Getting Screwed

Sex Workers and the Law

Alison Bass

• Publisher: ForeEdge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611688450
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Alison Bass weaves the true stories of sex workers with the latest research on prostitution into a gripping journalistic account of how women (and some men) navigate a culture that routinely accepts the implicit exchange of sex for money, status, or even a good meal, but imposes heavy penalties on those who make such bargains explicit. Along the way, Bass examines why an increasing number of middle-class white women choose to become sex workers and explores how prostitution has become a thriving industry in the twenty-first-century global economy. Situating her book in American history more broadly, she also discusses the impact of the sexual revolution, the rise of the Nevada brothels, and the growing war on sex trafficking after 9/11. Drawing on recent studies that show lower rates of violence and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, in regions where adult prostitution is legal and regulated, Bass makes a powerful case for decriminalizing sex work. Through comparisons of the impact of criminalization vs. decriminalization in other countries, her book offers strategies for making prostitution safer for American sex workers and the communities in which they dwell. This riveting assessment of how U.S. anti-prostitution laws harm the public health and safety of sex workers and other citizens—and affect larger societal attitudes toward women—will interest feminists, sociologists, lawyers, health-care professionals, and policy makers. The book also will appeal to anyone with an interest in American history and our society's evolving attitudes toward sexuality and marriage.

The Madonna-Whore Divide

Maggie Hall, a golden-haired twenty-year-old from Ireland, stepped off a ship in New York City in 1873, eager to conquer a new world. Hall was well educated, outgoing, and beautiful, with pretty blue eyes and a contagious laugh. But like many female immigrants without family or friends in New York, she had trouble finding decent employment, so she ended up working as a barmaid in a Manhattan saloon. There, she met a good-looking bounder by the name of William Burdan, the scion of a wealthy family who had never worked a day in his life.¹ Hall married Burdan, who insisted she change her first name to Molly (Maggie was apparently too common a name for him), and they took up married life in Burdan’s Manhattan apartment. Within months, however, his father found out about the secret marriage, and furious that his son had married an Irish barmaid, he discontinued Burdan’s allowance. The young man refused to find a job — he spent most of his time gambling and drinking with friends — and he wouldn’t hear of his wife’s going back to work in a saloon. As their finances worsened, they moved from apartment to apartment and finally landed in a cheap walk-up with no money to pay for food or rent. Burdan talked his wife into selling sex to other men, mostly other gentlemen of his milieu. He claimed that it was the only way that they could survive. Molly Burdan was heartbroken but did what her husband asked.²

In 1870s New York, the Victorian double standard was firmly entrenched. While there was no dearth of entertainment — striptease shows and brothels flourished alongside saloons, theaters, and expensive restaurants — these venues catered almost exclusively to men, according to Timothy Gilfoyle in City of Eros. Both single and married men participated in what Gilfoyle calls “a sporting male culture,”³ while their wives and girlfriends stayed home. In the Victorian ethos, middle- and upper-class women were not supposed to enjoy sex; they were cast as Madonnas: pure, sexless creatures whom Victorian men could worship on a pedestal. Since this meant that some men’s sexual desires could not be satisfied within the confines of marriage, these men turned to a class of women considered the polar opposite of Madonna: the Whore. Yet while it was acceptable for men of that era to frequent brothels, any woman who had sex outside marriage was deemed a whore.

At the same time, almost all the jobs available to women as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam in the nineteenth century were low-paying positions as servants, store clerks, barmaids, or garment-factory workers. Respectable (meaning middle- and upper-class) married women were not supposed to work, but according to Gilfoyle and others, many working-class women, both married and single, supplemented their income by selling sex.

“Many did not view [prostitution] as a full-time occupation,” Gilfoyle writes.⁴ A groundbreaking study of prostitutes by a well-known physician of the time, Dr. William Sanger, which was released in 1858, revealed that probably 5 to 10 percent of all young women between the ages of fifteen and thirty who were living in New York City prostituted themselves at some point. They cited “destitution” as the primary reason.⁵

Other researchers also found that the careers of many prostitutes in the nineteenth century were short-lived. Many worked largely for economic reasons from their late teens to their early to mid-twenties, and then they got married or otherwise merged back into the communities from which they had come.⁶ In fact, according to William Acton, another researcher of this period, the relative affluence of prostitutes “meant that they consistently enjoyed better health than other working women and were no more likely to fall victim to alcoholism, insanity, suicide,” or other problems.⁷

