Life As an American Madam

I’ve said it often enough that it’ll sound all-too familiar, but historians of women’s history are often at a disadvantage due to a paucity of sources, especially ones written by women. This problem is multiplied when the women in question are working class and then multiplied further when those working women are sex workers. 

Recently, I learned about the book Nell Kimball: Her Life As an American Madam. Somehow, unfortunately, in my years of researching my dissertation and writing a chapter on prostitution, I was unaware of its existence. I first read about it in another dissertation, “The Criminalization of Prostitution in the United States: The Case of San Francisco, 1854-1919” by Brenda Elaine Pillors (UC Berkeley, 1982), also a source I was unaware of or did not have the time to actual read while composing my dissertation.

The provenance of the book is a little murky and, as with all sources, the accuracy of the information it contains should be carefully considered. However, its alignment with other sources I have used and the relatively-unique insider perspective it provides makes it enormously valuable. 

Kimball was born in 1854 on a farm in rural Missouri. She ran away from home to St. Louis and became a prostitute at the age of fifteen. The book is an autobiography of Kimball’s life from a teenage farm girl through the closing of her last brothel in New Orleans in 1917. According to the book’s editor, Stephen Longstreet, Kimball approached him in the 1930s with a rough draft of the manuscript, which she hoped to get published in order to make some money during the Depression. However, the subject matter and the bawdy language Kimball employed led every publisher Longstreet approached to reject it. 

The book is remarkable for the breadth and nuance of information it provides about prostitution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in several big cities including St. Louis, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Kimball wrote with a flow and voice that was full of energy, self-assured, and captivating. In fact, I have taken the liberty of including below more direct quotes than I typically prefer because Kimball’s voice is too interesting to paraphrase.

There are a number of topics she covers that relates to my work:

Unhappiness of Mother

One of the things she explained about her family that is not directly connected to my project but was notable nonetheless was the description of her mother. I was immediately reminded of Margaret Sanger’s resentment of her father as Kimball’s father tried to impregnate her mother every night supposedly out of some Catholic “duty.” With an equal amount of anger, Kimball wrote, “My father…banged my scared mother into the corn-husk mattress nearly every night, yelling out and groaning as he came, and banging, banging away–he called it begetting and begetting. Banging away so that every year there would be a new baby hanging on my mother’s tits, while she tried to cook with her free hand, keep the hair out of her face and make us kids keep order” (12). Her father’s behavior can leave little doubt about the necessity of birth control and the need for women to maintain control over their own bodies and reproductive decisions. 

Country Girls

One of the fears raised by Progressives, especially during the “White Slavery” scare, was the abduction or seduction of young, innocent girls from the countryside who were then forced into prostitution. An unscrupulous procurer (who could be a man or a woman) fast-talked a naive young woman, dazzled by the lights and life of the city, into committing an act of immorality that then prevented her from returning home to face her family (the “fallen woman” stigma). But Kimball flipped that script on its head quite convincingly. Throughout her story she repeatedly came back to her experiences of sexuality on a farm. It was a place, she explained, where one “picks up dirty talk with your spoon victuals…The young bucks were always experimenting with themselves or their sisters, and at the swimming hole and creek bottoms they horsed around a lot, with pecker pulling and talk of cornholing and country buggery. I don’t think any farm boy or girl grew up innocent as a city child might. We girls soon knew everything there was to know before we had fuzz on our pussies” (13). She always laughed when she heard people talk “of the clean country life and the innocence of farm living” (17). And to make her point even more relevant for her chosen profession, she stated, “Sex was the only real pleasure that most of the farm folk of all ages reached for–that and drink” (27).

Corruption

She fully endorsed and frequently supported the assertion by Progressive-era reformers that prostitution was a money-making scheme for politicians and police far more than for most prostitutes. No small part of her business success came from her knowledge of working within the system of graft and corruption endemic to big city politics. 

As she moved from one city to another, she described the importance of possessing “letters of introduction” for the the local officials that needed to be bribed. The waves of reform that would sweep over a city and temporarily force her underground–or in one dramatic case force her to leave New Orleans for three years “while the dust settled”–were simply a part of the business that she folded into her accounting. She explained that as a brothel owner, “inspecting the laundry with the housekeeper…replacing busted chairs, lamps, and linens,” were as routine as “getting the police and the city hall cut of the night’s take put in envelopes” (9). As the owner of moderately-high-class brothels, it did not make sense to her to set up an expensive house without sufficient municipal protection and this went beyond just the police looking the other way or receiving a small hand out. “Unless the city, and often even the county and state officials, are part of the payoff,” she risked losing an enormous investment. This arrangement, she frequently made clear, was not particular to one city or cabal of unscrupulous city officials. It was endemic of urban prostitution across the country. “The truth is,” she explained in her no-nonsense manner, “crime could not exist without some form of protection, even control from above” (142). 

