A Renegade History of the United States Page 15
One of Backrach’s chief competitors was Julius Schmid, like Backrach a German-Jewish immigrant, who saw an opportunity at his job cleaning animal intestines at a sausage factory. In 1883 he took home hundreds of intestines and founded what would become Julius Schmid Inc., the manufacturer of Fourex, Ramses, and Sheik condoms. In 1890 Comstock’s New York vice squad arrested Schmid at his home on Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan, which was ideally located amid what was then New York’s largest red-light district, and found 696 prophylactic “skins” and “one form for manufacturing same.” Schmid was jailed and fined for “selling articles to prevent conception” but was encouraged by the enormous market of bad people and continued his trade. This was twenty-six years before Margaret Sanger more famously opened her first birth control clinic. Using a technique invented in Germany, Schmid became the first American to mass-produce rubber condoms and the leading condom manufacturer in the United States. During World War I, he provided condoms to the British, French, Russian, and Italian armies, but not to the American army, which, following the ban on contraceptives, instructed its soldiers to use “moral prophylaxis” in their encounters with prostitutes. As a result, roughly 10 percent of American GIs contracted venereal disease during the war. By World War II, the ban had been lifted, allowing the U.S. armed forces to make Schmid its official condom supplier.
In the nineteenth century, when oral sex was universally condemned as a sin, brothels were known to be the only place a man could receive it without coercion. Until well into the twentieth century, medical sexual manuals and marriage advice books either ignored oral sex or condemned it as pathological and perverted. As of 1950, fellatio—even when practiced by a married couple—was a felony in all forty-eight states, and cunnilingus was a felony in forty-one. No doubt many Americans practiced oral sex anyway, but prostitutes were practically the only ones to do so publicly and with no apparent shame. In a 1934 survey of Chicago prostitutes, only five solicited what investigators called “the ‘normal’ coitus,” while more than one hundred offered fellatio. The report noted that 90 percent of the solicitations observed by investigators “consisted of offers of gross perversion.” Prostitutes were the vanguard of the sexual revolution that broke open the erotic lives of Americans. Until the 1970s, when many observers declared that “everyone” was doing it, oral sex among heterosexuals was considered to be the exclusive practice of whores.
Even the dance craze of the 1910s and 1920s originated in brothels. Until then, respectable social dancing was limited to upper-class balls where, according to historian Lewis A. Erenberg, the dancing “exhibited control, regularity, and patterned movement.” The waltz, the most popular of the respectable dances in the nineteenth century, demanded “a certain unity in the steps, creating a standardized form of motion.” Erenberg’s description of the waltz—which required a distance between the partners of three to four inches at the shoulders, “increasing downward”—shows just how revolutionary were slaves, minstrels, prostitutes, and the renegade Americans who emulated them on the dance floor:
The waltz perhaps expressed the emphasis on disembodied love in the nineteenth century. It was a more companionate dance to be sure, but the movement of the dance, much like the mobility enshrined in the society, kept the man and woman apart.
Any overtly sexual dancing was considered the practice of only blacks and prostitutes. Moreover, dancing was consigned to private, well-regulated spaces. Jesse Lasky, a vaudeville performer who created Hollywood’s first film studio, said that in 1911 “it was still scandalous to dance in a public place.” But in the second decade of the twentieth century, renegade pleasures and freedoms bubbled up from the gutter.
While good Americans were dancing the waltz, bad people were enjoying dirty dancing in houses of ill repute all over the country. Places called “concert saloons” appeared in cities during the 1840s and 1850s and gained popularity through the nineteenth century. By 1910, San Francisco’s red-light district, known as the Barbary Coast, contained more than 300 concert saloons within a six-block radius, and the South Side of Chicago had more than 285. New York’s Bowery and Tenderloin (Julius Schmid’s neighborhood) and the French Quarter in New Orleans contained several hundred similar establishments.
