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  • Prostitutes, Runaway Wives, Working Women, Charity Girls, Courting Couples, Spitting Women, Boastful Husbands, Pimps, and Johns
  • Stephen Robertson (bio)
Elizabeth Alice Clement . Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. viii + 314 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-5690-8 (pb).
Jennine Hurl-Eamon . Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680-1720. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. xii + 213 pp. ISBN 0-8142-0987-4 (cl).
Clare A. Lyons . Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xii + 420 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-5675-4 (pb).
Thomas C. Mackey . Pursuing Johns: Criminal Law Reform, Defending Character, and New York City's Committee of Fourteen, 1920-1930. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. x + 297 pp. ISBN 0-8142-0988-2 (cl).
Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson , eds. Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panics, and Moral Outrage. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. xxxii + 318 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8142-0973-4 (cl).
Sharon E. Wood . The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii + 321 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8078-5601-0 (pb).

The title of this review is a catalogue of public women and their companions. Prostitutes appear at the head of the list, befitting their status as the first to come to mind when we hear the term public women. But they are part of a crowd, a far larger group than they have generally appeared with in women's history and the history of sexuality. That image captures a central aspect of the new generation of scholarship represented by the works reviewed here. These authors widen the conventional frame of analysis to consider a range of women who appear in public, and the men and women in their company. [End Page 247]

One result is a new perspective on prostitution. Prostitutes are not just juxtaposed with idealized wives and accompanied by reformers, as we have become used to encountering them, but are placed in relation with johns, situated in working–class communities, and located alongside cultural representations of sexuality. What comes into view is what Clare Lyons calls a "world of nonmarital sexuality," a setting in which prostitutes appear far less aberrant than when located in relation to marital sexuality. New relationships, which link sexuality to broader political, cultural, and social trends, are also revealed between prostitutes and working women, between nonmarital sexuality and class formation, between sexuality and race, and between sexuality and power relations. There are also women in the crowd who still need more attention, namely criminal women. Much like prostitutes, criminals have been marginalized as a separate class, distinct from the broader population, although few actually conform to that image. Much like the world of nonmarital sexuality previously kept out of focus by the foregrounding of prostitutes, there is a world around female criminals still to be illuminated.

The authors of these studies create a new picture not so much by looking at new sources as by grouping topics or sources, or both, together in new combinations. Lyons, Elizabeth Clement, and Sharon Wood frame their books to look at prostitution alongside a range of other behaviors—illegitimacy, adultery, and serial relationships in Lyons's case; courting and treating in Clement's work; and paid employment in Wood's study. Lyons explores two sets of sources, documentation of sexual behavior (court, church, and social agency records, and newspaper advertisements) and popular print sources produced or available in Philadelphia, to reveal "the interplay between sexual behavior and the cultural construction of early American understandings of sexuality and how print culture participated in the contests over power, authority and sex" (8–9). Wood takes a community study approach, examining "an intimate canvas" on which "fragments [from a variety of records, over the course of years] come together into lives" (13). Such an approach has become commonplace in gay and lesbian history, where oral history plays a key role, but not in the history of heterosexuality. The collection of essays...

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