The Scarlet Sisters (16 page)

One male chronicler of the period repeated exactly what the sisters were saying. George Ellington (a pseudonym) estimated that “two out of three men of wealth and fashion and leisure devote time and money to some fair one,” and their “female relatives are profoundly in the dark” or look the other way. The “proportion of really happy marriages are exceedingly few, so few,” he wrote, that it was a wonder anyone married, and wives of the leisure class routinely had lovers themselves. In a time when a good laborer’s wage was $500 a year, the tiny percentage of the very rich, their wealth gained by any means, could enjoy a king’s life, including the fairest of those called “Women of Pleasure.” Young beauties often were part of the collection of rich men’s toys, which included horses, stylish carriages, servants, cruises to Europe, brandy, champagne, the best cigars, and the most elegant garments. These women paraded on Broadway, rode in the finest carriages in Central Park, enjoyed tables at Delmonico’s and fine theater boxes, and frequented private supper clubs with discreet back entrances.

Which brings us to
The Gentleman’s Companion
, a well-thumbed vest pocket guide to New York brothels published anonymously in 1870. It begins puckishly: “We don’t intend to tell the reader where the Central Park is, the Croton Aqueduct… Cooper Institute, or Knox the hatter… we propose” to give the reader “a knowledge of which he could not procure elsewhere.”

Pretty maids, tired of earning a pittance in domestic service while being chased around a bedroom by the master, “were the most likely to engage in the sex trade.” More than sixty percent of women workers in 1870 were domestics; live-in help worked from dawn until late at night for meager pay. The sisters saw that economics rather than inclination precipitated the exodus from such work into prostitution. Pleasure was often faked; prostitutes were major users of the prevalent opium-based laudanum. Yet they were touted as jolly companions.

The fifty-five-page palm-size brothel guide, its pages decorated with filigreed trim suitable for love poems, detailed the good, the bad, and the just awful dens of iniquity. At $1.50 apiece, the guide was not cheap. It stressed class distinctions and snob appeal. At one end were the “lowest class of courtezans [
sic
]” and “gentlemen who wear their shirts inside out when the other side is dirty.” The guide featured far more “first class” brothels among the 125 surveyed, those establishments that catered to the well-heeled men whom the sisters called hypocrites. Madam Jennie Creagh, “a dashing brunette, has splendidly furnished her place… with it’s [
sic
] French mirrors, English and Brussels carpets, rosewood furniture, superb bedding.” It featured “ten lady boarders, finely dressed and very accomplished and prepossessing.” Madam Kate Woods ran a house “better known among the aristocracy as Hotel de Wood.” (The sisters knew a wealthy madam named Annie Woods; this may have been her with a different first name.) The three-story brownstone featured a “gallery of oil paintings” that cost $10,000, immense mirrors, and $70,000 worth of furnishings, where “three young ladies of rare personal attractions” were available for “distinguished gentlemen from foreign countries.” Other “first class” houses were “visited by some of our first citizens.”

To earn high marks, madams had to be fun-loving and friendly, real-life versions of
Gone with the Wind
’s Belle Watling. There was Madam Emma March, with her “inexhaustible stock of good humor,” and Madam Ida Thompson and her “lively young ladies… full of fun, love, and fond of amusement.” On the other hand, Laura Howard’s “power house” got a negative review because “some of its visitors have asserted that it’s [
sic
] inmates are of a snobbish disposition.” Another house was dismissed with one sentence: the madam and the girls “are as sour as her wine.” One house provided a “regular physician.” The strangest entry: “There is a report of a bear being kept in the cellar, but for what reason may be inferred.” The anonymous author, whose strong suit was not spelling or grammar, was probably paid by madams to promote certain houses; after all, it was routine for madams to pay off the police. The sisters revealed the details of a prostitute’s hard life in their 1871
Weekly
. A first-class prostitute paid her madam $40 a week to use a room and 20 percent of her profits. Towels cost extra. The police made $100 a week in protection money from the madam, and the prostitutes paid patrolmen $3 to $10 a week, plus provided sex on the house. Police captains and sergeants had their pick of girls, gratis. “The amount of degradation and bodily injury” to pay off such rackets “can only be imagined,” stated the
Weekly
.

