Bad Women Research Articles

Prostitution and virtue in nevada

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.

STEROIDS AND TONOMETRY

To the Editor: —An elderly woman in a drug store, groping to remember the name of a medicine, said, `It's named after a type of bad woman.' The clerk finally figured out what she wanted—Cortisone. (Neil Morgan, quoted by Earl Wilson.) The recent furor about steroid glaucoma has had two unfortunate byproducts: The abandonment of the use of steroids by some men even when indicated, and the revelation that routine tonometry is apparently not an integral part of American ophthalmic practice. Parenthetically, our own findings do not confirm the same high incidence of increased intraocular pressures in a six week period as reported. However, that is not the subject of this letter. This letter is stimulated by the fact that numerous discussions with individual ophthalmologists and ophthalmological societies during the past half year have produced the impression that they thought that Dr. Bernard Becker is engaged in an

The Lily and the Prairie Flower

WHAT IS the American girl made of? a manufacturer of cosmetics asked recently. Sugar and spice and everything nice? Not since the days of the Gibson Girl: There's a new American beauty ... she's tease and temptress, siren and Gamin, dynamic and demure . . . easily the most exciting woman in the world. . . .' Although the terms of this description are striking, even more impressive is the notion that this person is new and surprising, original. In actual fact she is perhaps the most publicized of American types. A study of heroines in modern French, British and American films differentiated among the women each culture seems admire most. It is reported that the usual French heroine is a bad woman: when a man must choose between a good woman and a bad, ordinarily he prefers the latter. The British heroine does not fit either category but is rather a fine woman loved by both good and bad men. The good man is satisfied with her as she is and the bad man degrades her-he does not yield her ennobling influences as he is apt do in American films. Only the American girl, indeed, attempts reconcile both principles and model herself according a new procedure in which sexual wickedness is merely an external ornament, a . . . stimulus wholesome love.2 Two years earlier, the editors of Time had anticipated this opinion. In their view a girl of this sort is uniquely endowed, especially charming: to millions of Americans, the pert, sexy but basically 'nice' American girl that Betty [Grable] plays on the screen is young American womanhood at its best.3 This person, then, whose distinctive quality is moral dualism, embodies the most popular current American opinion of love. However exciting the

Wanted: Artists for Neighbors

O RDINARILY artists and art have little place in day-to-day life. The resulting isolation of art and artists has a serious impact upon both artist and layman. The artist, baffled in his attempt to find significant things to say and effective ways of conveying them, flounders from one fancy to another. The rest of us, bewildered by what the artist does, tend to be ever more confirmed in the belief that art is beyond the pale of normalcy. Each ends by going his own antiseptic way, convinced that art is art and life is life. The arts themselves are frequently used to strengthen the wall of separation between the artist and other people. In the mass arts-comics, movies, popular novels, magazine literature, advertising-the strangeness of the artist and his work is a favorite topic. Recent episodes of the comic strip Mary Worth are illustrative of the insistence on the difference between artists and other people. One episode, for instance, is devoted to the ridicule of modern architecture and interior decoration. Bad Woman champions this type of art, thereby establishing a connection between moral badness and modern art. One of the Sunday sequences includes a conversation between Bad Woman and Good Man, the Rugged Young American, in the course of which Good Man remarks that the room just decorated by Bad Woman seems cold. Later he turns from a picture and asks: Is this a picture? Or did the painter wipe off his brushes and frame the rag? His companion retorts, Darling! Don't be prehistoric. That's an excellent copy of a Naguchi ! Two frames later Good Man looks out of the window at Dream Girl, who, in order to stress her role of Good Girl, is pictured hanging out the wash. From sequence to sequence, the artist and the lover of modern art are portrayed as bad, queer, selfish and above all different from other

The ‘Pistola’ of Cerveri de Girona

Cerveri was decidedly no poetical genius, and often enough he follows the trodden paths of troubadour poetry. However, there is no denying that again and again he tries to escape that poetical routine. In many cases these attempts result in odd and eccentric compositions, where the unusual is reached at the cost of good taste and poetical values. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Cerveri's efforts in this respect were not always futile. His is, e.g. an amusing satire upon bad women. One of his love songs, characteristically called libel by the MS (Sg), assumes the form of a complaint submitted to the king as the supreme earthly judge, in which the defendant is the lady whose charms torture the lover and have made him a prisoner. This poem combines the traditional praise of the beloved and a flattery addressed to the king. Its slightly humoristic tone is also found in a song entitled lo vers del vassayll leyal. Here Cerveri, basing himself on a certain legend connected with St. Mark, gives the king advice in his love affair. Again the poet kills two birds with one stone, flattering the sovereign and pointing, for obvious purposes, to his own poverty. The latter is the only topic of a remarkably personal poem in which the author complains bitterly that, while many of his playmates have become rich in later years, the only wealth he himself did amass were the chans gays and sonetz agradans which he composed for other people to enjoy. Cerveri even tries to renew the traditional genre of the chanson de la mal mariée by adding motifs of—presumably—his own invention. This tendency towards a more independent way of thinking and greater originality in its poetical presentation could not be better illustrated than by the two poems which the MS calls Lo vers de la terra de Preste Johan and Pistola The one puts the poet's moral argumentation against the background of the medieval legend of Prester John, the other, which forms the subject of the present study, sets its teachings in a still more solemn framework, the liturgy of the Mass.

Thought content in catatonic dementia praecox

This study is based upon the case records of 100 patients admitted to the Hudson River State Hospital, the major i ty of them having entered the hospital f rom 1927 to 1931, and all ]laving been finally and .definitely diagnosed as dementia prmcox, catatonic. The thought content was determined, not alone by its expression as recorded during hospital residence, but also as reported by various observers pr ior to admission. In 7 of these 100 cases there was no record of thought content, due to nmtism of patient dur ing hospital residence and absence of any account prior to admission. The ideas consti tuting the thought content in these cases nmy be a r ranged according to the frequency of their occurrence, as follows: Ideas expressing fear were present in 48 cases. These may be subdivided, as follows: Fea r of being killed 18, vague fears of something indefinite 15, of castrat ion 10, of homo-sexuality 6; 5 showed an acute homo-sexual panic, 3 of them making impulsive suicidal a t tempts; fear of the fa ther 5, of being buried alive 5, of men 5, of germs and poison 4, of fire 3, and in 1 each the fear was associated with ideas concerning negroes, hell, people entering the room and needles enter ing the body. Audi tory hallucinations occurred in 42 of the cases. They were accusatory of fellatio in 18 of the male patients and in 2 of the female. Three heard themselves called bad girl or woman, and in 2 the voices called them insane, 5 hear.d messages of guidance f rom the Lord, 3 were threats of being killed, 2 were communications with the father surrogate. In 1 the Lord ordered the patient to kill himself, and in ] the sound heard was that of water. In 5 the content of the hallucinations was unknown. In 36 of the cases incestuous ideas were expressed, and in 29 of the cases ideas of death were present. This does not include the fear of being killed or buried alive, which are included under the ideas accompanied by fear. In 6 of the cases there were ideas of rebirth. In 5, ideas of being in or near water were recorded, while in 3 ideas of being in heaven were mentioned. Grandi-

A beautiful bad woman

A beautiful bad woman Get access Yeltneb Yeltneb Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s5-XI, Issue 269, 22 February 1879, Page 149, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s5-XI.269.149g Published: 22 February 1879