About This Project: Key Terms, Nineteenth-Century Public Sentiments, and Conclusions
Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers, Elsewhere
Source for the image on the left: Sylvie Hansen, Berlin, Germany, 2023.
Source for the image above: Grover, Montie E., Mrs. Scrapbook (1881): Toppen Library, Special Collections, Uncat. Laramie, Wyoming.
Key terms:
Prostitute (n) - 2.b.
1680–
A person who acts in a debased or corrupt way for profit or advantage; a person who undertakes any demeaning or dishonourable act, office, or connection for personal gain.
Source: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “prostitute (n.), sense 2.b,” December 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9787189384.
Vice (n) - 1.a.
1297–
Depravity or corruption of morals; evil, immoral, or wicked habits or conduct; indulgence in degrading pleasures or practices.
Source: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “vice (n.1), sense 1.a,” March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9892670417.
Given how little we know about nineteenth-century prostitutes, I expected few results in online archives. However, my archival research in the Wyoming Digital Newspapers Collection using the simple search term “prostitution” turned up nearly five-hundred results.
Demimonde, French for “half-world” (n.) 1.
1855–
In 19th-century France: a class of women on the fringes of respectable society, considered to be of doubtful social standing and morality; spec. the milieu of courtesans supported by wealthy lovers. Now historical.
2.
1862–
In extended use. Any group that is regarded as disreputable or as being on the fringes of mainstream or conventional society or culture. Also: the world or milieu associated with such a group.
Source: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “demimonde (n.), sense 1,” September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2353436478.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “demimonde (n.), sense 2,” September 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1117010239.
As a crucial part of the beginning stages of my research, I searched the Wyoming Newspapers Collection for any use of the term “prostitution,” applying the temporal search parameters of “January 1, 1850 to January 1, 1900.” Though many of the results predictably focused on prostitution as a scourge on society, one writer laments on page 1 of Bill Barlow’s Budget printed on June 17, 1891, in a line that could just as easily be used to narrate Monte Grover’s brutal demise, “Love, marriage, divorce, prostitution, religion, all these furnish their quota to the sea of crime and misery.” That is, prostitution was only one institution among many with the capacity for causing misery during the nineteenth century.
Also interesting are places where the word “prostitution” is used to describe any overreach or abuse of powers. For example, on page 1 of the September 27, 1892 print edition of the Cheyenne Daily Leader complained of “the prostitution of the military power of the federal government.”
Taken together with commentary such as that from page 9 of the Cheyenne Weekly Leader, printed on on November 29, 1883, stating that “more than thirty houses of prostitution and the propietors of a number of them hold licenses from the county to sell liquor,” we can conclude that for Victorian Wyomingites, public expressions of disdain for the institution of prostitution were bound up with disdain for ‘vice’ of any kind.
To this point, on an unnumbered page of The News-Register from January 16, 1897, regarding prostitution among other vices, the writer specifies that the circumstances of the American West “practically suppl[y] organized vice with a sort of sanction, it being argued that prostitution is the less of two evils. We may as well assure ourselves finally that vice is to marriage as tuberculosis is to healthy lung tissue and there is precisely as much safety in contact in one case as the other.”
Despite these and other scathing comments from colorful characters across nineteenth-century Wyoming, writers for Laramie newspapers specifically differ quite a bit in their tone while addressing prostitution as an institution. While a writer for the Semi-Weekly Boomerang comments matter-of-factly on November 5, 1900 that “there are now about 200 regularly licensed houses of prostitution in the city [of Manila]” (page 6) and in the title of the same article notes that "Houses of Prostitution [were] Recognized, Inspected, and Licensed by United States Army Officers in the Philippines” (page 6), another writer almost a quarter-century earlier, in an issue of the Laramie Daily Sentinel dated April 27, 1876 (page 1), expresses puzzlement, observing, “How to put an end to prostitution is a problem not easy to solve.”
While a writer from The Cheyenne Daily News expresses concern on December 4, 1874 (page 2) that “women … were bought in China, brought to this country, and sold for purposes of prostitution,” invoking as evidence “several original bills of sale,” Dr. Anne Butler’s research reveals that most prostitutes in nineteenth-century Wyoming were in fact born in the United States.