The Gentleman’s Companion
was very free with establishment addresses and names—most, no doubt, fake—but most madams were spared. Census takers generally recorded them as women who “keep house” or as “domestic servants”—unless they missed their payola payments. Occasionally, police conducted sham arrests, releasing prostitutes after a few hours, once they had paid a fee. The fancier houses produced elaborate calling cards of fine vellum, with name, address, and discreet mention of the number of “lady boarders” in elegant script. Older and drug-addicted prostitutes were reduced to infamous Greene Street.
The Gentleman’s Companion
warned its users to avoid Greene Street like the pox, which, the guide inferred, could easily be acquired there: “In the short space of six squares, included between Canal and Bleecker streets there are 41 houses containing barrooms, 8 houses of assignation, 22 houses
in which furnished rooms are let to girls and 11 segar [
sic
] stores… the filth and turmoil would lead a stranger to suppose that… old Sodom and Gomorrah had risen from their ashes.”

Despite their charms, streetwalkers on fashionable Broadway—“smart, good-looking, well educated, prepossessing”—were also poison. Young “comely females, ages 15 to 25” took their Broadway customers to rented furnished rooms. These “Badgers,” or “panel thieves,” said the guide with male indignation, “have robbed many an unsuspecting stranger of his all.” A married man or well-known public figure was a target; “the presumption is that fear of exposure will prevent him from making a complaint… They are in our public streets what sharks are on [
sic
] the ocean.” Public houses where “gentlemen” could meet women included the huge Broadway Garden, extending from Broadway to Mercer Street. A red lamp at 25 East Houston Street marked the establishment of Harry Hill, a “genial and indefatigable landlord.”

If a married gent wanted to wander back home, ads in the guide featured Dr. Groves’s marriage pamphlets for fifty cents, “with six new illustrations, 310 pages of usable information” containing “all those wonderful, marvelous and mysterious” sex secrets from “the various professions, arts and sciences.”

In the nineteenth century it was easy to be called a slut or prostitute. Lucy Stone’s father, like many men, called women who engaged in public speaking sluts, including his daughter, remarking that “when the sluts are out, the dogs will bark.” When working girls attempted to strike, they were jeered as prostitutes, and foremen threatened to send them to the Tombs, the jail in Lower Manhattan, to await sentencing. Mediums and actresses were considered demimondes. An unmarried society woman who went out at night without an escort could ruin her reputation.

The sensational act of conducting business on Wall Street was enough to cast suspicion on the sisters. Now, as sex radicals, their call for women’s sexual emancipation was proof to their enemies. In arguing that a woman had a right to freedom regarding her own body, to choose her mate, to
decide when she wanted sex, and actually to enjoy it, the sisters were so far ahead of the era that they were openly called prostitutes in print.

Equally advanced was their shocking notion that “Physiology and hygiene should not stop short of all the uses of the sexual organs. And all this should be taught in every school to both sexes conjointly, so that in early youth children shall not be drawn into the terrible mistake that these organs are indecent, obscene or vulgar,” they wrote in the
Weekly
. “At the ages of twelve, thirteen and fourteen years, youth of both sexes begin to experience the sexual desire… it is simply folly; aye it is madness, to pretend to think that a desire so utterly beyond the soul of reason… will be controlled to best results by those who have been kept in the most profound ignorance of its nature and uses.… But what has been done to guard or guide this tremendous impulse? Nothing! Absolutely nothing. Neither teachers, parents or priests have opened their lips either to instruct or to warn.”

Woodhull’s advice included warning children about the evils of masturbation. For all her forward thinking, she shared the Victorian condemnation of the act, saying, “I need not tell you that four-fifths of the children practice self-abuse before they are old enough, of their own wisdom, to know better.” Like many in the Victorian hygienic movement, Woodhull viewed this “morbid vice” as sapping one’s energy and, for men, wasting precious bodily fluids. When she differentiated “free love” from “free lust,” she explained, “Lust is the perverted action of the desire for sexual love.” She lumped masturbation in with “free lust” practices such as “sodomy” and “purchased intercourse as in prostitution.” She alluded to disgust for homosexuality: “were I to tell you the extent to which Sodomy in man and its antitype in woman have attained, I should shock you beyond measure.” Her simplistic and incoherent solution to end free lust evil was free love, with everyone being able to pick and choose his or her true love, providing they did not exhibit what she termed vile behavior.

