Trick Identities: The Nexus of Work and Sex

Abstract

For more than two decades, historians of prostitution in the United States have focused their analyses on the "sex wars" of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, emphasizing reform efforts, the geography of prostitution, and, occasionally, the "sporting life" and deviant subculture of commercial sex. 1 Such studies have helped us understand tensions among moral reformers and their subjects and how social control has been exercised over sexually "deviant" groups in the past. With few exceptions, however, they have ignored the reality of prostitutes' daily lives. 2 Most important, they give us little sense of how women in "the life" understood themselves, their work, and their clients. This weakness is often attributed to a gap in the source base, but I think it stems from a general failure among historians to consider the actual sex tasks involved in prostitution, despite histories that examine various other aspects of the profession as women's work. 3 Although women's historians have addressed other occupations with an eye to how the actual work task has served to construct work identity—domestic labor, clerical work, waitressing, dressmaking and millinery, nursing, teaching, agricultural labor, and meatpacking, to name just a few 4 —to date, no historian has applied this model to prostitution. Beginning in the 1980s and gaining steam more recently, however, scholars of sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism have penned theoretical studies of prostitution in Britain and the United States and have provided increasingly nuanced analyses of prostitutes' sexual labor. 5 In addition, some prostitutes' autobiographies from the recent past (and, I have found, from even earlier) have portrayed the sex part of sex work as work, even an "industry." 6 Here, I build on these writings and demonstrate the insight we gain into the history of prostitution when we look at sex acts as part of prostitutes' workaday lives in the same ways we might examine the experiences of waitresses dishing out food, teachers grading papers, and meatpackers classifying tripe.