Introduction

"Mesdames Flint, Davis, Demarr, Lawrence, Noble and Grey were fined $99 each for keeping houses of prostitution. Of the twenty-four inmates of the houses of ill-fame, fifteen were fined $50 each."
--Salt Lake City Daily Tribune, 1 March 1885

"The complaints in each case are sworn to by B. Y. Hampton, the city license collector. Deputy Vandercook is charged with lewd and lascivious conduct with one Mrs. A. J. Field."
--Tribune, 22 November 1885

BOTH OF THESE NEWS items describe arrests for prostitution-related offenses in Salt Lake City, but the similarity ends there. The first article might have appeared in any western newspaper. It describes a typical periodic mass arrest of prostitutes and madams resulting in the payment of set fines, an unofficial licensing system that lasted for decades in many American cities. Prostitution in Salt Lake City and elsewhere was explicitly outlawed, but municipal authorities long tolerated and regulated the practice. Normally, only the women who sold sex faced legal penalties, not the men who bought it. The women who lived, worked, and sometimes died in Salt Lake City brothels contributed to the city's economic and social development despite the fact that most "respectable" citizens deemed them criminals.

      The second item hints at a long and often bitter struggle for power. Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) announced to the world that its members ("Mormons") practiced polygyny (usually referred to as polygamy), non-Mormons ("gentiles") had condemned the practice and waged a campaign to abolish it. ¹ By 1885 that campaign had resulted in the arrest of several prominent LDS officials and forced many others into hiding. Brigham Young Hampton, a Mormon, hoped to use prostitutes to entrap federal officials, thus proving that those officials were immoral, not the Saints. In this context, the targets were the male patrons of prostitutes.

      These two news stories suggest the complex history of prostitution in Salt Lake City. In many respects, Salt Lake resembled other western cities. Its settlers struggled to build homes, earn livings, raise families, and create community institutions. Their lives exhibited the limitless variety of human experience, but generally followed the patterns of settlement in other areas. Many of Salt Lake's inhabitants were undoubtedly not overly troubled by issues of theology or marital practice. The demands of daily life necessitated a degree of economic and social interaction across religious lines. By the early 1870s, gentile and Mormon residents had built a small business district where women and men sold goods and services, including sex. Most prostitutes' lives were probably similar to those lived elsewhere, and the city's other residents and municipal authorities often reacted to them in similar ways.

      But Salt Lake City differed in important respects. The leaders of the LDS Church wielded great spiritual, social, economic, and political influence over their numerically dominant membership. And because of that influence, the city stood at the center of a conflict that ebbed and flowed for decades. A vocal minority of Mormons and gentiles competed for power in a variety of arenas, including economics, electoral politics, church pulpits, newspapers, and voluntary associations. The conflict drew national attention and resulted in unprecedented action by the federal government that eventually forced the Latter-day Saints to change some of their most distinctive practices.

      This conflict shaped prostitutes' experiences and gave prostitution in Salt Lake City an additional significance. The most highly publicized aspect of the struggle concerned sexual morality. Many gentiles accused polygamous Mormons of violating Christian norms of family structure and sexual behavior. Gentile women especially condemned plural marriage because it institutionalized a double standard that allowed men to have multiple sex partners. In response, Mormons defended their church and their families and accused gentiles of immorality. Mormons argued that gentiles introduced prostitution, a sinful practice based on lust that degraded women and the family, into a previously pure and virtuous community of honorably married Saints. Prostitution quickly and enduringly became a mutual point of reference in the ongoing competition. At numerous significant junctures of the contest over polygamy, one or the other antagonist used prostitution to discredit its opponent.

      The stakes in this public contest were great: economic and political power in the city and territory. The social significance was no less important. Prostitution and polygamy concerned the highly charged arena of human sexuality, and the contest had enormous consequences for the most intimate and fundamental aspects of individuals' lives. The contestants attempted to exercise control over women, whether prostitutes or plural wives, and over their customers, husbands, or lovers. The arguments sometimes seemed purely rhetorical, and those who struggled for power often seemed to ignore the actual people involved. But the results were quite real: women and men were arrested and jailed. Some lost their homes, livelihoods, or marriages or had their reputations ruined or their children's legacies endangered. Prostitutes, plural wives, and the men associated with them often found themselves buffeted by forces they could only partially control.

      By the second decade of the twentieth century, the conflict between gentiles and Mormons had quieted, and their differences had narrowed. The LDS Church abandoned some of its most distinctive practices, especially communal economics and plural marriage, and consciously sought to accommodate to the larger American society. Gentiles and Mormons increasingly conducted business with one another and joined the same political parties and voluntary associations. Some united to fight regulated prostitution in a common reform effort that demonstrated a degree of reconciliation and recognition of shared values.