Specifically, Butler explains,
White prostitution in Wyoming reflected this fact. Of 724 prostitutes identified in the territory between 1865 and 1885, the ethnic origins and birthplace of 506 remained obscure, a comment upon the invisibility of prostitute populations. From among the 218 whose birth locations could be given, 153 were born in the United States. Of these, 107, or slightly more than 64% of the prostitutes of known origins in Wyoming, or native born white Americans. The largest volume of immigrants arrived, respectively, from Ireland, Prussia, England, and France. Canada, Scotland, Switzerland, and Denmark sent in an insignificant number of representatives. (Butler 13-14)
Going on to say that the Irish were particularly good candidates for prostitution in the American West, because they had “generations of social malaise to condition them” (Butler 14), she adds that establishing the average age for a nineteenth-century prostitute’s entry into the profession is far more difficult. However, as she puts it,
Prostitution employed young women. The prime years came between the ages of 15 and 30. After 30, although some prostitutes lingered on, many looked for employment and related fields; manager for one or two younger women, saloon operator, or abortionist figure among the most common choices. (Butler 16)
Going further, Butler describes how the military’s mismanagement of American Indian reservations, which caused famine conditions for the tribes forced into residence there, led to prostitution by Indian women, “driven by [their] need to survive infrastructure founded on the genocide of Indigenous tribes, beginning with the extraction of mineral wealth from their land” (Hansen 84). In other words, the institution of prostitution thrived in and around nineteenth-century Laramie, and it encapsulated and enthralled every segment of the frontier population. And as I write in my English Masters thesis, “the primacy of industry with its extractive interests, coupled with isolation and few other options for survival, led to sex workers constellating around industrial workers on the American frontier” (Hansen 83).
“Numerous factors contributed to the development of a female labor force on the frontier. American society championed the notion of the protected, virtuous woman as the guardian of morals and values. Despite these ideals, many American women faced a life that necessitated they find employment. Within the working world, women found that few jobs awaited them, and the existing ones offered less than lucrative pay. These problems enlarged in a frontier environment that catered to masculine workers. Here women desired not only employment but some of the boom profits attached to the burgeoning frontier enterprises. From this combination of elements, a substantial prostitute population emerged on the American frontier.”
— Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987), the quotation is from 16.
Conclusions:
Sex workers constellated around industry and military personnel. Brothel madams also donated large sums of money to fund public infrastructure in Laramie. According to the Albany County Historical Society (ACHS)’s website, recipients of these generous donations from brothel madams included not only the the Police Athletic League, established by former police chief Barney Deti “to keep teenage boys out of trouble,” but also toward the construction of the War Memorial Fieldhouse at the University of Wyoming. In fact, the notorious second story brothels kept many other businesses afloat from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, when the brothels were forced to close up shop for good, not to mention the fact that brothel madams and prostitutes were frequently ordered to pay (usually monthly) fines, which as the writer at the ACHS also argues, became de facto business licenses.
Prostitution in and around Laramie, much like in many other American Western boom towns, was outlawed on the books yet tacitly regulated and tolerated for the gratification of agents of industry and the armed forces.
While doing research for this project, I discovered that attempting a tracing of nineteenth-century prostitution was much easier when done through the lives of brothel and hog house madams, rather than through the lives of prostitutes themselves, because madams either kept their own records or had their various business purchases (inventory) incorporated into Laramie City records, as a matter of course. However, in order to properly understand the nature of nineteenth-century prostitution, it is also imperative that we understand how many brothel madams ascended as women in a world of male enterpreneurship, often following lives of prostitution themselves, to the ranks of the property owning class. This same paradigm applied to prostitutes, who as Anne Butler writes, faced frontier workers “with a thin appreciation for the women of their own class and unimpressed with nineteenth-century values about the gentility and protection for women,” who “readily expected the females of their own social background to hawk for them the one commodity the women possessed” (Butler 35).
This in effect placed targets on madams’ and prostitutes’ backs, as the allure of their potential estates often took precedent over their potential allure as romantic partners. These dynamics often made the prostitutes’ and madams’ attempts at forming authentic relationships with those positioned outside of their business lives, and even their own coworkers, incredibly difficult.
3. Given these findings, I conclude that the infrastructures of the American West were not only built on the backs of industry workers, but also through the energies of sex workers and the entrepreneurial enterprises of madams. For not only did they perform what Dr. Heather Berg at the University of Washington-St. Louis calls “authenticity work” (Berg 2021), providing companionship primarily to isolated industry workers on the American frontier, but also they contributed valuable income to Laramie businesses and institutions that may not have survived without that money, making invaluable contributions to Laramie City. In fact, without their contributions, Laramie as we know it may have never survived the nineteenth century, becoming just another ghost town (think of all the Wyoming and American Western towns that met this precise fate), while the University of Wyoming may have needed to move to Cheyenne in order to survive as an institution. Without adequate business and cash flow, in other words, a nineteenth-century town would never have survived to support either future business opportunities or educational institutions.