Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but
at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked
downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city
fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away
from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in
a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to
explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared
their neighborhoods.
The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the
years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of
citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to
assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the
demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of
individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable"
white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's
opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to
rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance
at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual
power.