supercheesegirl

Full title: Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul. Recommended to me by Fritz, borrowed from the library. What a great read. I guess I wanted to follow up all that spiritual reading I've been doing with some good old-fashioned vice?

This is a nonfiction book about two famous madams, the Everleigh sisters, who operated a brothel called the Everleigh Club in Chicago, for over ten years (1900-1911, I think it was). The sisters were revolutionary in that they believed women should be able to earn more money than at some factory job; they treated their girls well, paid them well, gave them time off, insisted on medical exams every week, and refused to allow drug use or alcohol abuse. Because of this they ran the best club in Chicago, probably in the whole US, and they were known all over the world. It's from the Everleighs that we get some modern slang: men used to say they were going to "get Everleighed", which eventually made its way into current usage as "getting laid"; also, the Everleighs briefly employed one Suzy Poon Tang, an extraordinary Chinese courtesan renowned for her skills. That to me is a major mark of how famous they were and how influential, that they've come down to us in our vocabulary.

The country just wasn't ready for them, though, and because they were so well-known, their club kind of became the scapegoat of a purity movement that eventually closed down the vice district in Chicago. On one hand, the reformers wanted to stop the deplorable practice of kidnapping girls, raping them, and forcing them to become prostitutes, which was apparently rampant at the time. The Everleigh sisters, though, hated the practice, interviewed their candidates carefully, and only accepted girls who genuinely wanted the work and to make a decent living. They had a waiting list of literally hundreds of girls who wanted to work there. But they still had horrible lies told about them and were driven out of business, which made me sad. I don't know that an institution like the Everleigh Club could exist today - it was a really classy place, despite the fact that people paid for sex there and bawdy things happened. It was beautiful and classy and run well, and the girls were valued for being smart and interesting along with their other talents.

Overall, a really fascinating book. I've written here more about the topics in the book that interested me the most, but really the book is focused as much if not more on the culture of the times and the reform movement as it is on the Everleighs themselves (which, you know, is right there in the title). So, expect some political and moral history if you read it--but most of that was interesting too, I just would have liked more about the girls, the actual business, how they conducted things, etc, more of the "hands-on" aspects, I guess. Highly recommended for people interested in sex work, historical nonfiction, women's history, or who (like I do) just like "books about prostitutes".