Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  Indeed, Gilfoyle and others contend, such institutionalized violence is what gave rise for the first time to pimps. The women who ran brothels were forced to hire men for protection against gangs paid by Tammany Hall, and streetwalkers required pimps to protect them against physical assaults from both clients and police.

  Even though prostitution offered women the chance to make a better living, it was a dangerous trade. According to the 1858 study by Sanger, approximately 40 percent of the prostitutes he surveyed said they had contracted syphilis or gonorrhea at least once. Many prostitutes also had to contend with violent clients. As Nickie Roberts writes in Whores in History: “A violent pimp was often the least of the whore’s worries; every prostitute was, on the other hand, afraid of the possibility of being attacked — even murdered — by a client. The whore-stigma ensured that the protection and safety of prostitutes was low on the police agenda, and few prostitute-killers were actually caught.”11

  Underage prostitution was also rampant in 1870s New York. Numerous brothels promoted the availability of nubile young virgins amid a general atmosphere of “youthful carnality.”12

  Even then, Sanger found that less than one-fifth of girls selling sex in New York said they had been seduced or forced into prostitution. Many came from broken homes, where there were too many mouths to feed and no male breadwinner; others were newly arrived immigrants trying to survive in a cold, hard city.13

  Against this backdrop, Molly Burdan was growing increasingly tired of the carnal demands her husband and his friends were imposing on her. In 1877, she left William Burdan and traveled west. She spent time in Chicago, Virginia City, Nevada, the Dakota Territory, and San Francisco, becoming a sought-after prostitute everywhere she went. “The price for her favors was high and she had acquired an expensive wardrobe, which included furs and exquisite jewelry,” writes Anne Seagraves in Soiled Doves.14 In 1884, when Burdan was thirty, she read about the rich gold strike in Coeur d’Alene, a lake district in northern Idaho. She took the train to Thompson Falls, Montana, and there purchased a horse and joined a pack train on its way to Murray, Idaho. But the pack train of people, some on horseback, some on foot dragging a toboggan with all their worldly goods, was hit by a blizzard. Riding on horseback, Burdan noticed that a woman, who was carrying a small child, had stumbled in the snow and fallen. Burdan got off her horse, put both the woman and the child up on the saddle, and then remounted, according to newspaper accounts. But neither of them was dressed for the blizzard, and Burdan could see they were freezing. So when the pack train came to a battered hut off the side of the path, she dismounted, and they took shelter in the hut, all three huddling in Molly Burdan’s furs. The rest of the people in the pack continued onward, never expecting to see the three stragglers again.15

  The next day the entire town was surprised to see Burdan and her wards galloping down the street. She ordered a cabin and food for the mother and child, saying that she would foot the bill. As for herself, she announced that she wanted “cabin number one.” In Murray, and throughout the west, Seagraves writes, “cabin number one was reserved for the madam of the red light district.”16 When an Irishman named Patrick O’Rourke asked the fur-clad lady on her horse what her name was, she replied, “Molly Burdan.” But he misunderstood and responded in his heavy Irish brogue, “Well for the life of me, I’d never of thought it. Molly b’Dam.” This was the beginning of the legend of Molly b’Dam, who became known throughout the West for her kindness and generosity toward those less fortunate than herself. 17 Burdan’s considerable charms are on display in an undated photo of her, draped coquettishly in furs, which hangs in the Spragpole Museum in Murray, Idaho.

  A few years before Molly Burdan arrived in Idaho, another young woman, by the name of Veronica Baldwin, ventured west to embark on what she too hoped would be an exciting new chapter in her life. An émigré from Britain, she had no idea that the unforgiving chauvinism of the era would relegate her, just like Molly Burdan before her, to cabin number one. Veronica’s wealthy older cousin, Elias J. Baldwin, had invited her to come and work as a schoolteacher on the Santa Anita ranch he owned in the foothills outside Los Angeles. By 1880, “Lucky” Baldwin, who had made his fortune buying and selling gold-mining interests in the West, owned more than 40,000 acres in Los Angeles County, including the Santa Anita ranch, where he bred racehorses.

