I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn of the Century Chicago (review)

In I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, Cynthia M. Blair uses census data, police reports, newspaper accounts, and property records to describe the Great Migration of southern Blacks to Chicago, and the contexts that they found, influenced and created in the milieu of sexual commerce. Blair offers an overview of Black women’s migration to Chicago and their involvement selling sex, with emphasis on understanding prostitution as an economic activity, generating income for sex workers and for house and saloon management of all ethnicities. Her use of the late-20^th century term “sex work” surprised this reader because it is anachronistic, but for most of the period Blair describes, no obvious terms exist, and all carry pejorative baggage or euphemistic lack of clarity, without emphasis on the sale of sexual services as an economic activity but instead emphasizing sexual availability.

Blair has a uniquely strong understanding of the labor involved in sex work, “greeting and entertaining men; constantly assuring prospective clients of their desirability or urbanity; the constant self-care required to produce alluring personal effects” (68–70) and distinguishes between venues where women sold sex and the additional responsibilities of each, from parlor house rules to independent negotiations in saloons and the vagaries of streetwalking. The nuanced picture painted by Blair demonstrates that sex work contributes to both formal and informal economic sectors, and that even people unaware of it were part of the gigantic ecosystem of sexual commerce in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Her deep understanding of the milieu is further demonstrated by her recognition and description of the slippery uses of the word “pimp” for not only exploitive male bosses but also lovers, husbands, and family of women who sell sex, saying, “Most often the term reflected reformers’ inability to comprehend women’s willing involvement in the sex trade” (166). What Blair hints at is the divide between working class people of all ethnicities and the upper class leaders of reform. This theme of the different and sometimes conflicting agendas—working class everyday life and efforts to uplift the race—is an underlying theme of I’ve Got to Make My Livin’.

Blair is at her best describing shifting economic and leisure landscapes, the ways such shifts affected Black women’s options, and the responses to these changes, including creative responses and new workplaces. This is the crux of all she writes about, sexual commerce, black-owned business, limited economic options, migration toward improved situations. She also describes backlash and blame from whites and Blacks on Black sex workers for the decline of Black neighborhoods and for general discrimination against Blacks, including stereotypes of sexually voraciousness and promiscuity. Blair locates the root of Black-on-Black blame in the contrast between economic motivation and the desire for respectability. This is inevitable in light of the contradictions faced by Black people living in the areas with Black saloons and whorehouses while living mainstream lives without participation in sexual commerce.

Despite Blair’s great understanding of the work of sex work, in a few instances, Blair refers to sexual activity across race in a commercial setting as being contemptuous, but without information about sex shows in other entertainment. These instances were the only false notes heard by this reader, and they are no object to the great information throughout this book. However, these instances jar because they lack Blair’s nuanced understanding and contempt is not demonstrated with further documentation, as with other sentiments described by Blair. Perhaps later publications will offer clarity from Blair, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Blair links the racial changes in sexual commerce to white slavery panics and campaigns, which had a definite racial component. Today’s anti-trafficking campaigns would benefit from her analysis’s exposure of the exclusion of minority-owned and...