Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul,1865-1883

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Book Review

Controlling Vice: Regulating Brothel Prostitution in St. Paul,
1865-1883. By Joel Best. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1998. xiv, 175 pp. Cloth, $29.95, isbn 0-8142-0807-X. Paper, $16.95,
isbn 0-8142-5007-6.)

This study is meant primarily as a contribution to a field whose
central concept has been thoroughly discredited but that nevertheless
refuses to make a graceful exit from curricula: the sociology of
"deviance." Curiously, in writing about indoor prostitutes in St.
Paul in the decades before the social purity movement, Joel Best does
not in fact treat them as "deviants." The madams, about whom he has
the most information (his sources have little information about
ordinary prostitutes and no information about customers), come across
as savvy businesswomen who knew how to strike deals with police and
other authorities and how to play real estate markets. And yet Best
continues to use the term "deviance," without quotation marks, to
argue that official "prohibition" strategies, such as
criminalization, were enforced only sporadically and could easily
coexist with informal tactics that sought to regulate, not prohibit,
a particular activity.

For most of the period studied, the method for controlling brothels
was to call the madams into court once a month to be "punished" with
a fine that acted as a license. A couple of times, evangelical
preachers or reform-minded politicians attempted to circumvent the
police by seeking felony charges, but this strategy was foiled since,
if police court judges were lenient in imposing only standard fines,
juries were even more lenient: They repeatedly refused to convict.

How exactly this system gave way to the stricter antivice policies of
the early twentieth century is an interesting question, but
unfortunately Best confines himself to stating that he ends his study
in 1883 because a reform mayor was elected and the system changed-as
if the issue of "change" were the sole purview of historians and thus
outside the scope of sociological study. Best's reasons for not
attempting to address the issue of change over time are particularly
lame in that the reform era lasted a mere two years: In 1885 St. Paul
went back to the "toleration" system again.

Controlling Vice will be of interest primarily to regional
historians, since it shows that the informal red-light districts that
existed in "vice" cities-San Francisco, New Orleans-were not unique;
and it also sheds some interesting light on local municipal politics.
Historians, however, will be frustrated by the arbitrarily chosen
time frame of the research. In this instance, since sources do not
allow for a thorough study of the sex trade as a whole at any one
time, it would have made sense to continue the research over a longer
period to see how the nationwide panics about "white slavery"
affected the St. Paul red-light district.

Empirically, this study contributes to documenting the long American
tradition of tolerating vice in practice while denouncing it in
discourse. Analytically, however, the book's main argument-that
keeping brothels was a regular occupation, not a melodramatic slide
down the slippery slope to tragic death-has a clear straw man
quality, given that the old model of "the deviant career" has been
replaced (as Best himself points out) by more sophisticated models.
New models do not posit separate "deviant" identities but rather map
out how all manner of individuals evaluate the risks of different
economic behaviors. The old paradigm about the inevitable, uniform
decline of the fallen woman is no more current in sociological
studies of crime than in historical studies. Thus Best's refutation
of this paradigm, while marginally informative, is largely
uninspiring.

Mariana Valverde
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario

<http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/86.4/br_69.html>