  Veronica Baldwin, a willowy, dark-haired woman with striking hazel eyes, burst into the news on January 4, 1883, when she shot Elias Baldwin through the left arm as he left the private dining room of the Baldwin Hotel (which he owned) in San Francisco. According to the San Francisco Call of January 5, 1883, Veronica Baldwin, then twenty-three, said, “He ruined me in body and mind. That is why I shot him.” She told reporters that Baldwin had sexually assaulted her and then dismissed her from her job for improper conduct. According to news accounts, she said, “I did not try to kill him. I hit him just where I wanted to, for I am a good shot and never miss anything I aim at.”18

  In the end, Lucky Baldwin declined to testify against his cousin, and she was acquitted. She immediately left for what was then the Washington Territory, according to news reports of the time. Three years later, she reappeared in California, threatening to sue her cousin for the support of a child whom she insisted he had fathered. According to Lucky Baldwin, a 1933 book about the multimillionaire, “that threat was also hushed quickly and again the girl vanished, only to reappear in the news a third time when she was found to be violently insane and committed to the state asylum at Napa by Judge Lucien Shaw.” Horace Bell, a San Francisco lawyer turned investigative reporter, raged about the case in the Porcupine, a muckraking sheet he had founded. “Our hellish statutes protected [Baldwin] and enabled him to send his victim to an insane asylum,” Bell wrote.19

  As Carl Glasscock, the author of Lucky Baldwin, notes, Elias Baldwin, who married four times during his long life, almost always to women much younger than himself, was sued by a number of other young women for staining their virtue and breaking promises to marry them. “Lucky Baldwin’s reputation as a Lothario was growing even faster than his reputation as a turf-man, a multi-millionaire and a great landed proprietor and promoter,” Glasscock writes.20

  Around the time that Veronica Baldwin was involuntarily dispatched to the state asylum in Napa, Molly b’Dam was pursuing a happier existence in Murray, Idaho. According to newspaper reports, Molly was good to the girls in her brothel and the locals were good to her. She was always feeding hungry families, and those who were down on their luck knew that Molly b’Dam would provide them with warm clothing and shelter. Although she lived in luxury, Molly never hesitated to ride on her horse over treacherous mountain trails to nurse a sick prospector.21

  Women: A Rare Commodity

  In the mining economies of the West during the latter part of the nineteenth century, women were a rare and precious commodity. In 1860, only 5 percent of the residents of Virginia City, Nevada, were female, according to Barbara Brents, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coauthor of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland.22 Prostitution, gambling, and drinking were mainstays of the local economy, and by 1870, which marked the height of Virginia City’s prosperity, prostitution was the most commonly listed occupation for women. Prostitutes worked out of dance halls, saloons, or one-room shacks known as cribs. Many prostitutes, particularly those who were no longer young or pretty enough to work in the high-class brothels or saloons and had fallen to the bottom of the food chain — working out of cribs — lived in squalid quarters. An 1886 newspaper account describes the crib of a Denver, Colorado, prostitute who had killed herself:

  The walls and ceiling were absolutely black with smoke and dirt, excepting where old, stained newspapers had been pasted on them . . . to exclude rain and melting snow. Around the walls were disposed innumerable unwashed and battered tin cooking utensils, shelves, for the most part laden with dust, old clothing, which emitted a powerful e
ffluvium, hung from nails here and there, or tumble down chairs, a table of very rheumatic tendency, on which broken cups, plates and remains of food were scattered all over its surface. An empty whiskey bottle and pewter spoon or two. In one corner and taking up half the space of the den was the bedstead strongly suggestive of a bountiful crop of vermin, and on that flimsy bed lay the corpse of the suicide, clad in dirty ratted apparel, and with as horrid a look on her begrimed, pallid features as the surroundings presented. No one of her neighbors in wretchedness had had the sense to open either of the two little windows in the room to admit pure air, hence the atmosphere was sickeningly impure and almost asphyxiating. “My God,” exclaimed Coroner McHatton, used as he is to similar scenes and smells in his official capacity. “Isn’t this awful?23

