Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [644]
Prostitution per se was not outlawed by statute, but the police could and did arrest “all common prostitutes who have no lawful employment” as vagrants or “disorderly persons” and send them to either the almshouse or penitentiary for six months. However, though the police periodically raided Sixth Ward brothels and often hauled in streetwalkers from predominantly immigrant areas, elite brothels were almost never disturbed: the New York district attorney charged a grand total of seven during the entire decade of the 1850s.
Prostitution proved irrepressible because New York males supported it, patrons and profiteers alike. The latter included landlords who collected hefty rents from madams, municipal tax collectors who skimmed their share of landlord revenues, and two new beneficiaries: pimps and politicians. Madams had begun hiring men to protect their employees from assault by drunken packs like the one, forty strong, that in 1851 trashed Catherine Cauldwell’s place on Lispenard Street. But streetwalkers were far more vulnerable and were soon dominated by their protectors. By the 1850s pimps had become a common sight, lounging in front of the monster hotels or in nearby bars, waiting for women to hand over their earnings.
Politicians too leeched off sex workers. The local ward bosses who relied on muscle to dominate the polls also used it to extort revenue, often in conjunction with local police. Tammany gang leaders like Isaiah Rynders and Thomas Hyer levied tribute from brothels, saloons, and gambling dens and in return extended them “protection.” In 1850, when police rounded up brothel keepers in the Points, Alderman Patrick Kelly scurried to their aid.
By mid-century prostitution had become deeply imbricated in the business life of the city. Dr. Sanger calculated its aggregate annual revenues as exceeding three million dollars and if liquor sales and rental income were added, the figure doubled, to an annual cash value just below the garment industry’s $7.5 million. For all the feminists’ efforts, New York would remain a “city of orgies.”
“MISTRESS OF ABOMINATIONS”
While respectable women fruitlessly battled the sex trades, they barely held their own in another arena, control of their own fertility. The average number of children born to white New Yorkers surviving to menopause continued to decline, dropping from seven or eight in 1800 to five in 1860. But abortion, one of the leading weapons in women’s birth control arsenal, came under heavy censure, touching off a public struggle over sexuality in the city.
Abortions were legal if done before “quickening”—a woman’s first awareness of fetal movement, usually late in the fourth month. Given most people’s assumption that a fetus was not human before this, the procedure’s morality was not generally an issue. Most considered abortion akin to contraception, and white, married, native, middleand upper-class Protestants dramatically expanded their reliance on it in this era. Catholics aborted far less frequently—their lower rate and later age of marriage provided an effective substitute—but there is no evidence of any public activity against abortion by the city’s Catholic leadership. By the end of the 1850s, according to one estimate, perhaps 20 percent of all New York pregnancies were being aborted, a substantial increase from earlier in the century.
Since 1828, however, abortion after quickening had been a crime. A person convicted of performing one—though not the woman herself—could be found guilty of second-degree manslaughter and given a year in jail or a hundred-dollar fine. This law, passed at the insistence of regular doctors, stipulated that postquickening abortions could be done legally if necessary to save the mother’s life, though only if two regular doctors attested to such necessity. The law, part of a larger package physicians had pushed through the state legislature in an effort to clamp down on their “irregular” competitors, had little practical effect throughout the 1830s.
Indeed, at decade’s end abortion had become a public commercial enterprise.