During the colonial era, prostitution largely existed on the fringe of society (in taverns by the docks) and was mostly controlled by women working independently. Indeed, Gilfoyle argues that before 1850, “Women had greater control and influence over prostitution than in any other period of American history.”⁸ By the 1860s, prostitution had grown into a thriving commercial enterprise in New York City, with six hundred brothels scattered around Broadway and Soho. Those who ultimately benefited from this system, Gilfoyle says, were the ward politicians from Tammany Hall and the police, who extracted bribes to look the other way. “Prostitution became a significant revenue source for the local political bosses,” he writes.⁹

Gilfoyle and others set this trend squarely in the context of the Victorian era’s sharpening gender divide. “Men wanted control over autonomous and sexually independent women,” he writes. “Violent gangs allied to the political machine used extortion, force and outright terror to ensure male hegemony over the profits of prostitution.”¹⁰

Indeed, Gilfoyle and others contend, such institutionalized violence is what gave rise for the first time to pimps. The women who ran brothels were forced to hire men for protection against gangs paid by Tammany Hall, and streetwalkers required pimps to protect them against physical assaults from both clients and police.

Even though prostitution offered women the chance to make a better living, it was a dangerous trade. According to the 1858 study by Sanger, approximately 40 percent of the prostitutes he surveyed said they had contracted syphilis or gonorrhea at least once. Many prostitutes also had to contend with violent clients. As Nickie Roberts writes in Whores in History: “A violent pimp was often the least of the whore’s worries; every prostitute was, on the other hand, afraid of the possibility of being attacked — even murdered — by a client. The whore-stigma ensured that the protection and safety of prostitutes was low on the police agenda, and few prostitute-killers were actually caught.”¹¹

Underage prostitution was also rampant in 1870s New York. Numerous brothels promoted the availability of nubile young virgins amid a general atmosphere of “youthful carnality.”¹²

Even then, Sanger found that less than one-fifth of girls selling sex in New York said they had been seduced or forced into prostitution. Many came from broken homes, where there were too many mouths to feed and no male breadwinner; others were newly arrived immigrants trying to survive in a cold, hard city.¹³

Against this backdrop, Molly Burdan was growing increasingly tired of the carnal demands her husband and his friends were imposing on her. In 1877, she left William Burdan and traveled west. She spent time in Chicago, Virginia City, Nevada, the Dakota Territory, and San Francisco, becoming a sought-after prostitute everywhere she went. “The price for her favors was high and she had acquired an expensive wardrobe, which included furs and exquisite jewelry,” writes Anne Seagraves in Soiled Doves.¹⁴ In 1884, when Burdan was thirty, she read about the rich gold strike in Coeur d’Alene, a lake district in northern Idaho. She took the train to Thompson Falls, Montana, and there purchased a horse and joined a pack train on its way to Murray, Idaho. But the pack train of people, some on horseback, some on foot dragging a toboggan with all their worldly goods, was hit by a blizzard. Riding on horseback, Burdan noticed that a woman, who was carrying a small child, had stumbled in the snow and fallen. Burdan got off her horse, put both the woman and the child up on the saddle, and then remounted, according to newspaper accounts. But neither of them was dressed for the blizzard, and Burdan could see they were freezing. So when the pack train came to a battered hut off the side of the path, she dismounted, and they took shelter in the hut, all three huddling in Molly Burdan’s furs. The rest of the people in the pack continued onward, never expecting to see the three stragglers again.¹⁵

The next day the entire town was surprised to see Burdan and her wards galloping down the street. She ordered a cabin and food for the mother and child, saying that she would foot the bill. As for herself, she announced that she wanted “cabin number one.” In Murray, and throughout the west, Seagraves writes, “cabin number one was reserved for the madam of the red light district.”¹⁶ When an Irishman named Patrick O’Rourke asked the fur-clad lady on her horse what her name was, she replied, “Molly Burdan.” But he misunderstood and responded in his heavy Irish brogue, “Well for the life of me, I’d never of thought it. Molly b’Dam.” This was the beginning of the legend of Molly b’Dam, who became known throughout the West for her kindness and generosity toward those less fortunate than herself. ¹⁷ Burdan’s considerable charms are on display in an undated photo of her, draped coquettishly in furs, which hangs in the Spragpole Museum in Murray, Idaho.