Concert saloons were known to offer four things: liquor, music, dancing, and sex for sale. According to the historian Russel B. Nye, “the girls who frequented them were nearly always prostitutes, amateur and professional.” They were also, like the brothels of the Wild West, frequently integrated. Many of the concert saloons in the big cities were owned by African Americans, and most were known to host mixed clientele. Even perfectly genteel establishments began to offer the freedoms and pleasures that were previously found only in brothels. In 1912, cafes on Broadway in New York started afternoon dances, often called “tango teas,” for unescorted women, single men, and even gigolos hired by management to dance with the female patrons. They became all the rage. Moral reformers rightly pointed to the scum of society as the source of the phenomenon. “It is simply an evil condition working upward into other strata of society,” said Belle Moskowitz, who led a campaign to ban all forms of sensual and public dancing in New York. As the New York World quite accurately noted, “From the slum to the state, from the state to the restaurant, from restaurant to home, the dive dances have clutched and taken hold upon the young who know no better and the old who should.”
Historians have estimated that in the 1910s more than one hundred new dances became fashionable in perfectly respectable public spaces. These dances overturned Victorian conventions against overt sexuality. According to Erenberg, they “fostered an unheard-of casualness between partners, permitted greater options in holds and distances, and symbolized the high value placed on mutual heterosexual intimacy and attraction.” Most shocking to the keepers of social order, “couples often held each other very close, grasping each other firmly about the waist or about the neck as in a hug … the one-step, the bunny hug, and the other new dances allowed a lingering close contact.” The most influential of the new dances, which scholars cite as the sources of both swing dance and the gyrations at early rock-and-roll dances, were the turkey trot, the fox-trot, the Charleston, and the Texas Tommy. According to the leading historians of American vernacular dance, all of these dances were invented by ex-slaves and their descendants in the South, then popularized among whites by prostitutes in the Barbary Coast district of San Francisco. “By turning to the animal world, black culture, and the red-light district for the sources of their cultural regeneration,” writes Erenberg, “well-to-do urbanites were searching for a way to liberate some of the repressed wilder elements, the more natural elements, that had been contained by gentility.”
PISTOLS AND PAINT
American prostitutes gave the lie not only to the Victorian belief that women were innately asexual but also to the common assumption that women were incapable of defending themselves from physical violence. Biographies of virtually all the major madams include at least one story of armed self-defense against a male assailant. Jessie Hayman always kept a pistol in her pocket. “I keep my customers close and my gun closer,” she often said. “It’s helped me settle many an argument.” Caroline “Cad” Thompson, the queen of the silver mining town Virginia City, Nevada, responded to her husband’s threat to kill her by pointing a pistol at his head and holding him at bay until the police arrived. When “Big Nose Kate” Horony was fifteen years old, she stopped a man from raping her by knocking him unconscious with an ax handle. Later, as a prostitute in St. Louis, Horony gained fame by shooting to death a man who had killed the madam who was her mentor. Eleanora Dumont was known to have shot many men in her days roaming the West, and on one occasion she saved not only herself but an entire town on the Missouri River in Montana. When a steamboat known to be carrying smallpox attempted to unload its passengers, Dumont aimed her derringer pistol at the captain and fired two shots into the deck just inches from his feet. “The second shot was to prove the fi
rst was no accident,” she said. “If you don’t turn this boat around, the next bullet goes through your head.” With that, the captain turned his wheel and sped off down the river.
It is common now for feminists and others critical of our “beauty culture” to think of women’s use of fashion and cosmetics as submission to male desire, the promotion of superficiality over substance, a means to conformity, narcissistic, and a form of self-oppression. These criticisms are not new, nor were they launched by women. Moralistic Englishmen first raised the cry against cosmetics in the seventeenth century. Puritan clergyman Thomas Tuke’s 1616 A Discourse Against Painting and Tincturing warned that cosmetics were “brought into use by the devil” to make women worship themselves. By allowing women to remake themselves, cosmetics violated the natural order: “And though she bee the creature of God, as she is a woman, yet is she her owne creatrisse, as a picture.” Tuke counseled women who wished to be respectable to “leave these base arts to the commo[n] strumpets, of whom they are fittest to be used, that by that filthiness they may be known and noted.” In early modern England, as later in the young United States, makeup was the tool of whores. “To most Americans,” writes historian Kathy Peiss, “the painted woman was simply a prostitute who brazenly advertised her immoral profession through rouge and kohl.” In the nineteenth century, “[n]ewspapers, tracts, and songs associated paint and prostitution so closely as to be a generic figure of speech.” Makeup represented “the aesthetic side of vice.”
