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The Underworld Sewer: a Prostitute Reflects An Life in the Trade, 1871-1909

1999; University of Iowa; Volume: 58; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.17077/0003-4827.11080

2473-9006

Josie Washburn,

Race, History, and American Society

For twenty years Josie Washburn lived and worked in houses of prostitution. She spent last twelve as madam of a moderately fancy brothel in Lincoln, Nebraska. After retiring in 1907 and moving to Omaha, she turned to throwing a searchlight on underworld, including cribs of Nebraska's largest city. The Underworld Sewer, based on her own experience in profession, blazes with a kind of honesty unavailable to more conventional moral reformers. Originally published in 1909, The Underworld Sewer asks why the social evil is universally considered necessary or inevitable. Washburn minces no words in exposing conditions that perpetuate prostitution: greed and graft of landlords, pimps, alcohol vendors, dope dealers, police officers, city administrators, and politicians; competition for circulation by sensation-seeking newspapers; indifference or intolerance of law-abiding, church-going citizens; false modesty that prevents family discussion of venereal disease; double standard that allows men to indulge their sexuality but punishes women who do so. Sharon Wood is an assistant professor of history at University of Chicago.