      Morality did not cease to be contested in the early twentieth century, but divisions tended to be along generational and class rather than religious lines. As more young women worked and recreated in public, middle- and upper-class reformers feared that such newly independent behavior would lead those women into prostitution. The reformers demanded that the state intervene in young women's private lives and regulate venues where the sexes met. Mormon and gentile reformers alike welcomed the efforts of city, state, and federal governments to control the sexuality of young, mostly working-class women.

      That reconciliation spelled trouble for prostitutes. As a consensus developed that prostitution should be abolished, the police forced women out of regulated brothels and into rooming houses and hotels, and onto the streets. Women continued to sell sex, but the end of regulation meant the loss of a certain degree of predictability, protection, and status. The law continued to hold them, not their customers, largely responsible for prostitution. Reformers had united to defend society from the alleged dangers of prostitution, but few seemed to care about the women involved or the conditions that drove them to sell sex.

      An extensive and sophisticated historical literature on prostitution and reform has developed in the last three decades. Several works have particularly influenced this study. Ruth Rosen has studied the culture of prostitution in eastern cities in the early twentieth century, and she concludes that the change from regulation to abolition of restricted districts made prostitutes' lives even more difficult and dangerous. ² Anne Butler has investigated prostitution in the West from the Civil War until about 1890. Her classifications by class, race, and ethnicity have proven applicable to this study, and she demonstrates the overwhelmingly bleak lives of most of the women who sold sex in the West. ³ Other scholars have contributed valuable studies of single western communities, including Jacqueline Baker Barnhart (San Francisco), Paula Petrik (Helena), Mary Murphy (Butte), and Marion Goldman (the Comstock Lode). ⁴ These scholars have convincingly proven what I found in Salt Lake City: prostitution was well known, openly regulated, and important to the growth of communities. Most women made the dangerous choice to sell sex because of financial difficulties and limited opportunities, and they faced exploitation by customers, brothel managers, and municipal authorities.

      The responses to prostitution have also been extensively studied. Barbara Meil Hobson has shown how inequalities in gender, race, and class shaped policy in eastern cities, resulting in a coercive campaign against prostitutes in the Progressive Era. ⁵ Peggy Pascoe details the range of activities that middle-class reformers carried out across the West, from "rescuing" plural wives in Salt Lake City to freeing Chinese women held in virtual sex slavery in San Francisco, in a search for "female moral authority." ⁶ Paul Boyer provides a context for moral reform from the early nineteenth century into the Progressive Era. He argues persuasively that prostitution policy always reflected other contemporary concerns about American society. ⁷ Joanne Meyerowitz and Mary Odem demonstrate how young women's growing autonomy and economic independence around the turn of the twentieth century worried reformers and contributed to the campaigns against regulated prostitution and for state control of young women's sexuality. ⁸

      This study investigates prostitutes and the responses to them in Salt Lake City from its founding to the end of World War I. While it describes some women's experiences selling sex and the structure of prostitution in Salt Lake, it also investigates the roles prostitutes played in building a community. The terms "prostitute," "prostitution," and "reform" had complex and dynamic meanings across this time period, meanings shaped by gender, economics, religion, class, race, and power. Because of these contested meanings, prostitutes, prostitution, and reform could be put to many different uses. For poor women, selling sex could be a temporary expedient, a long-term source of livelihood, and/or an avenue of disease, abuse, and degradation. A few such women amassed considerable wealth and political influence, and some may even have attained a measure of social respectability for themselves or their families, but most prostitutes lived in poverty. To be labeled a prostitute meant incurring the fear and loathing of most other citizens. For women who sold sex, reform could mean arrest, public exposure, loss of money and freedom, or forced expulsion from their homes or from the city. Occasionally, reform meant expressions of sympathy or offers of "rescue." Prostitutes' lives were shaped extensively by the actions and policies of reformers. Prostitutes were among the least powerful residents of the city, but they were not simply passive recipients or victims: they accepted, rejected, evaded, or adapted to aspects of reform.

      In the eyes of many middle- and upper-class Mormons and non-Mormons, prostitutes egregiously violated ideal moral codes and gender systems. Reform in this sense could mean the reinforcement of the respective moral code, which might be accomplished by "rescuing" individual prostitutes and converting them to "true" (or "true Mormon") women. For others, reform could mean using state power to abolish prostitution.

