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The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Gender and American Culture)

Amazon.com Price:  $29.38 (as of 26/03/2019 23:57 PST- Details)

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Description

Gilded Age cities offered strange opportunities to girls–but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to become profitable, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research imaginable only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood specializes in Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods.

The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport within the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual women and girls–both prostitutes and “respectable” white workers–looking for to reshape their city and expand women’s opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, alternatively, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at each turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.

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