There were “prostitutes” whom the sisters did despise, but not those mentioned in
The Gentleman’s Companion
: they were scathing about
the underlying hypocrisy of high-society women who sold themselves for profitable marriages. “What a commentary upon the divinity of marriage are the watering places during the summer seasons!” scoffed Victoria. “The mercenary ‘mammas’ trot out their daughters on exhibition, as though they were so many stud of horses, to be hawked to the highest bidder. It’s the man who can pay the most money who is sought; it makes no difference how he got it, nor what are his antecedents… To him who bids highest… the article is knocked down… this is the ruling spirit, not at watering places only but in so-called best society everywhere. Marriages of love become rarer year after year, while those of convenience are proportionately on the increase… and we prate of the holy marriage covenant!”

Every era breeds some rebellion with the past, and Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838 amid a backlash against an “age of debauchery,” when upper-class males routinely kept mistresses. In the Victorian era, the image of the happy family, chaste couples amid the “respectability” of polite society, was acclaimed. And by 1870, reformers were once again fighting crime, obscenity, debauchery, and prostitution as the post–Civil War period mocked much of the Victorian myth. Yet hypocrisy hadn’t faded. Despite fashion that paraded plumped-up breasts, women were supposed to be horrified at naked statues in art museums, legs were never to be seen, and the lower half of the body was called the “nether regions.”

Only women such as the sisters and a few of the earlier feminists even dared to wear radical dress. Two decades before the sisters cut their hair and wore shorter skirts, Amelia Bloomer, Stone, Anthony, and Stanton wore voluminous harem trousers to the ankles, covered by tunic-length skirts. These “bloomers”—named for Amelia Bloomer—revealed absolutely nothing but made it easier for their wearers to walk. Anthony resisted until she tired of ripping the hems of unwieldy skirts getting on and off stagecoaches and dragging them in the mud.

Stanton added humor as she made her point: “Take a man and pin three or four large tablecloths about him, fastened back with elastic and looped up with ribbons; drag all his own hair to the middle of his head
and tie it tight, and hair pin on about five pounds of other hair with a bow of ribbon… pinch his waist into a corset and give him gloves a size too small and shoes ditto, and a hat that will not stay on without a torturing elastic and frill to tickle his chin and little lace veil to bend his eyes whenever he goes out to walk and he will know what woman’s dress is.”

The ability to walk and breathe freely was no match for the heavy ridicule in newspapers, the hoots and whistles of men, or the rocks thrown by young boys. Stanton told Anthony that “the cup of ridicule is more than you can bear,” advising her not to waste her energies fighting it. But Stanton herself held out, even as she embarrassed her husband while he campaigned for reelection to the New York State Senate in 1852. (He was widely depicted as a henpecked man whose wife “wears the britches.”)

Twenty years later nothing had changed for the better, and Victoria and Tennie vociferously mocked fashion. “A blind and foolish custom has decreed that women must wear skirts to hide their legs, while they may… expose their arms and breasts,” wrote Tennie. She ridiculed coy women who blush “when subjects are spoken of which are of the greatest interest to humanity generally” but “appear at balls and receptions and at the opera virtually naked to the waist.” On the contrary, since the “portion of woman’s clothing which is supported from the waist” was up to fifteen pounds, Tennie asked, “Are weak backs a wonder? Put on suspenders, girls.” Fashionable clothes were “absurd… ridiculous” and “from the health point of view they are suicidal.” Tennie spoke contemptuously about a useless upper class: “While women remain mere dolls… it does not matter very much how they dress; but when any of them shake off the shackles of dependence, and become their own support,” they should “accommodate their dress to their new modes of life.”

However, the sisters themselves ran ads that mocked everything they stood for.
BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
, beckoned one: “All women know that it is beauty, rather than genius, which all generations of men have worshipped in the sex.” A drawing of a woman, with flowing hair, breasts pushed up, touching a potion bottle accompanied the text for the lotion, with the caption “When most men speak of the intelligent women, they speak
critically, tamely, coolly.” When speaking of beautiful women, “their language and their eyes kindle with an enthusiasm… The world has yet allowed no higher mission to woman than to be beautiful.” This lotion promised to smooth out “all indentations, furrows, scars, removing tan, freckles and discolorations… giving the appearance of youth and beauty.”