California Madams

With the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848, fortune-seekers from around the globe descended on California, among them a sprinkling of enterprising women. As author Sherry Monahan explains, "Living in the wild American West provided women with equal opportunity-for both success and failure. Conventional wisdom suggests that women became prostitutes only because they were desperate…. In fact, many of the women were smart entrepreneurs and saw a way to acquire fast and, in several cas...