Disorderly City, Disorderly Women: Prostitution in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia

Abstract

Disorderly Women: Prostitution in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia UNTIL THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, the wards of Philadelphia were a disorderly mixture of the rich, middling and poor; of native and immigrant; of black and white. Amidst the rush of growth and change, there was little room for privacy, no premium on decorum. The city was an urban frontier; people were bound together in neighborhoods where they lived and worked, and as time and money permitted, played. Such boundaries as distinguished between races were evident and deepening. The modern city was to bring with it more rigid rules of behavior and formal standards that set groups off from each other. But this development was neither simple nor smooth. The reshaping of the old city was as much a reshaping of the people who lived in it as it was a recasting of the urban horizon. It was a struggle fought many times over between the old habits of some and the new priorities of others. Prostitutes—or disorderly women as they were frequently called— were familiar figures in the landscape of the disorderly city. They moved freely and openly in parks, on the streets, and in places of amusement. Along with paupers and peddlers, they used public spaces to their own advantage. Like more substantial citizens, they sometimes came before local magistrates to complain of wrongs against them; on other occasions, they might have been brought before the bench as vagrants and thieves. They were "public women," symbols of longstanding sexual disorder, tolerated as necessary nuisances. This essay attempts to re-create in ethnographic style the "disorderly" world in which prostitutes lived and to examine their lives and careers in the context of those of their peers among the laboring