Women Sailors & Sailors' Women

by David Cordingly

  Child prostitution was rife in the city by the 1840s, and much of it went on in brothels run by women. In the same month that Beach was arrested, a woman named Jane White, alias Horn, alias Cook, was brought before the magistrates for conducting a system of juvenile prostitution from her house on Reade Street. A dozen young girls were sent out by their parents to sell fruit and candy in the local bars, offices, and stores. They would be befriended by unscrupulous men with perverted tastes and taken to White’s house “to consummate their degradation by actual prostitution.” 23 The girls received $2 or $3 a day from prostitution and were expected to give most of this to White. In May of the same year, Mary Ann Sterling was arrested for keeping a den of infamy at 27 Roosevelt Street. Six girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen were living in a miserable state of prostitution on her premises. 24 William Bell, a police officer, reported that a small fifteen-year-old girl who worked in a junk shop by the docks on Front Street was in the habit of going aboard coal boats in that vicinity and prostituting herself. 25

  Not all such girls were victims, and one of the surprising features of prostitution in New York is the number of women who retained control over their lives. Lucy Ann Brady, for instance, was a prostitute on an occasional basis. She was born in the city around 1820 and came from a poor family. As a teenager she used to attend the theater and began having sex with the men she met there. Her parents sent her to the House of Refuge, an institution for juvenile delinquents, but she ran away and for a year lived a life of casual promiscuity. She spent three nights with a steamboat captain. Another man paid her $5 for a night spent in a brothel on Orange Street. On another occasion she met a girlfriend in an oyster saloon, and they picked up two men and took them to another Orange Street brothel. Once she was arrested by the authorities and kept off the street for a while, but on being released she resumed her old life. Most of the time she worked as a servant but resorted to prostitution when she needed more money. 26

  As they grew older many New York prostitutes took to running their own establishments, and the newspapers frequently mentioned their arrest for keeping a disorderly house. Some of them were formidable characters. Mary or “Moll” Stephens, who was described as the keeper of a den of prostitution, was arrested on Christmas Day, 1846, for attempting to shoot a man named Briggs with a six-barreled pistol. Briggs had been noisy on her premises and refused to leave, so she discharged the pistol in his face. Fortunately for him, the barrel she fired was empty, although it was discovered that the other five barrels were loaded with powder and ball. 27

  Several New York prostitutes became wealthy property owners. Maria Williamson, who was reputed to run one of the greatest whorehouses in America, had saved enough money by 1819 to buy her brothel and adjoining real estate for $3,500. By 1820, she owned five brothels on Church Street, the total value of the houses being $10,000. 28 Fanny White bought a Mercer Street brothel in 1851 after working as a prostitute for some years. Two years later, she was assessed for $11,000 in real estate and $5,000 in personal property taxes. She then sailed for Europe with Dan Sickles, a married man who had been appointed secretary to James Buchanan, minister to Britain. She returned from Europe in 1854 and resumed the management of the brothel on Mercer Street. She accumulated several other houses, some of which were gifts from her numerous suitors, and married Edmond Blankman, a lawyer. On her death in 1860, she owned three fine city mansions as well as other property the total value of which was reckoned to be between $50,000 and $100,000. 29 This would make her a millionaire in today’s terms.

  Eliza Bowen Jumel was even more successful. She was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1775, the daughter of a prostitute. At an early age she became a prostitute herself, and when she was nineteen, she moved to New York, where she joined a theatrical troupe. She must have had considerable charms, because she was soon the talk of the town. In 1804, she married Stephen Jumel, a successful French wine merchant, who set her up in a fine mansion above Harlem. When her husband died, she took over his business and proved such a shrewd businesswoman that she is said to have become the wealthiest woman in America. 30

  The most famous New York prostitute in the 1840s was Julia Brown. She began in the 1830s by working in a brothel run by a notorious madam named Adeline Miller. After a while she set up on her own, and by 1842 she had a magnificent parlor house on Leonard Street. She attended the most fashionable balls and parties and became known as Princess Julia. 31

  These women were the tip of the iceberg. Recent studies of prostitution in New York have shown that dozens of other women made a good living from running brothels and boardinghouses. Marilynn Wood Hill has shown that at least twenty-four prostitutes had property valued at $5,000 or more in the years between 1840 and 1860, and both she and Timothy Gilfoyle have studied city records, newspapers, and the books of nineteenth-century reformers, which reveal that prostitution was not only a means to personal wealth for many women, but was sometimes an entrée into respectable society.