  While some prostitutes led very difficult lives and suffered greatly, others turned the economics of commercial sex to their advantage. In the smaller mining towns, some single working-class women ran saloons as independent prostitute-proprietors. In Butte, Montana, some prostitutes were the widows of miners, and they worked out of cribs during the day while their children were in school.24 According to historians, there was a certain respect for the place of prostitutes in mining economies. They were not the same as “good proper wives,” but they held a certain status.25

  Julia “Jule” Bulette, for example, was one of the first unattached white women to arrive in Virginia City, Nevada, after the Comstock Lode silver strike in 1859. Bulette, described in various accounts as beautiful, slim, and full of good humor,26 had left an abusive husband behind in New Orleans, and she became a favorite of the Comstock miners. She owned her own cottage in Virginia City, and like Molly b’Dam, she became known for feeding the poor and nursing sick and injured men back to health. Because of Bulette’s donations to the Virginia City fire department, local firefighters made her an honorary member of the Virginia Engine Number 1, and on July 4, 1861, Bulette rode the fire truck as Queen of the Independence Day Parade.27 Yet six years later, Bulette, then thirty-five, was murdered, and all her valuables were stolen. A French drifter was arrested and hanged for the crime, although he maintained his innocence to the end.28

  Molly b’Dam also died young but not by violent means. In 1886, smallpox swept into Murray. Residents of the small mining town barricaded themselves behind closed doors in a futile attempt to keep the scourge at bay, and bodies began piling up everywhere. Molly Burdan took charge, calling a town meeting and berating the town’s residents for their cowardice. With the help of her girls and a few other volunteers, she cleared out the hotels and turned them into makeshift hospitals for the sick, and Burdan and her girls became nurses. “It has been said that Molly worked tirelessly. She was everywhere, nursing patients until she could no longer stand. She barely ate and didn’t take time to even change her clothes,” Seagraves writes. “The town survived — but Molly was never to be the same.”29

  In October 1887, she developed a constant fever and hacking cough, and on January 17, 1888, Molly Burdan died of what was then called consumption and is now known as tuberculosis. On the day of her funeral, more than a thousand people came from the surrounding area to bid farewell to a prostitute whom they admired and loved. Today, in the few remaining saloons of Murray, Idaho, a song written in her honor, The Legend of Molly b’Dam, is still sung.30

  A few years after Molly died, Veronica Baldwin was discharged from the Napa state asylum. In the 1890s, she turned up in Denver, Colorado, with the means to open an upscale brothel on Market Street. “It was said that Lucky Baldwin provided her with the money she needed,” writes Seagraves in Soiled Doves. “It was also said that the lady displayed no evidence of insanity.”31

  The years, however, had left their mark on Veronica Baldwin: “Although Veronica was still young, lines were etched upon her comely face, her hair was prematurely gray, and she walked with a slow measured step. She was no longer the same person that California newspapers once described as ‘the most beautiful girl on the Pacific Coast.’ ”32

  In her upscale Market Street brothel, Veronica Baldwin, dressed in royal purple with a touch of white lace, served her customers imported delicacies (including fresh oysters in season) and fine French wine in crystal glasses. Her clients were wealthy businessmen, mining owners, real estate investors, and politicians, and they came by invitation only.

  According to several accounts, Veronica hired only beautiful, educated women who were experienced in matters of sex. One evening in 1898, a pretty young woman turned up on her doorstep in the company of a “notorious procuress,” the Rocky Mountain News reported. When Veronica Baldwin found out that the girl was a virgin and had no idea what she was getting into, she convinced her to go home to her family and then notified local police, who placed the girl in a “respectable dwelling” for the night, according to the Rocky Mountain News. The paper concluded its April 28 story with the news that “[the girl]was sent away to her relatives, the police department bearing the cost of transportation.”33

  What this and other news reports of the time indicate is that Veronica Baldwin, like many successful madams and prostitutes of the nineteenth century, had a close and mutually beneficial relationship with local law enforcement. They paid the police and local politicians handsome bribes to look the other way, and in return, the police protected their establishments from drunken gangs and abolitionists who wanted to eliminate prostitution once and for all.

