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The Private Lives of Public Women: Prostitution in Butte, Montana, 1878-1917

1984; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3346238

1536-0334

Mary Murphy,

Canadian Identity and History

The prostitutes who worked in Butte, Montana, prior to 1917 were daughters of the nineteenth century, yet they violated every tenet of Victorian womanliness. They were hardly temperate with regard to sexual intercourse, they were impious and impure, they lived without true homes or families, and they were anything but submissive. They aggressively sought customers, fought publicly, and cursed not only among themselves but with patrons and the police.1 Between 1878, when its first hurdy-gurdy house opened, and 1917, when its red-light district closed down, Butte was the temporary home of hundreds, perhaps thousands of prostitutes. They lived and worked in a one-block area where most of the vices of the nineteenth century were available for a price. The red-light district was their home, the demimonde their family. In the world of prostitution the division between and private, which was so central to nineteenth-century women's lives, was virtually nonexistent. Sexuality, a most private and intimate concern for most people, became blatantly for prostitutes. Husbands or lovers were often pimps, and family or lovers' squabbles were regularly reported in the paper as battles among the denizens of the district. Prostitutes' clothing, language, even their shopping places became issues of policy and regulation. Prostitution was a highly stratified occupation. A woman's status was determined by a combination of race, ethnicity, education, sociability, and sexual skill, and was reflected in the place in which she worked. Parlor houses, such as Butte's elaborately furnished Windsor and Irish World, were the top of the line and functioned as social centers as well as brothels. Madams hired attractive usually white, who dressed well, acted like ladies, and played the part of companion as well as prostitute. These houses were few, however, and many more prostitutes worked in shabby brothels decorated with brewery calendars and whiskey-stained chairs rather than giltframed mirrors and brocade couches. A few prostitutes acquired the resources to work on their own in small cottages on the fringes of the red-light district. But the vast majority of prostitutes in Butte, of all ages and races, were everynight workingman's whores, who lived and worked in the cribs lining the streets and alleys of Butte's tenderloin. Only those who were private mistresses, who worked in the large parlor houses or out of their own cottages, managed to retain a degree of privacy. They catered to a middle-class clientele for whom publicity was undesirable. In return for discretion these received protection from the police, from censure, and from the violence of street life. For those prostitutes who worked on the street or in cribs, however, display was part of the trade. They could not afford both a and a private life, and suffered because of that lack. They were public women, belonging to all men, not one man, and therefore not quite at all. The Butte city council expressed this position in its ordinance concerning vagrancy when it drew a distinction between women and lewd and dissolute persons. These female persons were subject to arrest if they conducted themselves in an improper, profane or obscene manner within the sight or hearing of women.2 The consequences of occupying this position outside womanhood were mixed. On the one hand prostitutes