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

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, s...