The relationship between prostitution and corruption connects well with my main argument in “Resisting Reform,” which was the futility of reform before the Great War. There were earnest reformers in every city and they made lots of noise that couldn’t easily be ignored. But the attempts to contain vice were never sustained or thorough. And Kimball had plenty to say about reformers as well. Besides scanning the newspapers daily for the list of men who had recently arrived in town and she expected to see in her house, she was well-versed in the intermittent waves of reform that swept over a city. “A great public scandal is like an enema,” she declared (143). It captured the public’s attention and the cleansing that followed left everyone self-satisfied but exhausted.

Kimball knew that “Every house of prostitution, every criminal gang operating could be knocked out of business in a day if the proper orders were given.” “But police, courts, lawyers, bail bondsmen, fences, strike-breaking organizations are so bedded down with their crime contacts and in the big money that it would be against human nature to expect a fully lawful community” (143). Raids that followed an uproar almost always targeted “low class places, or houses whose madam had fallen out with the official grafters” (67). Yet, even in such cases, not long after an arrest, “the poor whore, run out one day, always came back, and the cribs were again ready for them” (222).

Rates of Venereal Disease Infection

The main argument used by opponents of prostitution during the Great War was the supposedly high rates of venereal disease infection among prostitutes (commonly-cited statistics were 90%+) that they then passed on to their male clientele thus compromising the health of the nation’s military. However, as I explain in my dissertation, based on the careful work of previous historians and statisticians, the rates of infection among prostitutes was grossly exaggerated (a fact easily discerned even at the time but deliberately miscalculated and inflated). In reality, prostitutes were among the best educated (not to mention having a compelling professional reason) to avoid such diseases. Venereal disease seemed to be of such little concern to her that I noticed only two mentions in her book. While working in her first brothel, she “learned how to examine a John casually, to see he was free of Big or Little Casino” (87). I have not yet found an authoritative definition of “Big Casino” but “Little Casino” appears to mean a non-fatal sexually-transmitted disease such as chlamydia or gonorrhea. Big Casino, presumably referred to something like syphilis. The second time she discusses venereal disease was in her description of Barbary Coast prostitutes as “dirty and diseases” (220). But that was the extent of what, according to reformers was a ubiquitous part of commercial sex in the early twentieth century. 

War and sex

What is additionally notable about her infrequent mention of venereal disease, is by contrast, her frequent observation about the relationship between war and sex. “Wars always make sex a kind of disease and even send off a whole epidemic of rape and horniness” (278). (A startling observation, by and by, that I have not read elsewhere, that war led to a rise in rapes, and may be worth further investigation.) She claimed several times that she could tell when there was a “war scare” because “there were lines outside the sporting places…gentlemen callers were thick as summer flies in Boston Street.” Men who thought they may be going off to war went to a whorehouse first. “When we got ourselves in the war,” she wrote as the U.S. began its involvement in the Great War, “it looked like somebody had just given us a wheelbarrow and a shovel and opened the mint and said–take up all you can shovel” (195-6). This notion of an increase in business at brothels comports with the evidence I present in my chapter on prostitution and the alarm expressed by military health officials about the extent of venereal disease among new recruits. The important difference, however, is that the young men who reported for duty and tested positive for a VD typically were the transmitters of the disease and more often passed it among women in casual encounters, not at a brothel. This observation has been substantiated by a number of recent studies of Army reporting that new recruits most often contracted and spread sexually transmitted infections through non-commercial, home-town sexual liaisons. 

White Slavery

“White slavery” is a topic that I have a new-found interest in and wish to write about more. Initially, I was quite skeptical of the hysteria. It fit a classic Progressive playbook of raising an alarm usually based on anecdotal evidence (overhead conversations, for example) that made dramatic claims about the extent of the crime and invariably had more than a hint of racism and xenophobia driving the campaign. However, in recent years with the increased attention on sex slavery that continues to exist even today, it would be naive to imagine that in a period of increased global, personal travel, with few business regulations and even fewer laws about prostitution that there would not be an extensive sex slave trade going on. So I wonder if perhaps the supposed victims of the practice were not misidentified as a way to solicit public outrage but the existence of elaborate, long-distance sex slave trade was robust in the early twentieth century. 

