Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel by Maryjean Wall (review)

Infamous locales like Storyville in New Orleans and the Tenderloin in New York City most often come to mind when thinking about well-known, frequently traversed red-light districts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Often neglected are the many districts that flourished in smaller cities and towns across the country. Maryjean Wall’s biography of Belle Brezing, a well-known madam of brothels in Lexington, Kentucky, begins to rectify this absence with a fascinating look at Brezing and her hometown.

It is not surprising that Lexington’s internationally known madam lived an unconventional life. When Brezing was a child, her mother sued for divorce, which became a source of much gossip in the small city of Lexington in 1866. At age fifteen, while pregnant, Brezing briefly married. A story in the local newspaper made fun of the marriage; thus Brezing’s reputation as someone willing to engage with men in romantic liaisons and sex was known very early across the city. This notoriety often served her well, and she opened her own brothel at the age of twenty. Her connections to the wealthy men involved in the horse-racing business, not only Kentuckians but also men from the East, like the Singerly brothers of Philadelphia, ensured a moneyed clientele for her business for many years to come. While she died in relative obscurity at the age of eighty, her reputation, or perhaps her notoriety, earned her an obituary in Time magazine.

Wall’s research also offers an unexpected history of Bluegrass horse culture; horse racing defined Lexington, and the descriptions of the sport’s history in Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel provide a unique regionalism to the study. While red-light districts may have operated similarly in other small American cities, it is unlikely that brothels catering to the wealthiest clientele were bound up so closely in the horse business anywhere else.

By intertwining the life of Belle Brezing with the changing landscape of the city of Lexington, Wall’s book also offers significant insight into the moral shifts from the Victorian era to the Progressive era. Wall notes that while the Victorians viewed “prostitution as a ‘necessary evil’” to be tolerated, Progressives characterized it as a “‘social evil’” in need of eradication (p. 120). As happened across the country, the rise of the Progressives in early-twentieth-century Lexington coincided with the decline of the city’s red-light district. Lexington’s Twin Vice Ordinances of 1915 put the red-light district out of business by the end of the year. While the rise of the Progressives and the closure of red-light districts across the country are not new stories, the unique influences of the Bluegrass horse culture and the famous madam Belle Brezing on Lexington’s red-light district present a new, vibrant addition to the history of gender, work, brothels, and Gilded Age life in a small city struggling to define itself.