Overview

This book examines the intersection and interplay between Progressive-Era rhetoric regarding commercialized vice and the realities of prostitution in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia. Adams asserts that reformers constructed a cultural view of prostitution that was based more upon their perceptions of the trade than on reality itself.

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9781498508698

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James H. Adams s book casts a much needed critical light on urban reformers in early twentieth-century Philadelphia. Adams astutely demonstrates that reformers actually did very little to reform one of the most recognizable figures of urban vice the prostitute. Instead, they used sensational cultural discourses on prostitution to serve other political, social, and moral agendas. More often than not, such discourses on prostitution were used to draw clear boundaries between the urban and the rural, between racial others and whites, between promiscuous and virtuous women. --Jill Suzanne Smith, Bowdoin College, author of Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933

Author Information

James H. Adams is lecturer of history at Southern New Hampshire University.

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