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(More customer reviews)My godson is taking his orals for his PhD, and as a requirement, was told to read this, among 100 other assigned books. As he knew I was a Davenport native, he thought I might enjoy reading this. As a female, I found it especially fascinating as it deals mostly with the status of women, both prostitutes and women who owned small businesses, worked as clerks and in other professions, in the Gilded Age. I had no idea that prostition was once legalized in Davenport and such establishements were licensed. I also was surprised to learn how the German influence led to widespread flauting of Prohibition. I had gone to the Lend-A-Hand club as a small girl after school, and reading the history of that venerable institution was really heartening. My grandfather ran a Shell Service station at the base of the Government Bridge and it was amazing to read how that area was a hotbed of vice from 1880-1920.
I bought this book for my mother, who grew up in Davenport, and who is now 90. She knew many of the names in the book, attended school with one of the girls, and was amazed to hear all this come to life. Many of the facts and stories were told her by HER mother, and she was taken back in time when these stories were confirmed. She is now busily engaged in digesting the book.But the book is better than simply a Davenport history snapshot. As a woman, I was disheartened in the extreme to read of the cruelty practiced on young girls, as young as 11 who were forced into prostitution after having been raped. The Good Shepherd Home in Dubuque proved a godsend for many of the unfortunate girls. They were given a new life and dignity. It left me with new respect for the work of the Catholic Church in restoring people's lives.This book gave me a view of middle America that caught me off guard. I hope this book gains wide currency, as it deserves it.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Gender and American Culture)
Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods.
The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.
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