Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [641]
Class lines are enforced in a fashionable store, (torn Harper’s Weekly, January 8, 1859. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
In the end, while genteel feminists did provide tangible services to immigrant women, they themselves were the primary beneficiaries. Reform projects justified respectable women’s claim on city space. Social housekeeping was deemed a legitimate extension of women’s sphere into the public arena, accepted (at times hailed) by wealthy males of their own class. It allowed them to create and run large, complex organizations that commanded considerable assets. Like the women writers who (with the help of readers) had secured a position in the marketplace, so female reformers (with the help of reformees) secured a place in the civic and charitable arena. A feminist alliance would remain elusive, however, not least because women of different classes were as far apart on issues of sexuality as they were on those of economics and theology.
CITY OF ORGIES
In 1857 the Reverend William Berrian had been for three decades the rector of Trinity Church, the most prestigious pulpit in the United States. In a sermon that year he admitted to his congregation that “during a ministry of more than fifty years I have not been in a house of ill-fame more than ten times!” Perhaps even more remarkable than this pronouncement by such a model Christian was the fact that what startled his listeners was not that he had gone whoring at all but that he had gone so infrequently. For the years of his ministry had seen a luxuriant growth of prostitution in New York City—marked by the widespread patronage of eminently respectable bourgeois men—to the point that the metropolis had become the wide-open national capital of commercialized sex.
In the 1840s and 1850s, when Broadway between Canal and Houston streets emerged as the city’s grand shopping and entertainment boulevard, New York’s bawdy houses trekked northward too. They clustered directly behind the commercial strip, in the small cobbled streets of Mercer, Greene, Howard, and Wooster—present-day SoHo. In the evening, scant hours after the afternoon promenade of fashionable ladies, Broadway filled with fashionable streetwalkers, who sauntered past the hotels, paused at the gas-lit shop windows, loitered outside the theater entrances. As the fifties wore on, these femmes de pavé invaded the daylight, cruising Broadway after shopping hours, casting inviting glances at passersby.
“Hooking a Victim,” streetwalkers on Broadway, c. 1850. The adoption of the term hooker as a synonym for prostitute may have been inspired by the proliferation of brothels and streetwalkers on the Corlear’s Hook waterfront. (© Museum of the City of New York)
The SoHo brothels, most of them run by entrepreneurial madams, were stylish affairs, noted for attractive women, luxurious furniture, fine liquor, and black servants, some of whom doubled as piano players. Different houses had distinctive clienteles (southerners, Germans, Astor House visitors) and particular specialties: Mrs. Hathaway’s “fair Quakeresses,” Mrs. Everett’s “beautiful senoritas [who] are quite accomplished,” Miss Lizzie Wright’s “French belles.” Carnally inclined males kept abreast of the possibilities by perusing handbooks such as Charles DeKock’s Guide to the Harems, Free Lovyer’s [sic] Directory of the Seraglios, and Butt Ender’s Prostitution Exposed. They could also consult the newspapers, the calling cards brothels dropped off at hotels, or the city directories (in 1855 sixty-nine women listed themselves as “prostitute”).
The ethnic composition of women “on the town” reflected the larger transformation in working-class