Love for Sale

Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945

Elizabeth Alice Clement

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780807856901, 9780807830260
• eBook ISBN: 9780807877074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The intense urbanization and industrialization of America’s largest city from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class practice of heterosexual barter called “treating,” Elizabeth Alice Clement examines changes in sexual morality and sexual and economic practices.

Women “treated” when they exchanged sexual favors for dinner and an evening’s entertainment or, more tangibly, for stockings, shoes, and other material goods. These “charity girls” created for themselves a moral space between prostitution and courtship that preserved both sexual barter and respectability. Although treating, as a clearly articulated language and identity, began to disappear after the 1920s and 1930s, Clement argues that it still had significant, lasting effects on modern sexual norms. She demonstrates how treating shaped courtship and dating practices, the prevalence and meaning of premarital sex, and America’s developing commercial sex industry. Even further, her study illuminates the ways in which sexuality and morality interact and contribute to our understanding of the broader social categories of race, gender, and class.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION. The Evolution of ‘‘Near Whores’’ and ‘‘Whores in the Making’’
• CHAPTER 1. Today’s Children: Courtship, Americanization, and Modernity
• CHAPTER 2. The Treat: Transforming Sexual Values at the Turn of the Century
• CHAPTER 3. These Are the People in Your Neighborhood: Prostitution, Commerce, and Community in Turn-of-the-Century New York City
• CHAPTER 4. A Fight on the Home Front: The Repression of Prostitution during World War I
• CHAPTER 5. Doing Our Part for the Boys in Uniform: Sexuality, Treating, Courtship, and Patriotism
• CHAPTER 6. Nudes Feel Pinch!: Prostitution, Prohibition, and the Emergence of America’s Sex Industry
• CHAPTER 7. Treating, Dating, Petting, and the Class Dynamics of America’s First Sexual Revolution
• CONCLUSION. A New Type of Girl in an Old Type of Delinquency: Women, Sexuality, and Venereal Disease during World War II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index