  Things were rather different in San Francisco. This was the most notorious of all the ports in the Western world for its brothels, its nightlife, and the bizarre entertainments that were provided for the visiting sailors and the men who flocked into the city during and after the Gold Rush of 1849. Before then San Francisco was little more than a shantytown of wooden shacks, crudely constructed tents, and the mud huts of a few Mexican Indian families. The entire population of the place was reckoned to be no more than 459 people in June 1847, the majority of whom were men between the ages of twenty and forty. 32 Within a year of the finding of gold, some 50,000 men had arrived in the hope of making their fortune. The number of ships arriving in the booming town increased rapidly: 451 came in October 1851, and during the following year, a total of 1,147 entered the bay and dropped anchor offshore or tried to find a place alongside the one and only wharf. 33 Boardinghouses, bars, taverns, and gambling dens were hastily erected along the waterfront or in some cases were set up on board the ships lying on the beach. A doorway was cut in the side of the sailing ship Niantic, the interior was roughly converted into a doss-house, and the words “Rest for the Weary and Storage for Trunks” were painted on her sides. The brig Euphemia was turned into a jail.

  The acute shortage of women was solved by shipping in prostitutes from New Orleans and the east coast of America. A batch of prostitutes was even brought over from France. Mexican women arrived in considerable numbers, and there was a brisk trade in women from China. The prettiest Chinese girls from the interior of the country were sold to the brothels that catered to the rapidly growing numbers of rich merchants and tradesmen, while the boat girls from Chinese seaports ended up in the inferior dens of prostitution frequented by sailors and gold miners. By the 1860s, San Francisco had developed into a flourishing frontier town with levels of crime, violence, and vice that matched those of long-established seaports.

  An excerpt from a graphic article in the San Francisco Herald noted: “There are certain spots in our city, infested by the most abandoned men and women, that have acquired a reputation little better than the Five Points of New York or St. Giles of London. The upper part of Pacific Street, after dark, is crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors and similar characters, who resort to the groggeries that line the street, and there spend the night in the most hideous orgies.”

  Pacific Street was the center of the area that became known as the Barbary Coast. 34 It stretched from the junction of Montgomery Street and Kearney Street down past Front Street to the water’s edge. Every adventurous sailor looked forward to sampling its delights and being able to boast to his shipmates about his experiences there. The fact that many sailors were beaten up and robbed and infected with virulent forms of venereal disease on the Barbary Coast does not seem to have lessened its attraction. Apart from the inevitable gambling dens and bars, the Barbary Coast included an extraordinary variety of establishments catering to the sexual needs of visiting
sailors. There were dance halls with small bands or orchestras in which the principal attractions were the women who were called “pretty waiter girls” whatever their age and looks. They wore gaudy and revealing costumes that usually consisted of black silk stockings, short skirts, and low-cut blouses. For the payment of the derisory fee of 50 cents, the patrons of some dance halls were allowed to strip the girls and view them naked. The enterprising manager of one of the Mexican dives somewhat preempted this custom by introducing a form of dress for his pretty waiter girls that he believed would give him an edge over his rivals. Instead of providing topless girls, as is the custom in similar establishments today, he provided bottomless girls. Their costume consisted of nothing more than short red jackets, black stockings, fancy garters, and red slippers. He was forced to abandon the experiment after a few weeks because the girls complained of the cold and it became impossible to control the hordes of men who crowded in to view the spectacle.

  Then there were the “melodeons,” so called because the music in them was originally provided by instruments called melodeons, which were small reed organs operated by foot treadles. These places provided liquor and staged theatrical performances ranging from the vulgar to the obscene; acts involving bestiality were not uncommon. The most famous of the melodeons was the Bella Union. The girls who performed on the stage were expected to sell drinks during intermissions, and if a customer wished to have sex with them, they retired to a room set aside with curtained booths or alcoves. The concert halls were similar to the melodeons and staged anything from lesbian acts to song-and-dance routines performed by women with stage names such as the Roaring Gimlet, the Little Lost Chicken, Lady Jane Grey, the Galloping Cow, and the Dancing Heifer. The latter two were sisters, enormous washerwomen who found it more profitable to perform on stage than to wash laundry. The Galloping Cow saved enough money to open her own saloon on Pacific Street in 1878. Any man who attempted to make advances to her was likely to have a bottle smashed over his head.

  Whatever the entertainment provided in the dance halls, melodeons, and concert halls, it was usual for the women in them to work as prostitutes on the side. There were also brothels that made no attempt to provide music or dancing, and these fell into three main types: parlor houses, which usually housed the younger and prettier girls and charged anywhere from $2 to $10 for a brief visit and $20 for an all-night session; cribs, which were small, dirty, and dangerous; and cow yards, which were collections of cribs in one building housing as many as 300 prostitutes. Benjamin Estelle Lloyd, a local historian, summed up his impressions in a damning account in Lights and Shades of San Francisco, published in 1876: “The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house-burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cut-throats, murderers are all found here.” He described the dance halls and concert saloons in which bleary-eyed men and faded women drank vile liquor, smoked offensive tobacco, and sang obscene songs. He concluded: “Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy and death are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.”

