1 ene 1910 año - Mann Act prohibtions transportation of ppl across state lines for sex work

Descripción:

In the city, many young people found parental oversight weaker than it had been before. Amusement parks and dance halls helped foster the new custom of dating, which like other cultural innovations emerged first among the working class. Gradually, it became acceptable for a young man to escort a young woman out on the town for commercial entertainments rather than spending time at home under a chaperone’s watchful eye. Dating opened a new world of pleasure, sexual adventure, and danger.

But young women, not men, proved most vulnerable in the system of dating. Having less money to spend because they earned half or less of men’s wages, working-class girls relied on the “treat” to gain access to the commercialized pleasures of the big city, from amusement parks to movie theaters. Some tried to maintain strict standards of respectability, keenly aware that their prospects for marriage depended on a virtuous reputation. Others became so-called charity girls, who, as one investigator reported, “offer themselves to strangers, not for money, but for presents, attention and pleasure.” For some women, sexual favors were a matter of practical necessity. “If I did not have a man,” declared one waitress, “I could not get along on my wages.” In the anonymous city, there was not always a clear line between working-class treats and casual prostitution.

Dating and casual sex were hallmarks of an urban world in which large numbers of residents were young and single. The 1900 census found that more than 20 percent of women in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston lived as boarders and lodgers, not in family units; the percentage topped 30 percent in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Single men also found social opportunities in the city. One historian has called the late nineteenth century the Age of the Bachelor, a time when being an unattached male lost its social stigma. With boardinghouses, restaurants, and abundant personal services, the city afforded bachelors all the comforts of home and, on top of that, men’s clubs, saloons, and sporting events.

Many industrial cities developed robust gay subcultures. New York’s gay underground, for example, included an array of drinking and meeting places, as well as clubs and drag balls. Middle-class men, both straight and gay, frequented such venues for entertainment or to find companionship. One medical student remembered being taken to a ball at which he was startled to find five hundred gay and lesbian couples waltzing to “a good band.” By the 1910s, the word queer had come into use as slang for homosexual. Though harassment was frequent and moral reformers like Anthony Comstock issued regular denunciations of sexual “degeneracy,” arrests were few. Gay sex shows and saloons were lucrative for those who ran them (and for police, who took bribes to look the other way, just as they did for brothels). The exuberant gay urban subculture offered a dramatic challenge to Victorian ideals.

Distressed by the commercialization of sex, progressives also launched a campaign against urban prostitution. They warned dramatically of the threat of white slavery, alleging (in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary) that large numbers of young white women were being kidnapped and forced into prostitution. In The City’s Perils (1910), author Leona Prall Groetzinger wrote that young women arrived from the countryside “burning with high hope and filled with great resolve, but the remorseless city takes them, grinds them, crushes them, and at last deposits them in unknown graves.”

Practical investigators found a more complex reality: women entered prostitution as a result of many factors, including low-wage jobs, economic desperation, abandonment, and often sexual and domestic abuse. Women who bore a child out of wedlock were often shunned by their families and forced into prostitution. Some working women and even housewives undertook casual sex work to make ends meet. For decades, female reformers had tried to “rescue” such women and retrain them for more respectable employments, such as sewing. Results were mixed. Efforts to curb demand — that is, to focus on arresting and punishing men who employed prostitutes — proved unpopular with voters.

Nonetheless, with public concern mounting over “white slavery” and the payoffs machine bosses exacted from brothel keepers, many cities appointed vice commissions in the early twentieth century. A wave of brothel closings crested between 1909 and 1912, as police shut down red light districts in cities nationwide. Meanwhile, Congress passed the Mann Act (1910) to prohibit the transportation of prostitutes across state lines.

The crusade against prostitution accomplished its main goal — closing brothels — but in the long term it worsened conditions for many sex workers. Though conditions in some brothels were horrific, sex workers who catered to wealthy clients made high wages and were relatively protected by madams, many of whom set strict rules for clients and provided medical care for their workers. In the wake of brothel closings, such women lost control of the prostitution business. Instead, almost all sex workers became “streetwalkers” or “call girls,” more vulnerable to violence and often earning lower wages than they had before the antiprostitution crusade began.

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