  In the 1870s, William Sanger and other medical professionals (backed up by the American Medical Society), together with law enforcement, had pushed to legalize and regulate prostitution in the United States for public health reasons. As Sanger argued, regulating prostitution would enable the authorities to test and treat prostitutes for venereal disease and clamp down on child prostitution. But several bills in the New York legislature failed because of opposition by suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony. Anthony and others who were campaigning for equal rights believed, as some feminists do now, that prostitution victimized all women and that it was a “social evil” that had to be eradicated. Suffragettes joined forces with Christian social purity reformers, and in the face of their concerted opposition, only a few cities in the United States, including New Orleans, San Francisco, and St. Louis, passed ordinances to legalize and regulate prostitution, limiting it to specific red-light districts.

  By the 1880s, these abolitionist groups began to gain the upper hand. Religious groups had long promulgated a view of marriage to a “good” woman as a respected social arrangement (because it was the primary means through which erotic expression was linked to reproduction). Sex outside marriage threatened that social order, and sex for money was shunned because it completely divorced sexual intercourse from the goal of reproduction.34 Protestant groups were particularly vocal in their condemnation of prostitution because their religious tenets urged sexual satisfaction within the marriage and viewed infidelity more harshly than did Catholicism. And in fact, it was an alliance of evangelical Protestants and newly empowered suffragettes who led the campaign to outlaw alcohol and prostitution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  These reformist groups wielded a potent weapon: the panic over “white slavery” that was sweeping the nation, fueled by salacious and largely erroneous newspaper accounts of the hordes of young white women, both foreign- and native-born, who were being forced into sexual slavery. Even the great literature of the day, such as Stephen Crane’s 1893 book, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, portrayed young white women as innocent victims seduced or forced into prostitution by evil pimps and madams.35

  The image of the white slave, however, was largely myth. Several studies at the time showed that most young women selling sex were doing so to earn better wages than they could in domestic service or factory work. For example, the sociologist Kathleen Davis’s 1912 study of 671 prostitutes showed that many of them also worked at low-paying jobs (as store clerks, servants, or factory workers). Many of the women who had chosen to sell sex came
from broken or low-income homes and needed the money.36

  Even so, the hype over white slavery had its intended effect, as far as the reformists were concerned. It led to a series of state and federal laws that made it increasingly difficult for brothels and other forms of prostitution to operate as openly as they had before. In Colorado, gangs encouraged by antiprostitution and prohibition crusaders burned down a number of red-light districts in mining towns such as Colorado City and Cripple Creek in the early years of the twentieth century.37 In New York, laws pushed through by an alliance of purity reformers, settlement-house workers, and wealthy industrialists imposed fines on owners of apartments and buildings who rented to brothels and prostitutes.38 In 1910, the federal government passed the White Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act (named after Congressman James Robert Mann), which prohibited the transport of women from state to state for “immoral purposes.”

  A Military Clampdown

  As World War I approached, the clampdown intensified. Federal authorities, fearful that American soldiers would be laid low by disease-carrying prostitutes, began pressuring state officials to close down red-light districts throughout the country. By 1915, most red-light districts in the United States, including the famous Barbary Coast in San Francisco, the Levee district in Chicago, and Storyville in New Orleans, had been shuttered. Denver’s red-light district was also closed, and Veronica Baldwin’s brothel with it. Baldwin moved into one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods and continued to live a “quiet dignified life,” according to news reports of the time.39

  Prostitution, of course, didn’t disappear. It simply moved underground. After decades of visibility in theaters and concert halls and on the streets, prostitution became a clandestine activity. “Call girls” operated out of private apartments, and as prostitutes found themselves more vulnerable to abuse from police and clients, pimps became a permanent fixture, providing women with protection, emotional support, and legal assistance.40