In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Selling Sex and the Law I n the antebellum period, most American states did not consider selling sex a criminal act. However, the states often used vagrancy laws or other charges—such as disorderly conduct, indecent exposure, obscene language, drunkenness, and lewd behavior—to punish public women for practicing their profession. State law and city ordinances punished those who managed brothels under the general rubric of nuisance laws. The states did not criminalize selling sex in the United States until the Progressive Era. Accordingly, selling one’s body for sex did not constitute a distinct criminal act in antebellum New Orleans. A city ordinance of 1817 noted that any woman or girl “notoriously abandoned to lewdness” who committed scandal or disturbance of the peace could incur a fine of twenty-five dollars for each offense or, if she could not pay the fine, a confinement of one month in prison. Thus the ordinance did not prohibit prostitution as long as no scandal or disturbance occurred. An 1818 Louisiana law made it a criminal offense to keep “any disorderly inn, tavern, ale-place, tippling house, gaming house or brothel,” an offense punishable by either a fine or imprisonment at the discretion of the court. A Louisiana statute of 1855 reiterated the 1818 act. The city of New Orleans prohibited individuals by ordinance from renting rooms to or “harbor[ing]” a woman or girl “notoriously abandoned to lewdness” if she caused a nuisance in the neighborhood. The penalty for this offense consisted of a fifteen-dollar fine for each twenty-four hours that a person provided lodgings for such women.1 An 1845 city ordinance forbade “lewd women” to enter cabarets or coffeehouses ; nor could they have a drink in one of these establishments. ViolaR 18 Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women tion of this ordinance resulted in a twenty-five-dollar fine or a month in the workhouse for those who could not pay the fine. This ordinance required the police to apprehend any women in violation of this ordinance and bring them before one of the city’s recorder’s courts.2 According to another city ordinance, passed in 1846, people who violated nuisance laws and public decency were subject to a fine of $50. In August 1850 brothel owner Harry Wilson appeared before Justice of the Peace Alexander Derbes to answer to a charge of “keeping a disorderly brothel on Gallatin street” in violation of the 1846 ordinance. Derbes fined Wilson fifty dollars, and Wilson appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana. His attorney , Henry Train, argued that the city did not have the right to pass such an ordinance and therefore it was unconstitutional; he also asserted that the ordinance could not be legal because the same offense constituted a criminal act under state law. The supreme court rejected this reasoning, affirmed Justice Derbes’s ruling, and ordered Wilson to pay the fine. This ruling would allow New Orleans city officials the discretion to prosecute brothels that the city deemed “disorderly” while allowing others to continue their business . In order to get a city official to proclaim a brothel “disorderly,” people had to present proof that the inmates of the brothel had frequently disturbed their sleep or disrupted their businesses.3 Under general nuisance laws, police arrested public women on many occasions. Often prostitutes found themselves facing recorders for being “drunk, lewd and abandoned” or for drinking in a barroom. For example, in 1854 the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that “Harriet Kennedy, Mary Smith, Johanna Wright, Catherine Kane, and Helena Cotibo, four [sic] lewd and abandoned women, were arrested on Phillippa street last night, for being drunk, disturbing the peace and halloing [sic] murder. These women created more noise and disturbance than fifty men could possibly have done.” The recorder sentenced two of the women to a fine of ten dollars or twenty days in the workhouse and the other three to a fine of five dollars or ten days’ imprisonment. Few women would have chosen going to the workhouse if they could pay the fine. One grand jury report indicated that the workhouse buildings were “insufficient and in bad condition” and noted that “women are seated on the damp floor of their cells, there being no benches or even bunks, they all sleep on the floor.” In the same report, the grand jury noted that “requisitions for food and materials for steady work were not furnished, disorder and insubordination results.” In 1853 the Picayune, under the...

Share