Outstanding. Very well written. Learned a lot about the city I live in. ( )

Combining two of my reading themes – women of negotiable virtue and the underworld history of large cities – City of Eros is a scholarly study of prostitution in New York from 1790 to 1920. Not very much in the way of titillating text or pictures, alas, although there are a few line drawings of young women shamelessly wearing dresses so short that you can see their ankles. “In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking ….”, etc.


Despite the lack of material for voyeuristic gratification, there’s some fascinating – and saddening – stuff here. As was usual for the time, public figures blamed prostitution on women, preaching about painted women luring innocent young men into their web of seduction. A disturbing example is the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, a popular 23-year-old who had her head smashed with a hatchet and was then set on fire while she was still alive. There was pretty much an open-and-shut case against Richard Robinson, a 19-year-old clerk from a respectable family, who was the last person to visit Helen and who managed to leave his bloody cloak and hatchet at the scene. Robinson’s defense was “I was an unprotected boy, without female friends to introduce me to respectable society, sent into a boarding house, where I could enter at what hour I pleased – subservient to no control after the business of the day was over”. He was acquitted. The case may have contributed to a sort of open season on prostitutes in the 1830s, where mobs descended on known brothels, smashed windows and furniture, and sometimes gang-raped the inhabitants – 40 such attacks are cited.


OK, so enough of the blood and thunder – I said author Timothy Gilfoyle’s book was scholarly, and it is. There are a great number of maps showing the distribution of brothels in Manhattan over the years; there’s quite a concentration around the major theaters, especially the Metropolitan Opera House. Another table shows year-by-year tabulations of the number of women in the business, including the percentage of “young women” who were in the trade; this varies from 1% in 1846 to 71% (!) in 1849. Talk about boom and bust. These numbers are only estimates, and seem to suspiciously correlate with whowever was doing the estimating – the totals are always large when estimated by ministers or reformers, but small when estimated by police or aldermen. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for a computer model.


Other tables illustrate the economics. Women on their own in that era – in fact, in every era until the present – had very little opportunity to earn money. An 1839 survey showed 21738 women in the work force, in occupations ranging from milliners to household servants – and 49% were at least occasional prostitutes. The breakdown by trade is fascinating – 79% of umbrella sewers did business on the side, but only 35% of dressmakers. It’s too bad there isn’t information on the average wages in those occupations; what numbers are available are telling – a teenage girl could expect a salary of between $35 and $50 a year; she could get between $10 and $50 dollars for her virginity and between $5 and $20 a week after that. Beats a 12-hour day sewing umbrellas. A table for the decade 1855 to 1865 (from census data) compares the earnings from prostitution in New York with twenty manufacturing industries; prostitution comes in second, just after tailoring and just before silver wire.
( )