Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [643]
Some men justified brothels as “safeguards to the virtue of maidens, wives, and widows, who would otherwise be exposed to violence and outrage.” “Sporting men” went farther and celebrated brothel culture, calling it an essential part of sophisticated urbanity. Their ranks included stylish Bowery soaplocks, young clerks on the make, and “fast” gentlemen who set up their shopgirl, milliner, or servant “sweethearts” in brownstone apartments. Sporting males detested matrimony, which turned men into “captives” of women, and read sporting papers like the Flash, the Libertine, the Rake, the Whip, and the National Police Gazette, which featured up-to-date information about New York underworld offerings (along with ads for the cure of venereal disease).
Many respectable women were enraged that their husbands and brothers so casually flaunted a sexual code that women were forbidden to transgress. Theoretically both sexes of the bourgeoisie agreed on finding in sexual repression a badge of their moral superiority to class inferiors. True, it was supposedly easier for women to adhere to these standards—medical texts insisted that most “are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind”—so marriage manuals urged wives to assist husbands in subduing their passions. Some husbands went along with the dictates of propriety or agonized over their lapses when they didn’t, but many cheerfully bifurcated their sexual lives, turning for fun to working-class women who embraced sexual pleasure, or were forced by circumstances to pretend they did.
With males’ self-assumed prerogatives negating whatever control respectable women had gained over the sexual system, they set out to rein in prostitution. The traditional approach—redeeming or rescuing prostitutes, thus helping dry up supply—was carried on by the Female Benevolent Society, founded in the early thirties. In 1838 the society built a refuge in Yorkville, several miles outside the city, where residents could learn useful trades. It also began to take in the “friendless female orphan, when no way is left for her to obtain a livelihood but that of prostitution.”
Other women reached out to prostitutes in prison or immediately upon their release. The male Prison Association of New York set up a Female Department, which later, having come to believe “women could work best independently for the redemption of their own sex,” split off to form the Women’s Prison Association (1854). These ladies opened a refuge on Tenth Avenue for former inmates; it housed over a hundred women, on condition they forsook smoking, drinking, and cursing and took up sewing, laundering, and “religious study.” The ladies promised to “whisper hope to [each exconvict] amid her despair, teach her lessons of self-control, instill into her ideas of purity and industry”—then get her a job as a maid. In its first twenty years the refuge sheltered 2,961 women and placed 1,083 with private families, finding only 480 to be “unworthy” or hopelessly recidivist.
Reformers also crusaded tirelessly against male “licentiousness.” “Every man who will sport with female virtue,” declared the Advocate, should be fixed with “an eternal stigma.” Virtuous females were asked to boycott seducers: “Let them be regarded as enemies to the sex.” The Female Moral Reform Society turned to state power to rein in forward males. After a lengthy struggle, including a petition campaign that drew thousands of “virtuous mothers and daughters” from around the state, the legislature passed an Act to Punish Seduction as a Crime (1848). “Any man who shall under promise of marriage seduce and have illicit connection with any unmarried female of previous chaste character shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,” the law proclaimed. But with redress available only to women willing to prove their virtue in court, and with the “testimony of the seduced female, unsupported by other evidence,” being insufficient for conviction, the seeming triumph fizzled. It was a rare year in which more than one or two rakes were arrested under its provisions.