18th century Some of the
women in the American Revolution who followed the Continental Army served the soldiers and officers as sexual partners. Prostitutes were a worrisome presence to army leadership, particularly because of the possible spread of venereal diseases (in modern terms,
sexually transmitted infection or STI).
19th century In the 19th century,
parlor house
brothels catered to upper class clientele, while
bawdy houses catered to the lower class. At
concert saloons, men could eat, listen to music, watch a fight, or pay women for sex. Over 200 brothels existed in lower
Manhattan. Prostitution was illegal under the vagrancy laws, but was not well-enforced by police and city officials, who were bribed by brothel owners and madams. Attempts to regulate prostitution were struck down on the grounds that regulation would be contrary to the public good. While official acts of regulation were being struck down, there were those of a more religious perspective who took attempts to reform prostitution into their own hands. The
Magdalen Society of Philadelphia was an organization in the 1800s that sought to take prostitutes off the streets and turn them into respectable women. 138 women sought refuge here in the years between 1807 and 1820, and were placed with religious families who taught them how to read and attempted to convert them into "respectable women". Most of the women who entered the asylum stayed for only two and a half months, using the open doors as a temporary place to live off the street. The
gold rush profits of the 1840s to 1900 attracted gambling, crime, saloons, and prostitution to the mining towns of the
wild west. A brothel-keeper,
Julia Bulette, who was active in the mining town of
Virginia City,
Nevada, was murdered in 1867. Thirty years before, in 1836, the New York City courtesan
Helen Jewett was murdered by one of her customers, gaining prostitution considerable attention. The
Lorette Ordinance of 1857 prohibited prostitution on the first floor of buildings in
New Orleans. Nevertheless, prostitution continued to grow rapidly in the U.S. and became a $6.3 million business in 1858, larger than the
shipping and
brewing industries combined. Some army officers encouraged the presence of prostitutes during the
Civil War to keep troop morale high. On August 20, 1863, U.S. military commander Brig. General
Robert S. Granger legalized prostitution in
Nashville, Tennessee, in an effort to curb venereal disease among
Union soldiers. The move was successful and venereal disease rates fell from forty percent to just four percent due to a stringent program of health checks that required all prostitutes to register and be examined by a board certified physician every two weeks, for which they were charged a five dollar registration fee plus 50 cents per exam. By the time of the U.S. Civil War,
Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue had become a disreputable slum known as Murder Bay, home to an extensive criminal underclass and numerous brothels. So many prostitutes took up residence there to serve the needs of
General Joseph Hooker's
Army of the Potomac that the area became known as "Hooker's Division". (It is a popular legend that the slang term "hooker" originated from this period. However, the term "hooker" was associated with prostitutes well before General Hooker's rise to popularity.) Two blocks between Pennsylvania and Missouri Avenues became home to such expensive
brothels that it was known as "Marble Alley." In 1873,
Anthony Comstock created the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public. Comstock successfully influenced the
United States Congress to pass the
Comstock Law, which prohibited the delivery or transport of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material and
birth control information. In 1875, Congress passed the
Page Act of 1875, which made it illegal to transport women into the nation to be used as prostitutes. In the late 19th century, newspapers reported that 65,000
white slaves existed. Around 1890, the term "
red-light district" was first recorded in the United States. From 1890 to 1982, the
Dumas Brothel in Montana was America's longest-running house of prostitution. brothels in New Orleans,
New Orleans city alderman Sidney Story wrote an ordinance in 1897 to regulate and limit prostitution to one small area of the city, "The District", where all prostitutes in New Orleans were required to live and work. The District, which was nicknamed
Storyville, became the best known area for prostitution in the nation. Storyville at its peak had some 1,500 prostitutes and 200 brothels. Japanese girls and women worked as
Karayuki-san prostitutes on the west coast of the United States and provided sexual services to Chinese, white, and Japanese men. Japanese prostitutes also worked as barmaids. The Issei Japanese American Bunshiro Tazuma said "At the age of 18... I started... work as a dishwasher at a hotel in Spokane. Later I became a [railroad?] cook and went to North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and even as far as to Minnesota and Alaska... To my surprise I found at least two to six Japanese prostitutes in every town where I went between Seattle and St. Paul, a range of two thousand miles. Even when I went to Alaska to... a salmon cannery in 1908, I was surprised to see from two to five or six in such towns as Ketchikan, Juneau, Wrangell, Sitka, and Skagway.”
20th century Legal measures and morality campaigns In 1908, the government founded the
Bureau of Investigation (BOI; from 1935, the
FBI) to investigate "white slavery" by interviewing brothel employees to discover if they had been kidnapped. Out of 1,106 prostitutes interviewed in one city, six said they were victims of white slavery. The
White-Slave Traffic Act (Mann Act) of 1910 prohibited so-called white slavery. It also banned the interstate transportation of women for "immoral purposes". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution and perceived immorality. The
Supreme Court later included consensual debauchery, adultery, and polygamy under "immoral purposes". Prior to
World War I, there were few laws criminalizing prostitutes or the act of prostitution. During World War I, the U.S. government developed a public health program called the
American Plan that authorized the military to arrest any woman within five miles of a military
cantonment. If found infected, a woman could be sentenced to a hospital or a "farm colony" until cured. By the end of the war 15,520 prostitutes had been imprisoned, the majority never being medically hospitalized. In 1918, the
Chamberlain–Kahn Act, which implemented the American Plan, empowered the government to quarantine any woman suspected of having venereal disease. A medical examination was required, and if it revealed the presence of VD, the discovery could be considered proof of prostitution. The purpose of this law was to prevent the spread of venereal diseases among U.S. soldiers. During World War I,
Storyville, a district in New Orleans where prostitution was permitted, was shut down to prevent VD transmission to soldiers in nearby army and
navy camps. On January 25, 1917, an anti-prostitution drive in
San Francisco attracted huge crowds to public meetings. One meeting was attended by 7,000 people while an additional 20,000 were kept out for lack of room. At a conference with Reverend Paul Smith, an outspoken foe of prostitution, 300 prostitutes made a plea for toleration, explaining that they had been forced into the practice by poverty. When Smith asked if they would take other work at $8 to $10 a week, the ladies laughed derisively, which lost them public sympathy. The police closed about 200 houses of prostitution shortly thereafter. The National Venereal Disease Control Act, which became effective July 1, 1938, authorized the appropriation of federal funds to assist the states in combating venereal diseases. Appropriations under this act were doubled after the United States entered
World War II. The May Act, which became law in June 1941, was intended to prevent prostitution in restricted zones around
military bases. It was invoked chiefly during wartime. See
World War II U.S. Military Sex Education. In
Mortensen vs. United States, a 1944 case, the Supreme Court ruled that prostitutes could travel across state lines if the purpose of the travel was not for prostitution.
