—the involuntary enlistment of white European and American women into sex work, often by what their defenders suggested were unscrupulous Continentals or African American pimps. Payne points out that the white-slavery narrative depended upon a paradox: prostitutes were at once “powerless victims” who were “in need of rescue” and a threat to the United States.
Federal laws intended to combat the trafficking of prostitutes assumed that all women who migrated and engaged in sex work were victims of trafficking. No space was allowed for an alternative narrative: that a woman, particularly one from a country with a ravaged economy, might decide for herself to make a living—or, in many cases, to occasionally supplement an income earned by other means—by selling her sexual services. The voices of sex workers themselves were usually drowned out by the louder voices of those seeking to exert control over them, whether through the rights-based advocacy of Josephine Butler or the growling prohibitions of General Pershing.
When they were heard, however, they were articulate and incisive about their predicament, which was also their opportunity. One streetwalker in Vienna told the American interlocutor who interviewed her for the League of Nations report, “I make good money. I am my own boss. I can walk where I want. I can pick the men I want to, and I aint [sic] got anybody to answer to.” Payne does not romanticize this self-reliance, nor does she anywhere suggest that regulated sex work—which today in the U.S. is permitted in only a handful of counties in Nevada—is an entirely delightful profession. (No one enjoys undergoing a speculum examination.) Rather, her sober scholarship reveals the extent to which would-be legislators of sexual mores remain for the most part willfully blind to the causes of the conditions they critique. The words of the Missouri Republican reporter who investigated the Social Evil Hospital still ring essentially true, a century and a half later: “To theorize and moralise is well enough for those who make their living by so doing, but to benefit or deal with fallen women, takes money, brains, a good heart, and a plain straightforward way of showing it.” ♦
