Urban Reform and Sexual Vice in Progressive-Era Philadelphia

Prostitution studies constitutes a subfield of historical interpretation in social history and associated fields such as women's history, urban history, legal history, and the history of sexuality. Scholars have identified the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the so-called Progressive Era, as the key time frame in the history of prostitution in the United States. Historians have produced “lumping books” that place the issue of prostitution and the era in its historical context, and they have produced “splitting books” that examine one city and its reactions to the “discovery” of the social problem of prostitution. Urban Reform and Sexual Vice in Progressive-Era Philadelphia falls into the second approach to research and interpretation in this subfield. James H. Adams argues in this revised University of Virginia dissertation that the now-standard social history triad of race, class, and gender do not help in understanding the Philadelphia antiprostitution efforts because those efforts “were a result of a desire upon the part of twentieth-century reformers to create a social paradise of Protestant morality”(p. 3). Yet Adams then explains that Progressive Era reformers did, indeed, use race, class, and gender but did so in the construction of a “paradigm of prostitution that corresponded poorly to the realities of the trade”(p. 4). Adams's work reinforces what has long been argued: antiprostitution campaigns did not eliminate prostitution or grasp the problems confronting the individual women engaged in the trade. Prostitution reformers accomplished only “eliminating the most public examples of commercialized sexuality from view in urban spaces” (p. 7). A tinge of historicism creeps into Adams's narrative, faulting the turn-of-the-century social reformers, police, lawyers, and public officeholders for not having modern ideas and values about women, prostitution, commercialized vice, and its control, regulation, and accommodation

Context (archaeology · Criminology · Human sexuality · Interpretation (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Progressive era · Protestantism · Social history (medicine · Sociology · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Sex work and related issues

• Bawdy City

  Open Access•Katie M Hemphill•Bawdy City•2020

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