Prostitutes were the first women in America to wear brightly colored clothes, and red was the color of the sex trade. The protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” recognizes the lady on the street with a “saucy eye” as a prostitute by her “scarlet petticoat.” George G. Foster’s 1850 account of street life in New York by Gas-Light tells of “two ladies” who were immediately identifiable as prostitutes by their extravagant jewelry, dresses of “an ultra fashionable make,” and shawls “of that gorgeous scarlet whose beamy hue intoxicates the eye.” In Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, a woman wearing a red dress at a church revival meeting is singled out as a fallen woman:
At the sight of the bare arms and neck growing out of the clinging red dress, a shudder shook the swaying man at her right. On the face of the dancing woman before her a disapproving frown gathered. She shrieked: “A scarlet ’oman. Come to Jesus, you pore los’ Jezebel!”
By the early twentieth century, as more and more women left the countryside and entered the expanding world of the city and all its freedoms, Peiss notes, “they made elements of this racy public style their own.”
Peiss found that between 1909 and 1929 “the number of American perfume and cosmetics manufacturers nearly doubled, and the factory value of their products rose tenfold, from $14.2 million to nearly $141 million.” The first respectable women to adopt the styles of prostitutes were women at the high and low ends of the economic scale: saleswomen in department stores, factory workers, and upper-class socialites. At the new urban dance halls, where “working girls” predominated, the liberal use of rouge, powder, and lipstick was an “almost universal custom.” Many newspapers noted that the wealthiest women had also adopted the look of the street. In 1890 the New York World reported that “society women now paint,” even those in “very select circles.” Having moved past the taboo of making up, “it is the very best upper-crustdom that puts aside tradition and authority and bedizens itself as much as it pleases.” By the 1910s, according to Peiss, “it was often difficult to distinguish the dress and style of respectable women from prostitutes at dances.” In 1917 vice investigators at a New York dance hall were told by a waiter, “The way women dress today, they all look like prostitutes.”
The movement begun by prostitutes did not go unchallenged. A woman protested to the Baltimore Sun in 1912 that in the past “the painted face was the bold, brazen sign of the woman’s character and calling” but “now women and young girls of a respectable society are seen on our streets and fashionable promenade with painted faces.” The social reformer and feminist Lillian D. Wald complained in her 1915 memoir of working-class girls on the Lower East Side adopting the customs of prostitutes, including a “pronounced lack of modesty in dress,” which, along with “their dancing, their talk, their freedom of manner, all combined to render them conspicuous.” In 1920 a juvenile court judge in Los Angeles restricted a delinquent teenage girl “from any use of make-up, such as rouge and pencil which she has been using against the mother’s desires for some time in the past.” And more than half of the girls in a 1937 study reported fighting with their parents over lipstick. The use of makeup was, according to Peiss, seen by many young women as a means to freedom, pleasure, and control over their own lives: “The sudden appearance of rouge and lipstick on a teenage girl’s face often accompanied a demand to keep more of her wages, to choose her boyfriends, and to enjoy greater autonomy in leisure activities.”
Before smoking and wearing skirts above the ankles were considered respectable for women, this early-twentieth century photograph of a prostitute in the Alaska and Yukon territories shows her casually blowing smoke rings and revealing her legs. From the MacBride Museum of Yukon History.
Despite the efforts of sexual conservatives, by the middle of the twentieth century, the looks pioneered by prostitutes were not only respectable but also normal. Massive adoption of whore style began in the 1910s, when, for the first time, respectable women unabashedly revealed the skin below their necks. “An unprecedented public display of the female figure characterized the period,” writes the historian James R. McGovern. Hems became shorter, hosiery was rolled down to reveal parts of the leg, and dresses were deeply cut to expose cleavage. In 1917 Ladies’ Home Journal offered fashion advice that just a few years earlier could have been the words only of a madam: “Fashion says—Evening gowns must be sleeveless … afternoon gowns are made with semitransparent yokes and sleeves.” Women smoking and drinking in public, which had been the exclusive practice of prostitutes and unassimilated German immigrants, “were becoming fashionable for married women of the upper class and were making headway at other class levels.”