Later decades Conditions for sex trade workers changed considerably in the 1960s. The
combined oral contraceptive pill was first approved in 1960 for contraceptive use in the United States. "The Pill" helped prostitutes prevent pregnancy. In 1967, New York City eliminated license requirements for
massage parlors. Many massage parlors became brothels. In 1970, Nevada began regulation of houses of prostitution. In 1971, the
Mustang Ranch became Nevada's first licensed brothel, eventually leading to the legalization of brothel prostitution in 10 of 17 counties within the state. In time, Mustang Ranch became Nevada's largest brothel, with more revenue than all other legal Nevada brothels combined. By
World War II, prostitutes had increasingly begun working as
call girls. In 1971, the New York madam
Xaviera Hollander wrote
The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, a book that was notable at the time for its frankness and was considered a landmark of positive writing about sex. An early forerunner (1920s-1930s) of Xaviera Hollander's, both as a madam and author, was
Polly Adler, whose bestselling book,
A House Is Not a Home, was eventually adapted as a
film of the same name.
Carol Leigh, a prostitute's rights activist known as the "Scarlot Harlot," coined the term "Sex worker" in 1978. That same year, the Broadway musical
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas opened. It was based on the real-life
Texas Chicken Ranch brothel. The play was the basis for the
1982 film starring
Dolly Parton and
Burt Reynolds.
COYOTE, formed in 1973, was the first
sex workers' rights group in the country. Other
sex workers movements later formed, such as FLOP, HIRE, and PUMA. became one of America's best known madams in the 1990s. In 1997, "Hollywood Madam"
Heidi Fleiss was convicted in connection with her prostitution ring on charges including pandering and tax evasion. Her ring had had numerous wealthy
clients. Her original three-year sentence prompted widespread outrage at the harshness of the punishment contrasted with the fact that her customers were not punished. Earlier, in the 1980s, a member of Philadelphia's
social elite,
Sydney Biddle Barrows was revealed as a madam in New York City. She became known as the Mayflower Madam. In 1990, U.S. Representative
Barney Frank (D-MA) admitted to paying for sex in 1989. The House of Representatives voted to reprimand him.
21st century Ted Haggard, former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, resigned in 2006 after he was accused of soliciting homosexual sex and
methamphetamine.
Randall L. Tobias, former Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator, resigned in 2007 after being accused of patronizing a Washington escort service. In 2007, U.S. Senator from Louisiana
David Vitter acknowledged past transgressions after his name was listed as a client of "D.C. Madam"
Deborah Jeane Palfrey's prostitution service in Washington.
Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York in 2008 amid threats of impeachment after news reports alleged he was a client of an international prostitution ring. In 2009, Rhode Island signed a bill into law making prostitution a misdemeanor. Prior to the passage of this law, between 1980 and 2009, Rhode Island had been the only U.S. state where prostitution was decriminalized, (though this was limited to prostitution conducted indoors). (See
Prostitution in Rhode Island). In 2014, due Puerto Rico's stagnant economy, the government there considered legalizing prostitution. In 2018, economist
Robin Hanson suggested that the legalization of prostitution might solve the problem of
inceldom, an ideology responsible for numerous outbreaks of violence and mass killings throughout the United States. On April 11, 2018, the
United States Congress passed the
Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, commonly known as FOSTA-SESTA, which imposed severe penalties on online platforms that facilitated illicit
sex work. The effectiveness of the bill has come into question as it has purportedly endangered
sex workers and has been ineffective in stopping
sex traffickers. Prior to the Act's going into effect, the Department of Justice seized the website
Backpage and charged its founders with money laundering and promotion of prostitution, contributing to major destabilization in the lives of people who trade sex. On June 16, 2021,
Texas governor
Greg Abbott signed HB1540, a law that makes paying for sex in the state of Texas a felony punishable by up to two years in prison for a first-time offense, with enhanced penalties for recruitment from child care or treatment facilities. Texas is the first state in the United States to make the buying of sex a
felony. This law represents a shift from the traditional approach, as it targets buyers of sexual services instead of sellers. State representative
Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston), the author of the bill, said "We know the demand is the driving force behind human sex trafficking. If we can curb or stamp out the demand end of it, then we can save the lives of numerous persons." The law went into effect on September 1, 2021. On June 26, 2023, the state of
Maine enacted a law that partially decriminalized the act of prostitution, following the
Nordic model. The law eliminated Maine's Class E misdemeanor of engaging in prostitution, while elevating the crime of soliciting sex from a child or person with a mental disability from a misdemeanor to a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. ==Types of prostitution==