Kimball, however, throws cold water on the white slave fear. She called it a “bugaboo” and “very much malarky” (141, 228). “Contrary to public gossip,” she dismissed, it “is not the menace it is supposed to be” (141). She took some pride in personally securing woman for her houses through personal or professional connections, only occasionally relying on a procurer (in this sense more of an “agent” than a white slaver). It was not a business, she said, that lacked a workforce “of willing girls who wanted to be whores” (228). However, she does both allude to and admit the existence of unwilling prostitutes. For example, she noted that she did not like the idea of “forced girls” because “they usually lead to trouble,” suggesting a knowledge or personal experience with sex slaves (228). Additionally, she acknowledged the existence of an illegal sex slave trade by noting that the women entrapped in such circumstances were “mostly for the low houses, the cribs, the cowards and dives of very low class places” (142). She mentioned San Francisco in particular.  

San Francisco

I was immediately and most interested in reading Kimball’s book when I discovered that she ran a brothel in San Francisco during the time period of my project. Her three years in San Francisco was quite by accident. After many years of working as a prostitute, she finally opened her own house in New Orleans’s famous Storeyville. It was there that one night a rich, drunk dick attacked one of her prostitutes who ended up putting a pair of scissors into his skull through his eye, killing him instantly. The publicity that followed forced the police to make Kimball leave New Orleans “for a few years” until the incident blew over. She was given letters of introduction for city officials to open a house in San Francisco. She chose San Francisco because she had a few friends there and she knew “the town was wide open” and everyone told her “the native spenders were a horny lot” (216). 

So while she waited it out, from 1898 to 1901, she “ran a high class house for the top-hat trade in the Uptown Tenderloin” (216). Kimball’s description of her time in San Francisco turned out to be less insightful than I originally hoped. She covers her three years in the city in four chapters and forty pages. Her story of San Francisco repeated many of the same themes she described in earlier chapters. She complained about not doing as well, financially, as she hoped because “the police and politicians were pressing the houses hard all the time for the boodle and the graft” (221). Brief though it is, this observation does have some deeper connection to my work. Although I certainly do not make the argument that being a prostitute was an exercise of autonomy for the women involved, I do connect the ongoing resistance to anti-prostitution efforts by the reforming class to a desire by the women affected to pursue their work without harassment (certainly not criminalization and imprisonment). Kimball seems to suggest that the popularity of brothels and the determination to keep them came mainly from the male profiteers of them. It was not necessarily the workers as much as the protection the police and politicians provided for a kickback that kept them open. She stated at one point that she and her workers “traveled on a free railroad pass all the time” because their clientele included “so many big railroad men as steady guests” (216). I do make the point about the commercialization and profitability of sex in the city but perhaps I need to place much more emphasis on the owners and not the workers. (An observation that sounds obvious as I write it.) Kimball estimated she employed about two hundred women during her three years in San Francisco.

She visited the Barbary Coast several times but generally avoided the city’s most in/famous red-light district because it was “too mean a life and cheap for the kind of places” she operated (218). Her description of the brothels on the Coast tended to align with contemporary critics of the district. “On the Coast there were the cow-yard whore, the crib whore and the parlor house whore. A cow-yard could be a three or four floored building about ready to fall in on itself, with long halls, and off the hall as many small cubes of closets you could crowd in” (221). In some of these places she claimed there could be as many as three hundred prostitutes.

One of the topics that Kimball mentioned only in the context of describing her time in San Francisco, and I think is important to my project but I have not adequately explored is homosexuality in the city.⁠1 As early as the 1890s, in explaining the type of house she ran and the services she offered, Kimball made it clear that she “didn’t go in for dyke or freakish homosexual mixed games.” One of her mentors in San Francisco, a madam from the Gold Rush days, “Old Sugar Mary” told Kimball she “lost a lot of trade by not going in for the sissy byplay, and there were places in town that did a land office business in it” (219). 

Kimball’s story is quite remarkable. She writes with wit, humor, and a voice that at least suggests honesty. Certainly an account of sex work from the early twentieth century from an actual worker and owner makes it unusual and worth attention. And, ironically, though not unsurprisingly, one of the main takeaways of her story is the extent to which she operated, with moderate success until the war forced her to close permanently, within a context largely controlled by men. Most of the women she refers to as her mentors or previous employers were women. Furthermore, these were the same type of men, socio-economically, as the men who filled the ranks of reformers. 

1 I have enough evidence that there was a “scene” in the city in the early twentieth century and certainly there would have been “resistance” to anti-homosexual behavior, but it was so invisible that finding it has been extremely difficult so far.