Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847–1918. By Jeffrey Nichols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xii, 247 pp. $34.95, isbn 0-252-02768-X.)

Abstract

Jeffrey Nichols's study of the politics of prostitution in the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City is a useful contribution to the history of both commercial sex and western politics. He begins with the central irony of the early period: non-Mormon “gentiles” worked to attract mining and railroad investment to the region in part because the influx of workers would offset Mormon power and undermine the institution of plural marriage (polygyny), which many gentiles equated with prostitution. Yet the miners and railroad workers attracted sex workers, and some local men (apparently including Mormons) welcomed the prostitutes as “a sign that the city was becoming more modern and American” (p. 213). Before 1890, the issue of plural marriage divided activists—especially women—along religious lines, weakening their efforts to oppose prostitution. After 1890, Mormon rejection of plural marriage led to greater cooperation, and gentile and Mormon women became occasional allies. The spirit of cooperation was fragile, however. In politics, Mormon and gentile purity advocates continually failed to find common ground, leaving the proponents of regulated prostitution to push their policies into reality.