Review: The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City

The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City by Sharon E. Wood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this book up because it dealt with the history of Davenport, Iowa, the nearest metropolis to the small town I grew up in (assuming you disregard Iowa’s most exciting city, Bettendorf). I’ve been very lucky in local (to me) history books, choosing to read quite a few very good books. This was no exception. I found “The Freedom of the Streets” was a very interesting story of unintended consequences, driven by data and the conglomeration of many sources.

This is the kind of a history book that I really enjoy. As I read through, I found that the chapters built on each other to tell a complete story. The book begins with the stories of several women in Davenport who earned their own living, in the period roughly from 1870 through 1910. These women, beyond being suffragettes, also wanted women to not be held back by society in making their own money. To help, the created the “Lend a Hand Club”, sponsoring businesses and creating a club room in Downtown Davenport where women members could have lunch during their work day. They also decide to help reduce the scourge of prostitution by lobbying for, and eventually paying for and choosing, a prison matron. The matron shepherds female prisoners through the criminal system, focusing on showing the prisoner the error of her ways and hopefully rehabilitating her to society. Sounds reasonable, right? The following chapters show how this good deed turned bad. After the matron chosen by the town’s leading women works for a few years and moves on, a new matron is hired by the city. The new matron did not have the same loyalties as the previous, focusing on the needs of the mayor and police and not on the needs of the society women. At the same time, Davenport had grown into a men’s entertainment mecca, with over 100 taverns and open prostitution. Davenport’s 21 year old mayor comes up with a plan to license the prostitutes, enlisting the matron and town doctors to the scheme. The book continues to show how this plan ended up in play for decades, and the impacts on underage women. Along the way you are introduced to more than a dozen women, from doctors and tavern owners to prostitutes and juvenile “offenders”, and their stories are told in unexpected detail. (Tax records are a wonderful source.) Quite an interesting story.

I found that the history was very well compiled. There were times as I read a paragraph, I tried to think of how many different sources went into the data and analysis and was always amazed at how thorough this felt. I’d guess there are over 1000 references in the bibliography. The author mentions sources quite often, including written records from the prison matron over the decades, town censuses, and even maps showing the location of residences of people mentioned over time, including taverns and houses of prostitution. When I think about being a historian, this is the kind of writing I think illustrates the best of it.


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