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

Since the publication of Kathy Peiss' Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, the idea of treating has profoundly shaped our understanding of courtship and the rise of commercial leisure. But there has been no sustained study of the practice until the publication of Elizabeth Alice Clement's Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945. Like other studies of courtship and treating, Clement begins with the 1890s when New York's working class began to patronize the city's commercial amusements and when treating developed as young women struggled to negotiate the cost of these amusements and their own conceptions of morality and respectability. Following chapters explore the next several decades and the development of treating, courtship, prostitution, and their relationship. Initially the line dividing treating from prostitution was difficult to discern. But over the next few decades, Clement shows, treating became an integral part of courtship and much more distinct from prostitution. By the 1920s, in particular, it had become common for men to pay for dates, for women to reciprocate with a range of sexual favors, and for prostitution to move to the periphery of sexual experience. Treating, Clement argues, not only "set the trajectory for the development of modern American sexual values and behaviors" but also "accelerated the widespread inclusion of heterosexual intercourse into Modern American courtship, which approached the level of 50 percent for white American women by the mid-1930s" (3).

At times, Clement's discussion of prostitution overshadows the potential differences in the courtship practices she attempts to illuminate, and her discussion of treating is familiar: men paid for dates and expected treats in return from their female companions, and women struggled to negotiate these expectations with their own desire to enjoy the commercial leisure that was becoming central to heterosexual relations during this period. More of a discussion of the struggles men faced paying for treats and the problem of making ends meet would highlight a dimension of treating that has not received the attention it deserves.

These criticisms should not, however, detract from the overall quality of Clement's book. She has done what most studies of leisure and courtship have not, that is, blend together the histories of white ethnics, African Americans, and West Indians. Such a focus allows for a number of crucial comparisons about family life, respectability, and generational conflict, and her study successfully illuminates the differences between these groups and their similarities. Her look at prostitution is also particularly engaging. In her search for treating's beginnings and its development, Clement explores the day-to-day workings of prostitution during this period as it ebbed and flowed along with changes in courtship, treating, and regulation. Historians from a wide range of disciplines will find Clement's book interesting and useful. Her study draws upon a wide variety of rich sources, explores a critical period in the evolution of men and women's relationships, and fills an important historiographical gap.