PROSTITUTION

During the Progressive era, prostitution came to symbolize broader anxieties having to do with urbanization, mass consumption, and class and gender roles. Although Americans' preoccupation with prostitution diminished after World War I, it resurfaced in the early years of the Great Depression. Increasing concerns about prostitution reflected a broader climate of gender anxiety. Particularly in the early 1930s before the advent of the New Deal, many Americans believed that the economic crisis might lead to social and sexual chaos. Unable to comprehend the vastness of the nation's economic troubles, they often translated them into problems of gender instead. Thus, images of fallen women populate the Depression-era cultural landscape. Such images directly influenced state policy and action, shaping employment and welfare options not only for prostitutes but for a much broader group of women.

Particularly in the 1930 to 1933 period, prostitution was a topic of widespread comment and concern. Critics drew a direct connection between increasing unemployment and rising rates of vice and crime. A committee of prominent New Yorkers, known as the Seabury Committee, found in 1931 that prostitution was on the increase in their city. They claimed that women were becoming prostitutes because more legitimate jobs were unavailable. A sociologist at Brooklyn College noted that African-American women were at greater risk than white women for becoming prostitutes. Not only were African-American women more financially vulnerable, but urban vice tended to be concentrated in black residential areas like Harlem. Focusing on Chicago, sociologist Walter Reckless noted a similar rise in white and black prostitution. Like the Seabury Committee, he attributed the increase to women's unemployment, but also to the breakdown of traditional family constraints and the allure of urban leisure activities. Reckless downplayed women's financial motives for becoming prostitutes, arguing instead that sexual commerce afforded prostitutes excitement, glamour, and independence, thus appealing to their selfish, modern sensibilities.

For some commentators, even more distressing than the fact of prostitution was the perverse gender arrangements it supported. The Seabury Report on vice in New York expressed concern that pimps and nightclub proprietors relied on prostitutes for their livelihoods. Citing conventional wisdom about the prostitute's relation to male dependents, another writer noted that prostitutes typically supported male pimps, as well as corrupt police and city officials. As such observations suggest, prostitution signified both Depression-induced social instability and the potential reversal of male and female economic roles.

Concerns about the prostitute's usurpation of male economic authority are also evident in fallen woman films, such as Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise (1931), Blonde Venus (1932), and Baby Face (1933). In such films, prostitutes obtain wealth and power by sexually emasculating their male associates. The heroines of such films embody negative traits, such as selfishness, moral weakness, and duplicity. By using their sexual wiles for material gain, they wreak havoc on their male counterparts' lives, much as the Depression devastated the lives of much of the male moviegoing public. Narrative closure occurs in these films when masculine authority is restored and the prostitute-heroine is punished for her transgressions.

Concerns about rising rates of prostitution also infused the early Depression discourse on transiency. Many commentators alleged that women's participation in the "transient horde" was on the rise, and that most female transients engaged in prostitution. Thomas Minehan fed such fears with his 1934 volume, Boy and Girl Tramps of America. According to Minehan, prostitution was normalized within the transient community, and prostitutes were often young girls who traded sex for food and protection. In another sensational account, female transients prostituted themselves with as many as twenty men at a time, thus making up for the lack of women within the transient community.

Sensationalized accounts of prostitution and female transiency directly influenced early Depression welfare policy. Prior to the New Deal, prostitution was a major focus of municipal relief. Some jobless women objected to the implication embedded in municipal relief policy that they were at risk for becoming prostitutes. Instead of focusing on their supposed sexual exploits, such women suggested, journalists and others might do well to consider women's real relief needs. In a 1931 letter to The New Republic, one woman wrote, "The need is for agencies to which women of pride and independence—not potential prostitutes—can turn, and in which they will receive aid uninjurious to their selfrespect."

Such women had to wait some time before their pleas for dignified relief were met. Reflecting the broader climate of concern about prostitution, initial New Deal relief policy focused disproportionately on the plight of the sexually vulnerable "woman alone." The needs of single, needy women were a major focus of the White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women, convened in November 1933. Rose Schneiderman, president of the Women's Trade Union League, set an urgent tone for the conference when she observed that countless young women lacked not only jobs but shelter, and that many had little recourse but to sell their bodies. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reiterated Schneiderman's concern, and following the conference, the newly formed Women's Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration prioritized the needs of single, needy women. Only gradually, as the social and sexual panic of the early Depression years subsided, did federal relief administrators redirect their attention to the needs of jobless women who were not at risk for becoming prostitutes, but whose primary concern was supporting their children and other family dependents.

In the early Depression years, the widespread preoccupation with prostitution obscured women's real relief needs and disadvantaged them relative to men. At a time when male citizenship ideals were under stress, figures like the prostitute, the girl tramp, and the fallen woman heroine signified the potential disruptiveness of women in public. Much as the fallen woman film celebrated the restoration of masculine authority while blaming the prostitute-heroine for social chaos, New Deal social policies promoted masculine providership while reinforcing women's subordinate domestic roles. By the late 1930s, Americans no longer believed that the economic crisis would result in widespread social or sexual chaos. Complacency led to diminished visibility for the prostitute, if not to equitable and dignified work and welfare options for a majority of American women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Comments on Prostitution." New Republic (December 30, 1931).

Connelly, Mark Thomas. The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era. 1980.

Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Proceedings of the Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women, November 20, 1933. WPA Women's Division Files (R.G. 69, P.C. 37, entry 8, box 83), National Archives.

Golden, Stephanie. The Women Outside: Meanings and Myths of Homelessness. 1992.

Gordon, Linda. Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935. 1994.

Green, Alfred E., director. Baby Face. 1933.

Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition. 1987.

Jacobs, Lea. The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942. 1991.

Leonard, Robert Z., director. Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. 1931.

Minehan, Thomas. Boy and Girl Tramps of America. 1934.

Sternberg, Joseph von, director. Blonde Venus. 1932.

Ware, Susan. Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s. 1982.