Upstairs Girls by Michael Rutter

Author:Michael Rutter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS036090
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781560375425
Publisher: Farcountry Incorporated
Published: 2005-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

Profiles on Prostitutes

The Ladies of the Night

Women involved in prostitution lived fascinating lives and were an important part of the Western landscape in the nineteenth century. They lived in a shadowy world, and as one delves into their biographies, it’s difficult to distinguish myth from reality.

Most of these women used aliases to protect themselves and their families, making details of their lives hard to find. We know precious little about even the most famous of the “sporting women.”

Some of the women in this section will be instantly recognizable. Calamity Jane, Big Nose Kate, Poker Alice, and Julia Bulette have become Western legends. Others, like Rosa May, are not well known, but their lives are just as fascinating.

The women profiled in the chapters that follow are a cross section of prostitutes and madams in the West. Some beat the odds and were highly successful; although most, as we’ve learned, were not able to hang on to their fortunes. Others died young or by their own hands. Most were not happy with the lives they had chosen but felt they had nowhere else to turn—and eventually sought salvation in cheap whiskey or opiates. Some girls viewed prostitution as the best way to make a living because they had no other skills.

By piecing together newspaper accounts, biographies, and other documentation, we are able to present a more complete picture of each of these women—their childhoods, their joys and sorrows, their ambitions and failures—in an attempt to shed light on who they were as women, separating their real lives from the legend that surrounds them.

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