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  • Tricks and Treats
  • Stephanie Gilmore (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. xi + 321 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

"Let the poets pipe of love, in their childish way; I know every type of love, better far than they." In 1930, Cole Porter penned the song, "Love for Sale"; fifteen years later, Billie Holiday recorded it, offering in her magnetic voice the wariness of the daily work of a prostitute who offers, for a price, "fresh" but still "slightly soiled" love. Often banned from the airwaves because it pushed socially acceptable limits of decency, "Love for Sale" has become an American classic. In a book bearing the same title, Elizabeth Alice Clement takes us on a historical journey of how young women and men came to know nearly "every type of love" as they negotiated the commercial exchange of sex and love in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century.

Clement opens the book with a 1913 vice report breakdown of the "'moral' categories" of women who frequented a popular New York City nightclub. Ranging from courting girls who dated young men to prostitutes who solicited them for money, it sets the stage for Clement to introduce a continuum of sexual behavior that existed among young working-class women and men. Although there certainly were wholesome, monogamous young women who sought courtship en route to marriage, and there were solicitous prostitutes who openly exchanged sex for money, Clement asserts from the outset that women's sexual behaviors in the "exciting world of New York's commercial amusements" were not confined to this dichotomy (p. 1). Instead, young working-class women in New York City engaged in various kinds of sexual commerce and exchange, ranging from courtship to prostitution. Along this continuum is "treating," a heterosexual bartering of female sexual favors for men's pay for dinner, entertainment, and even more tangible consumer goods, such as shoes or clothes.

The practice of treating, Clement asserts, is uniquely urban and working class. Bringing treating to the fore, Clement trains her eye to the radical changes in sexual norms over the first half of the twentieth century. In so doing, she [End Page 260] is quick to acknowledge that the working class is multi-ethnic and hardly homogeneous and she is keen not to lump together all European immigrants or black-skinned people. Instead, she teases out differences in family structures, religious practices and beliefs, cultural mores, and heterosocial practices among newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe; older immigrants from Germany and Ireland who, by the 1890s, took pride in being "native" New Yorkers; West Indians who immigrated to New York City; and African Americans who moved out of the U.S. South and sought the promise of new jobs and new freedoms. Within this broad working-class culture, then, young women and men negotiated new responsibilities and opportunities—especially in the context of sex and sexuality. And the culture that emerged became a driving force in the shifts in sexual morality, sexual practice, and gender roles. Treating is key to understanding these shifts.

Clement is not the first scholar to discuss the turn-of-the-twentieth-century practice of treating—she acknowledges that historians Kathy Peiss and Joanne Meyerowitz introduced readers to the practice in their scholarly studies of working-class women's lives.1 However, unlike previous scholars, Clement explores treating as a practice operating somewhere between chaste courtship and overt prostitution. More specifically, she ties it to larger historical turns of urbanization, industrialization, and labor. As more young women labored for pay outside of the home, they bore increased financial responsibilities for families at home; at the same time, though, they sought to enjoy the city's emergent commercial amusements—theatres, dance halls, and nightclubs. To reconcile competing demands and desires, many young women started "treating" young men to a night on the town: in exchange for his purchasing dinner and the evening's entertainment, she provided sexual favors. Clement aptly demonstrates that these "charity girls" were engaging in a kind of sexual...

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