Walt Whitman and the Prostitutes

By general consensus, feminist critics have absolved Walt Whitman of those offenses with which they have customarily charged other nineteenth-century white, Protestant, male writers in the United States. Unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne, Whitman did not fulminate against “scribbling women,” nor did he, as in the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Margaret Fuller, draw upon a woman’s intelligence, all the while feeling uncomfortable with the woman herself. Women are not ignored in Whitman’s work as they are, for the most part, in the works of Herman Melville and Henry David Thoreau. In fact, Whitman has escaped feminist attack largely because the many gestures of inclusiveness—of race, class, and gender—in the poems confirm his assertion that he was “the poet of the woman the same as the man.” Few writers of his time entered into the female experience as did Whitman, and readers of both genders respond to the authenticity of the poetry and the man.

But for all that, it is also true that Whitman’s ideal woman was first and always a mother, and most of his concern for the improvement of woman’s lot in his America stemmed from his expectation of “perfect women, indispensible to endow the birth-stock of the New World.” ¹ As both editor and poet, Whitman opposed those aspects of female dress and deportment that he believed detrimental to a woman’s physical well-being. For example, exercise was good, thin shoes and dresses were not; work outside the home, for single women, was a benefit so long as the work was not dangerous and the women were adequately compensated for their labor. ² However, one kind of work outside the home to which some women were driven—prostitution—presented a particular dilemma for Whitman and other progressive thinkers. Whitman’s attitudes toward prostitution can be situated within ongoing discussions of the time regarding sex, gender, urbanity, and the health or disease of the individual citizen and the body politic. These concerns were often at odds, however, with the compassion he felt for prostitutes.

Whitman’s insistence on the perfect equality of women with men and his celebration of female sexuality were unusual, but he was far from unique in holding such ideas. Rather, he was part of a wide movement among more advanced thinkers that concentrated on all aspects of physicality, including sexuality. The aim of this movement was to counteract two opposing forces in the United States: the Calvinist attitude toward the physical, which clothed the body in sinfulness; and the overt eroticism that developed in popular entertainment of the 1840s, especially in the cities. ³ Whitman turned very purposefully toward this movement and in Leaves of Grass declared himself the poet of the body as well as of the soul. So strong was his commitment to this declaration that in the epic “Song of Myself,” the focal point of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), he broke with the long poetic convention of the dialogue between the body and the soul in which spirit prevailed over matter. Section 5 of “Song of Myself” was startling, even shocking, as it declared, “I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased to the other.” ⁴ The section goes on to present an explicit love scene involving the soul and body that achieves metaphysical insights.

Whitman’s celebration of women’s sexuality, however, was challenged by the increasing visibility of prostitution. Understanding and accepting it as part of the human condition; he never opposed prostitution on moral grounds. On the whole, he viewed the women who engaged in this work compassionately and with a keen sense of their victimization by all facets of society. While editor of the New York Aurora, in 1842 he condemned a police action along Broadway in which fifty or more prostitutes were arrested in a sweep of the area. ⁵ Six years later, at the age of twenty-nine, while working for a New Orleans newspaper, Whitman described with detached amusement a “Dusky Grisette” who worked the...