Prostitution as Power:

As villages and town began disappearing into bustling cities prostitution played a significant role in city life.  During the Gilded Age, it was “protected by business men and local government that profited from its revenue, additionally, it employed a significant fraction of women working outside the home”[1]. "Public Woman" originally referred to a prostitute, while a "public man" was "one who acted in and for the universal good”[2], and thus a "public woman” was seen as the dregs of society, vile, and unclean. The previous Victorian women governed the private sphere and were meant to be virtuous moral mothers. Thus, prostitutes represent a huge rift in the idealized woman of the Gilded Age. The women involved in the New Woman movement believed “that sexual identity and behavior should not be linked with public respectability, sexual activity should not destroy a woman's reputation”[3]. While many women involved in prostitution did so out of financial desperation due to the limitations on economic choices for women, this often included women of minority or low economic classes and immigrant women. However, in recent years scholars have complicated the image of the female victim forced into prostitution to one that encompasses the women who chose this lifestyle as a means of agency. In the mid 1880’s the Chicago Tribune “began to portray sexually active girls as innocent victims in need of protection, this new narrative served the needs of a class of lawmakers and moral reformers who built their careers controlling and circumscribing the sexual lives of girls to construct an extended and protected childhood”[4].For many of the female prostitutes of Chicago, “whether they were rebelling against Victorian morality, contemplating what to do about an unplanned pregnancy, or engaging in sexual commerce, Chicago’s bad girls made their own choices—from limited and often grim alternatives—and asserted agency and independence”[5]. Those girls who used prostitution as a “strategy of resistance”[6] found solidarity with other women creating an age of sisterhood.