A few years before Molly Burdan arrived in Idaho, another young woman, by the name of Veronica Baldwin, ventured west to embark on what she too hoped would be an exciting new chapter in her life. An émigré from Britain, she had no idea that the unforgiving chauvinism of the era would relegate her, just like Molly Burdan before her, to cabin number one. Veronica’s wealthy older cousin, Elias J. Baldwin, had invited her to come and work as a schoolteacher on the Santa Anita ranch he owned in the foothills outside Los Angeles. By 1880, “Lucky” Baldwin, who had made his fortune buying and selling gold-mining interests in the West, owned more than 40,000 acres in Los Angeles County, including the Santa Anita ranch, where he bred racehorses.

Veronica Baldwin, a willowy, dark-haired woman with striking hazel eyes, burst into the news on January 4, 1883, when she shot Elias Baldwin through the left arm as he left the private dining room of the Baldwin Hotel (which he owned) in San Francisco. According to the San Francisco Call of January 5, 1883, Veronica Baldwin, then twenty-three, said, “He ruined me in body and mind. That is why I shot him.” She told reporters that Baldwin had sexually assaulted her and then dismissed her from her job for improper conduct. According to news accounts, she said, “I did not try to kill him. I hit him just where I wanted to, for I am a good shot and never miss anything I aim at.”¹⁸

In the end, Lucky Baldwin declined to testify against his cousin, and she was acquitted. She immediately left for what was then the Washington Territory, according to news reports of the time. Three years later, she reappeared in California, threatening to sue her cousin for the support of a child whom she insisted he had fathered. According to Lucky Baldwin, a 1933 book about the multimillionaire, “that threat was also hushed quickly and again the girl vanished, only to reappear in the news a third time when she was found to be violently insane and committed to the state asylum at Napa by Judge Lucien Shaw.” Horace Bell, a San Francisco lawyer turned investigative reporter, raged about the case in the Porcupine, a muckraking sheet he had founded. “Our hellish statutes protected [Baldwin] and enabled him to send his victim to an insane asylum,” Bell wrote.¹⁹

As Carl Glasscock, the author of Lucky Baldwin, notes, Elias Baldwin, who married four times during his long life, almost always to women much younger than himself, was sued by a number of other young women for staining their virtue and breaking promises to marry them. “Lucky Baldwin’s reputation as a Lothario was growing even faster than his reputation as a turf-man, a multi-millionaire and a great landed proprietor and promoter,” Glasscock writes.²⁰

Around the time that Veronica Baldwin was involuntarily dispatched to the state asylum in Napa, Molly b’Dam was pursuing a happier existence in Murray, Idaho. According to newspaper reports, Molly was good to the girls in her brothel and the locals were good to her. She was always feeding hungry families, and those who were down on their luck knew that Molly b’Dam would provide them with warm clothing and shelter. Although she lived in luxury, Molly never hesitated to ride on her horse over treacherous mountain trails to nurse a sick prospector.²¹

Women: A Rare Commodity

In the mining economies of the West during the latter part of the nineteenth century, women were a rare and precious commodity. In 1860, only 5 percent of the residents of Virginia City, Nevada, were female, according to Barbara Brents, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coauthor of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland.²² Prostitution, gambling, and drinking were mainstays of the local economy, and by 1870, which marked the height of Virginia City’s prosperity, prostitution was the most commonly listed occupation for women. Prostitutes worked out of dance halls, saloons, or one-room shacks known as cribs. Many prostitutes, particularly those who were no longer young or pretty enough to work in the high-class brothels or saloons and had fallen to the bottom of the food chain — working out of cribs — lived in squalid quarters. An 1886 newspaper account describes the crib of a Denver, Colorado, prostitute who had killed herself:

The walls and ceiling were absolutely black with smoke and dirt, excepting where old, stained newspapers had been pasted on them . . . to exclude rain and melting snow. Around the walls were disposed innumerable unwashed and battered tin cooking utensils, shelves, for the most part laden with dust, old clothing, which emitted a powerful effluvium, hung from nails here and there, or tumble down chairs, a table of very rheumatic tendency, on which broken cups, plates and remains of food were scattered all over its surface. An empty whiskey bottle and pewter spoon or two. In one corner and taking up half the space of the den was the bedstead strongly suggestive of a bountiful crop of vermin, and on that flimsy bed lay the corpse of the suicide, clad in dirty ratted apparel, and with as horrid a look on her begrimed, pallid features as the surroundings presented. No one of her neighbors in wretchedness had had the sense to open eith...