      Prostitution had additional meanings and uses within the Mormon-gentile conflict. For many Mormon men, the presence of women selling sex was a galling symptom of their failure to maintain exclusive control over the city. Prostitution could stand for all of the unwelcome changes that gentiles supposedly brought to Zion, as well as "proof" of the immorality of those who condemned polygamy. Reform in this context could mean a return to Mormon hegemony and the enforcement of the LDS moral code and gender system. Mormons had additional reasons to condemn prostitution when some gentiles equated it with polygamy. Most Mormon women probably shared these views, at least publicly, although many welcomed the end of plural marriage.

      Some gentile women activists defined prostitution and polygamy as two aspects of the same phenomenon: the exploitation of women by a patriarchal gender system. In similar fashion, a man betrayed a woman who then became a prostitute; a Mormon husband deceived a woman into becoming his plural wife; or a man seduced a single woman (although reformers believed such women shared different levels of responsibility). For these activists, then, reform could mean the abolition of prostitution, the overthrow of polygamy, the destruction of the LDS Church, the enforcement of a single sexual standard, or even the establishment of equality between men and women within the framework of separate spheres. While some gentile males genuinely shared this sense of moral outrage, others linked prostitution to polygamy as a convenient means by which to attack Mormon political and economic domination.

      While the above considerations might seem to unite most citizens (except prostitutes) against prostitution, powerful factors resulted in its persistence. Most fundamentally, many men, Mormon and gentile, were willing to pay for sex. Some practiced a double standard of sexual morality that allowed them to use prostitutes while demanding chastity of other women in their lives. As for women, limited job opportunities and personal financial exigency (and for some, the opportunity to earn better money than in other occupations) meant there were always some women more or less willing to sell sex.

      Prostitution also had a powerful economic constituency of gentiles and Mormons. Women and men who sold liquor and drugs, loaned money, provided legal counsel, or rented, sold, or leased rooms to prostitutes and their customers used their economic and political clout to defend their interests. A few madams became successful and influential businesspeople. Some business owners and municipal officials considered prostitution an inevitable or even welcome adjunct to a modern, prosperous city. Many men without any direct stake declared that prostitution, while morally reprehensible, was ineradicable and less dangerous when openly regulated. For municipal authorities and the police, prostitution could be an important source of revenue from fines and bribes.

      For the members of this constituency, the proper policy toward prostitution was regulation. The city's political and economic elites developed a regulation policy that guaranteed customers access to sexual services while protecting profits, keeping social order, and allowing for easier policing and revenue collecting. Regulation also gave higher-status prostitutes a degree of economic and physical security. At the same time, prostitutes officially remained criminals, so individuals could be arrested or forced to move if authorities desired. Many prostitutes and madams skillfully adapted to or subverted this precarious system and used their mobility, anonymity, or personal, financial, and political contacts to stay in business. The police argued that regulation kept prostitution and its associated dangers localized and easy to control. The regulation of prostitution in Salt Lake City began under all-Mormon rule and continued without effective challenge until the campaign against the Stockade. During and after that campaign, which occurred in the midst of the national progressive campaign against regulated prostitution, many Mormons and gentiles in positions of power came to agree that "reform" meant abolition. Reformers decided that prostitutes were no longer necessary or desirable. Much of the legal apparatus that had been employed against polygamy was now turned against prostitution, with the result that women selling sex had to do so furtively and at even greater risk.

      I see the history of prostitution as a lens through which we can view many changes in Salt Lake, including women's public activities; the city's physical and economic transformations; religious, ethnic, racial, and class relations; the construction and interpretation of gender systems and moral codes; and the relationship between citizens and the state. Salt Lake City's history can be better understood through analysis of the various uses and meanings of prostitutes, prostitution, and reform. ⁹

Notes

      1. I will use "Mormon," "Saint," and "Latter-day Saint" as synonyms. Similarly, "non-Mormon" and "gentile" will be considered equivalents.

      2. Rosen, Lost Sisterhood.

      3. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery.

      4. Barnhart, Fair but Frail; Petrik, "Capitalists with Rooms"; Mary Murphy, "Women on the Line"; and Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners.

      5. Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, esp. pp. vii, 3-

      6. Pascoe, Relations of Rescue.

      7. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America.

      8. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift; Odem, Delinquent Daughters.

      9. Little has been written about prostitution in Salt Lake City. Exceptions include McCormick, "Red Lights in Zion"; brief references in R. Snow, "American Party in Utah"; Schindler, "The Oldest Profession's Sordid Past in Utah," in In Another Time, pp. 178-81; and Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles, pp. 118, 148-49, 282.