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  • Prostitutes and Female Patriots in the Civil War Era
  • Carol Faulkner (bio)
Judith Kelleher Schafer. Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. 221 pp. Halftones, map, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.50.
Nina Silber. Gender and the Sectional Conflict. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xi +114 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the clash between Northern and Southern understandings of gender during the mid-nineteenth century than General Benjamin Butler’s occupation of New Orleans in April 1862. Frustrated by Confederate women’s abusive behavior toward Union troops, Butler issued General Order No. 28, requiring that “when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.”1 One of the women’s rights movement’s greatest political allies after the Civil War, Butler remembered this measure as a success in controlling the actions of female residents and securing the city. But Southerners saw General Order No. 28 as an insult to their region’s virtuous women and called for “Beast” Butler’s capture and execution.

Two very different books, Judith Kelleher Schafer’s Brothels, Depravity and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans and Nina Silber’s Gender and the Sectional Conflict, consider the intersection of gender and sectionalism. While Schafer documents New Orleans’ large and vibrant population of prostitutes, Silber explores the competing gendered expectations for women’s wartime loyalty in both North and South. Schafer’s research in over 2,000 case files from the First District Court of New Orleans reveals both similarities and differences between the regions. Silber argues persuasively that gender ideology contributed to divergent ideas about women and citizenship during the Civil War.

Schafer’s study of prostitution emerged from rich cases she discovered while writing her previous book, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (2003). Though prostitution was not [End Page 87] illegal in New Orleans, prostitutes, referred to as “nymphs” or “frail women” in the city’s newspapers (p. 25), appeared in court on a variety of charges, from disorderly conduct and vagrancy to larceny and assault and battery. Schafer also found cases of prostitutes charged with harboring runaway slaves or insulting a white person, revealing a complicated and contentious interracial community of sex workers and their customers. Indeed, Schafer finds little evidence of “sisterhood” among New Orleans prostitutes in the courts; from legal records, she pieces together lives marked by violence.

Many of Schafer’s conclusions will not surprise readers familiar with Timothy Gilfoyle’s City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (1992) or Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett (1999). As in New York City, most of the prostitutes in New Orleans lived in brothels owned by prominent businessmen. Examples of brothel landlords include John McDonogh, a plantation owner; Sumpter Turner, a tobacco broker; and Theophilus Freeman, a slave trader. The businessmen, politicians, and police who profited from prostitution also enjoyed male sexual privilege, and they were reluctant to restrict the institution. In many of the cases discovered by Schafer, the prosecuting attorney dropped the charges, a result known as nolle prosequi. When New Orleans finally passed “An Ordinance Concerning Lewd and Abandoned Women” in 1857, which limited prostitution in the most exclusive neighborhood in the city, unhappy landlords and prostitutes challenged the law in court. One of these cases made it to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of prostitute Eliza Castello, who had been fined for refusing to pay the $250 licensing fee required to operate a brothel.

Women who became prostitutes did so for economic reasons. As Schafer acknowledges, prostitutes could potentially earn more money than most wage workers—women or men. Prostitutes used their money to pay rent, but also, like Kate Parker, a free woman of color, to buy “fabulous quantities of female apparel” (p. 77). Regularly hauled to court to pay fines (a reliable source...

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