Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (review)

Nineteenth-century middle class reformers were surprised when young women who traded sex for money observed that they only did what wives did, and without having to clean house, too. Elizabeth Clement builds on this connection between marriage and prostitution by focusing on the evolution of "treating" in early twentieth-century New York City. She attempts to discover why and how prostitution and treating came to divide so sharply that we now believe prostitutes and their customers engage in behavior that is outside the bounds of "decency," while teenage girls who trade sex for a movie are just behaving naturally.

In Clement's explanation, treating is the modern, sanitized version of the oldest exchange, an economic process that involves trading a variety of types of sexual or sexualized encounters for goods, experiences, or status. That trade engages women and men (Clement focuses on heterosexuality) in constantly shifting negotiations over a sliding scale of behaviors, from keeping company, to "petting," to sexual intercourse. Clement argues that in early twentieth-century New York City, these negotiations led to the professionalization of prostitution, the emergence of dating, and the triumph of courtship practices that began among the working classes and eventually spread upward and outward to become a part of American culture. In the process, she argues, "prostitution, sexual exchange, and courtship" became central "to the modern constructions of class, race, and gender in America" (p.7).

Treating involved both the sexual "treat" men received from women and the economic "treat" women received from men. What was crucial, Clement argues, was the way in which this exchange retained its inherent economic nature while shedding its moral taint. For those who participated—urban working and middle class girls and boys, women and men—buying and accepting a meal or a vacation did not place one morally beyond the Pale. Prostitution, meanwhile, retained and sharpened the moral taint in exchanging of sex for money, while staining prostitution, prostitutes, and to some extent their customers. Treating "made sexual intercourse outside of marriage more available to men" (p. 3), thus separating sex for favors from sex for money and turning prostitution into a profession.

Clement's book aims to fill a gap in the historical literature between the studies of urban prostitution and working class sexuality represented by the work of Timothy Gilfoyle, Kathy Peiss, and Ruth Rosen, and the studies of sexuality and courtship offered by Beth Bailey, Karen Lystra, and Ellen Rothman. The gap she addresses is both interpretive and historical. In the first instance, she asserts that courtship became a crucible for new modalities of class and race. Immigrant parents lost control as children took their courting out of the house and into dance halls, theaters, and restaurants. Middle-class girls and boys adopted these behaviors, blurring class boundaries. African Americans struggled with the connections between sexuality and race, particularly since so many black women were caught in prostitution. In the second instance, the period from 1900 to 1945 witnessed a shift from the casual prostitution of the Gilded Age, to the "charity girls" of the Progressive period, and the development of treating and then dating by World War II. Clement argues successfully that the years between World War I and World War II marked an important shift in New York City in the connections between courtship, economic value, and formalized and criminalized prostitution.

The book is more successful in some aspects than others. There is a perennial problem in U.S. history with equating the experience of large cities (and New York City is an especial favorite) with America at large. Clement charts a convincing trajectory for courtship and prostitution in inter-war Manhattan; how far those behaviors can be extrapolated to the rest of the country remains unclear. Most Americans, even on the eve of World War II, lived in small towns and...