“Hyenas in Bonnets”

This chapter contends that the figure of the procuress and madam garnered universal hatred not only among writers but also doctors, sociologists, and abolitionists, who drew upon anti-Semitic rhetoric and fears of “white slavery” to galvanize the public against the go-between and her profession. She was imagined to be a woman more dangerous than the demimondaine, a force harder to contain than the brothel worker, and a villain fiercer than the gold-digging coquette. Indeed, the antagonism toward madams and procuresses was far stronger than that toward other women who defied traditional norms of motherhood. As the chapter demonstrates, at the heart of condemnations of Russia's “hyenas in bonnets” was a deep distrust of women entrepreneurs who acquired social and financial capital. The procuress became a repository for male frustration at women who managed, despite their reproductive irrelevance, to gain a cultural relevancy in their roles as go-betweens.