  A few of the women who worked in the waterfront area of San Francisco managed to retain some measure of independence, but the vast majority of American, Mexican, Chinese, and European women working in the bars, dance halls, and brothels were degraded and exploited victims in an exceptionally rough, male-oriented world. This was not always the case with sailors’ women elsewhere, as we have seen. However, it has to be said that the lives of most prostitutes in seaports were hard and dangerous and offered little hope for the future. Why, then, did so many women become prostitutes and who exactly were they?

  Nineteenth-century observers were agreed on who the women were. They were young and they were working class. The most detailed survey of New York prostitutes was that carried out by Dr. William Sanger, published in 1858. Sanger was chief resident physician of Blackwell’s Island Hospital in New York City and was appointed to investigate the extent of venereal disease among the poor in the city. He turned his original brief into an ambitious work, which he entitled The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes and Effects Throughout the World. The basis of his study was the information obtained from 2,000 women, and this provides a remarkable insight into their lives. The limitations of the study are that it was dependent on information supplied by the police, who seem to have concentrated on women in brothels. Streetwalkers were largely ignored and child prostitutes were mysteriously omitted, although we know that large numbers of children under the age of fifteen were engaged in prostitution.

  Sanger’s study makes it clear that the great majority of adult prostitutes were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three. Most of the rest were between twenty-four and thirty, after which the numbers drop sharply. Amazingly, his survey notes that there was a prostitute still working at the age of seventy-one and another at the age of seventy-seven. With regard to the occupations of the 2,000 women in his study, 933 had been servants before becoming prostitutes, 499 had lived with parents or friends, and most of the rest were dressmakers, tailoresses, or seamstresses. These figures are echoed in similar studies produced by the Reverend G. P. Merrick, chaplain of London’s Millbank prison, who interviewed more than 100,000 women during the course of his work. 35 In an analysis of the trades and professions of 14,790 prostitutes, Merrick found that 8,001 were domestic servants, 2,667 were needlewomen, 1,617 were trade girls who worked in factories, 1,050 were barmaids, and the rest were street sellers, governesses, or dancers, or had no other job. Merrick also provided figures to show that the majority of the fathers of prostitutes were carpenters, laborers, shopkeepers, factory foremen, mechanics, soldiers, sailors, publicans, and farmers. Very few were professional men, officials in institutions, merchants, or shipowners, and only 13 were described as gentlemen. Merrick tested the reading and writing skills of the women and found that 3,237 were illiterate and 2,293 were of the lowest standard.

  The traditional explanation for why women became prostitutes was that they were seduced by men and then abandoned. But of the 2,000 women studied by Sanger, only 258 gave this as a reason. The largest number, 525, gave destitution as the cause of their taking to the streets, and 515 gave “inclination.” Sanger explains that “inclination” did not mean they wanted to become prostitutes but that they drifted into it for one reason or another: Some had been persuaded by other prostitutes; several had taken to drink as a result of problems in their lives and needed the money to satisfy their craving for liquor. Again Merrick’s figures reflect similar findings. Out of a list of 16,022 women, 3,363 pleaded poverty and necessity resulting from lack of employment as the reason, 5,061 left their homes voluntarily for various reasons, 2,808 were led away by other girls, 3,154 were seduced and drifted onto the streets, and 1,636 fell into that category favored by the Victorian novelists: They were betrayed under a promise of marriage “and having lost their characters, and being abandoned by their seducers and relatives, felt that they had no alternative but to seek a home and livelihood amongst the ‘fallen.’ ” 36 The reasons so many girls left their homes voluntarily would appear to be much the same as they are today: quarrels and tensions within the household; one or both parents taking to drink; violent or sexual abuse from the father or another male relation; or a wish to escape the confines and restrictions of family life. As one seventeen-year-old girl from Connecticut explained, “Mother is cross and home is an old, dull, dead place.” 37

  Sanger provides several examples of young women driven to prostitution through poverty. One example in particular sums up the problems often faced by the wives of seamen. The woman, who is identified only by the initials C.H., told Sanger that her father and mother had died while she was a child. At the age of seventeen she married a sailor, and they had three children. The girl died but the two boys survived. She said that the family lived very comfortably until the youngest child was born, but
then her husband began to drink. He stopped supporting the family and then went away, and she had not seen or heard from him for six months. Her older boy was five years old and her younger was eighteen months. She tried to keep going by washing and other work but could never manage to earn more than $2 or $3 a week. She came to New York with her two children “and I support them with what I earn by prostitution. It was only to keep them that I came here.” 38

  Merrick and Sanger were agreed on the dreadful toll that prostitution took on the lives of those who practiced it. Sanger reckoned that the average duration of the life of a prostitute did not exceed four years from the commencement of her career. Merrick came up with a similar figure: “I find that the average number of years which they live after having taken to a ‘life on the streets’ is about three years and six weeks.” 39 According to Merrick, the reasons for the high mortality of the women were the irregular hours, irregular meals, being out in all kinds of weather, short and broken sleep, and the constant drain on their natural strength.