Reviewed by: The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City John Putman The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. By Sharon E. Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 344. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). Nineteenth-century city streets were no doubt contested terrain for American women. In an intriguing study of prostitution in Davenport, Iowa, Sharon E. Wood examines the complex world of gender, sexuality, and public life in this midwestern riverfront city. Importantly, the author views prostitution from the perspective of paid employment, which is a pleasant addition to the typical focus on public morality that dominates similar studies. The choice of Davenport may raise some eyebrows, but Wood makes a strong case for the value of smaller cities to scholars. Most Americans resided in such communities, and their smaller size, she argues, permits scholars to re-create a more detailed portrait of a community that might be lost in the vastness of cities like Chicago and New York. Such depth likewise allows the reader to visualize not just the broad strokes but also the fine hairs of the historian’s brush. Wood’s masterful touch provides intriguing glimpses into the daily lives of Davenport prostitutes and their interaction with customers and public officials. The Freedom of the Streets begins with the struggle of Davenport’s women to carve out independent lives as working women. A handful of mostly self-employed working women organized the Lend a Hand Club to promote opportunities and access for women who “embraced the idea of self-support for women” (66). Led by local physician Jennie McCowen, the club included teachers, seamstresses, clerks, and even a few domestic servants on its roster. Working women, however, lived within a community that largely equated women who ventured outside the home to work with prostitutes. Realizing that their livelihoods hinged on access to the streets, working women pressed city leaders to hire a female police matron to confront the growing number of young women selling their bodies in the downtown district. Removing prostitutes from the streets, working women believed, would help eliminate the stigma associated with laboring in the public sphere. For the remainder of the book Wood shifts her attention to the complicated world of commercial sex. One of the strengths of her study is that she rejects the typical and often simplistic binary approach to public [End Page 496] perceptions of female sexuality—respectability and prostitution. Instead, the author carefully documents the fluid nature of prostitution where men and women—young and old, working and middle class—often saw paid sex differently. Drawing on a few prominent rape cases involving young teenage girls, Wood explores the trial of what many residents referred to as “sporting men.” Using a common strategy, the defendants attempted to turn the case into a debate about the girls’ misbehavior and their parents’ oversight. The girls’ familiarity with the streets, saloons, and the men who inhabited them, Wood contends, only served to undermine public perception of the girls as innocent victims. The controversy generated by these cases compelled Davenport officials to take a novel approach to the city’s vice problem by regulating it. While most American communities either took the path of least resistance by tolerating prostitution or took punitive measures to purge it, Wood argues that Davenport chose to follow the French model of regulated prostitution. City leaders required health certificates and imposed monthly fines or fees on brothels that registered their employees. This system, however, complicated the lives of couples and unregistered prostitutes who wished to engage in illicit sex in boardinghouses or hotels. City officials often harassed these individuals or attempted to shut down the businesses they frequented, which only made it more difficult for those who pursued unregulated sexual encounters. Regulated prostitution, according to Wood, operated side by side with a vigorous campaign to curb the troubling presence of teenage prostitutes by utilizing the Good Shepherd Home, run by Catholic nuns. City officials and the police matron placed many young girls in the private reformatory because it offered a more efficient and flexible solution than bureaucratic state-run...