The famous short, cropped, often wavy hairstyle of the flappers of the 1920s was seen by many as a rebellion against the maternal femininity of the Victorian era, when women were expected to wear long hair elaborately arranged on top of the head. To many flappers, the weight and the work of the Victorian style literally and symbolically kept women from moving freely. But historians of prostitution have found evidence that short hairstyles were first adopted in brothels. Photos taken of New Orleans prostitutes in 1912 by E. J. Bellocq show many wearing what would become the dominant hairstyle of the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, a 1913 vice report in Philadelphia noted that a black prostitute wore “black bobbed hair.” Within two decades, the style pioneered by prostitutes was so popular that the First Ladies Lou Henry Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt wore it in their official portraits.
In 1933 Vogue magazine declared wearing lipstick one of the “gestures of the twentieth century.” Peiss found evidence of many mothers in the 1930s adopting their daughter’s beauty regimens and a few mothers “who seem to have gone beyond their daughters in embracing the modern style of ‘flaming youth,’ despite traditional proscriptions.” The sociologist Walter Reckless said it best in his 1933 study of prostitution in Chicago. Until the 1910s, prostitutes “were in fact an outcast group with distinctive manner, dress, style.” They lived in “the ‘half-world,’” where they were “free to do what was tabu [sic] for the respectable woman.” The “painted lady” of the street had “an uncontested monopoly of rouge, the bleaching of hair, and strong perfumes, all of which have been means of sexual attraction.” But by the 1920s, “women of ill-fame no longer form[ed] a distinct caste readily distinguished from other women by dress, manners, and place of residence… . The activities of modern women—slumming, night life, exaggerations in dress, an unchaperoned life outside the home, entr
ance into business and sports—have erased the outward distinction between the painted sport and the paler protected lady.”
Even “the scarlet shame” of whores became the symbol of American female respectability. At the unveiling of the First Ladies Red Dress Collection, a charity for heart disease begun in 2005, Laura Bush spoke on behalf of her six predecessors:
Mrs. Reagan’s love of the color red is well known. Maybe her passion started when a dashing Ronald Reagan proposed to her in a red upholstered booth at a bistro in Los Angeles. America’s First Ladies have found many occasions to wear red. Lady Bird Johnson celebrated her eightieth birthday in her red evening gown. Betty Ford’s and Rosalynn Carter’s red dresses were reliable favorites. Barbara Bush wore red to a state dinner—accompanied, of course, by her pearls. Hillary Clinton’s red dress set just the right tone on Valentine’s Day. And I wore my red dress to the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. We’ve all made good use of our red dresses, and now we’re using them to promote our common interest in women’s health.
BLACK AND TAN
During the height of Jim Crow, the period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when lynchings were weekly events in the South and not uncommon in the North, countless thousands of black men had sex with white women with impunity in the brothels of the wild towns of the West. In fact, no place on the planet was more integrated than the nineteenth-century western whorehouse, saloon, or dance hall. This is all the more remarkable considering that the heyday of the Wild West coincided with the advent of segregation. In nearly every Western boom-town, one could find blacks and whites living next to Asians and Native Americans, and immigrants of dozens of nationalities working alongside native-born Americans. Many residents and travelers in the West reported on the “kaleidoscopic” social makeup of saloons and dance halls. They also reported on the high incidence of interracial sex—in particular but not exclusively in brothels. “Black and tans”—brothels employing white and black prostitutes—were common. Even the brothels that were segregated stood side by side in red-light districts. In big western cities like Denver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the typical brothel contained not just black and white prostitutes but also women from China, Japan, Mexico, and all parts of Europe. There were Jewish madams and Italian madams and Cherokee madams. Chinese and Mexican madams controlled much of the commerce in early San Francisco and Los Angeles. There were many wealthy, powerful, and famous madams who had been born into slavery.