Minneapolis Madams: The Lost History of Prostitution on the Riverfront

1. Women’s Work of All Kinds: Paid Labor, Sex Work, and the Reform Movement

15 ONE Women’s Work of All Kinds Paid Labor, Sex Work, and the Reform Movement Time was when the servant occupied a subordinate position in the household, when it was considered that obedience and not command was her function. In those days, they are long past now, and live only in history or tradition, the servant looked up to the lady of the house as authority. . . . Minneapolis has suffered with the rest of the world, and even more, perhaps, judging from the trouble our housewives report in obtaining efficient help. It is not an infrequent thing to hear of housewives changing girls two or three times in a single week. —“THE SERVANT GIRL PROBLEM,” MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 14, 1879 In 1874 a nineteen-year-old woman named Mary Rasette came to Minneapolis and found work as a domestic. But according to a Minneapolis Tribune article, she soon “willfully entered a life of shame” when she joined a bordello run by madam Mollie Ellsworth. Once Mary’s father learned of her situation, he removed her from the brothel despite her objections. She later escaped from his custody, and a reporter concluded that it was “probable she has left the city.” While one can only speculate, Rasette may have been avoiding an abusive family situation or looking for adventure, new opportunities, or better wages.1 The newspaper article provides only the briefest sketch of Rasette’s life, but it highlights the fluid and changing relationships among women’s growing mobility, opportunities for paid labor, and sex work in nineteenth-century America. The massive migration from rural to Women’s Work of All Kinds 16 urban areas brought many single women into the labor force, including the sex trade. Joseph Kett, a historian of American adolescence, observed that by the mid-nineteenth century young men were leaving their parental homes in great numbers. Kett argued that “girls probably left agricultural communities at earlier ages than boys, for girls were less valuable on farms. According to the 1830 census, girls aged fifteen to nineteen generally formed a smaller portion of the population of New England villages under 1,500 people than did males of comparable ages, but a larger proportion in cities.”2 Another scholar, Faye Dudden, noted a high degree of mobility for workers in the nineteenth century, especially those who were young, unmarried, and without property. In part, for female workers, domestic “service itself helped to stir the streams of geographic mobility because its entry requirements were virtually nil, the ability to do housework being practically a secondary sex characteristic. Girls and women who needed work knew that they could go to a city, any city, and find work as servants.”3 Increased mobility provided more opportunities for both men and women to seek their fortune away from parental control. Once in the city, young women became acquainted with a variety of employment opportunities, including prostitution. They also discovered that many of the old rules governing social interactions were different in the city. These young women might try out a number of jobs, encounter all manner of men, and perhaps move on to another city that seemed to offer better opportunities. This chapter explores women’s work in the nineteenth century, ranging from “respectable” work in factories and private homes to volunteer work meant to provide charity for the less fortunate and promote social change, to the disreputable labor of prostitution. It will provide a picture of the wages offered for different classes of female employment, as well as a rough estimate of what those wages would buy. The chapter also examines careers in prostitution and shows some of the reasons and routes that led women into and sometimes out of the commercial sex trade, as well as outlining the working life of one Minneapolis madam who flourished in the 1870s. Finally this chapter will introduce a group of female reformers, the Sisterhood of Bethany, who hoped to offer a chance at redemption to women who had violated , in one way or another, the bounds of sexual purity. Women’s Work of All Kinds 17 WOMEN’S LABOR IN MINNEAPOLIS During the second half of the nineteenth century, women in Minneapolis engaged in a variety of paid and unpaid occupations, ranging from housekeeping and child care to working in factories or retail stores, teaching school, and occasionally operating small businesses. Housekeeping, which covered a...