Charity Girls And City Pleasures Analysis

The rise of new forms of sexual control stemmed from a cultural shift that was occurring throughout the nineteenth century in America. This shift was the rise of the middle class— a small part of the population defined by the privacy of the home and principles such as the importance of childrearing and sobriety. The middle class held significantly different values from the ones afforded to the working class and the sharp contrast between the classes led to new sexual authorities creating definitions of sexuality based on status. The advent of public versus private spheres also characterized this time and the ideal of sexual privacy led to the creation of the “natural woman,” a view that to be womanly is to be chaste. Between 1860 and 1930, …show more content…
In her article “Charity Girls” and City Pleasures, Kathy Peiss uncovers the construction of working class sexuality through an exploration of young working women in New York City from 1880-1920. Peiss reveals that the sexuality of working class women must be “understood in context of larger relations of class and gender structuring the sexual culture.” In contrast with the strict expectations of upper and middle class women to be respectable in manners and behavior, “sexual expression was an integral part of working class women’s lives.” Working class females were given the opportunity to exchange sexual favors for resources and access to a new social world through the process of “treating”, which promoted a more relaxed sexual culture for females. However, this culture that working class women engaged in left them vulnerable to assault as men saw their bodies as a public entity and they were often excluded from the definition of womanhood because of the lack of privacy in their lives due to the nature of tenement homes. Socializing was occurring on the streets for working class women as opposed to in the privacy of the home for upper and middle class women. Middle class women began to attempt to reform these practices that they did often did not fully …show more content…
The Comstock Law was passed in 1873 as a response to the growing availability of obscene materials such as birth control, pornography, and illicit novels. The law was an attempt by Anthony Comstock to keep obscene material away from the American youth and in order to do this, obscenity had to be defined. The obscenity laws were targeting working class sexuality and resulted in the creation of two groups in the public sphere. One group believed in defining sexuality through individual control and the opposing group, the “vice crusaders”, pushed for government involvement in the expression of sexuality. Vice crusaders saw sex as a private entity, thus once again excluding the working class from this definition. Defining sexuality only in reproductive terms left no place for working class sexuality along with strict regulation of public sexuality such as art, media, and medicine. The success of Comstock’s law reveals how the moral reform that had been present since the early nineteenth century was now being supported by federal and state governments in an attempt to politicize sexuality. Furthermore, the definition of obscenity that was formed stemmed from a middle class discomfort with working class sexuality as the middle class came to value sexual restraint over all other principles. However, just like before, the