Prostitution and virtue in nevada

Abstract

Some of the most direct, vicious and persistent attacks by one class of American women against another occurred in the guise of crusades aimed at punishment and abolition of prostitution. Respectable women's antagonism against shady ladies was particularly visible in late nineteenth-century frontier boom towns, where prostitutes often outnumbered married women. Prostitutes were the first female settlers in many such towns, and the arrival of upright women produced many tensions and overt conflicts, some of which led to passage of laws limiting and regulating prostitution. Between 1860 and 1875, Virginia City, Nevada, the great Comstock boom town, grew from a crude shanty town of 2,500 to a relatively sophisticated city of 25,000, making it imperative that a system of social control develop in a short time. The whole pattern of legal development from informal social control, to semi-formal vigilante rule, to formal law making and enforcement occurred in less than a decade, reflecting the arrival of powerful new social groups bringing new definitions of deviance. Rapid changes in Virginia City's demographic composition and economic organization affected the community's ethos and its labeling of behavior. The arrival of relatively large numbers of upright matrons brought the iron Victorian distinctions between good and bad women into focus, where they previously had been blurred because of the absence of females other than prostitutes. As Virginia City developed a differentiated status structure and imported culture from established cities, the hard-working, tenacious frontier woman faded as a social ideal, to be replaced by the delicate, passive lady. Ladies seldom labored outside the home, and women who did often had their moral standards both questioned and assaulted. Thus the classifications of women as either good or bad were strongly (though not entirely) class related. In this sense, the Virginia City campaigns against prostitution were female class wars, and laws resulting from them affected working men's prostitutes who lived in cribs and wretched houses rather than the mistresses of rich or middle-class men. The presence of this large, visible group of poor women thought to be irrevocably tainted served as both impetus and weapon for the upperand middle-class woman's fight to sustain her own precarious social and economic position at the expense of her less fortunate sisters. Information on prostitution in early Virginia City is somewhat sketchy--few prostitutes left the letters or diaries commonly providing information about respectable women of the era. Instead, painted women's lives must be pieced together, from various sources such as histories of the period, personal documents, city council minutes and even coroner's reports. A random sample of 30 Virginia City Territorial Enterprises published between 1860 and 1875 proved helpful in this respect, as did census records listing sporting women in categories such as housekeepers, courtesans, hurdy girls, prostitutes, and prostitutes of the lowest order. In order to understand the roots of this conflict between matrons and prostitutes, it is essential to understand Victorian definitions of female sexuality which constrained in different ways the lives of all women of the period.