For women and men working in inner-city neighborhoods, markers of race, class status, and gender often worked together to define their ability. Her experience, however, also represents larger patterns of labor, work, and migration that emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. As the automobile industry expanded, cities in the Great Lakes region began to attract workers from around the country and the world.
The visible nature of the trade allowed young women with few personal contacts in the city to enter the profession relatively quickly. Her narrative focuses on prostitution as a business, similar to other service industries in the city. Many of the women who worked for McGowan also held positions in the formal economy, selling sex to supplement their fluctuating incomes.
This fluidity became important in the post-war years as the divide between working-class society and middle-class suburbs widened. Women's positions in the sex trade blurred the lines between the public/private dichotomy, between the professional and the personal, sometimes in problematic ways. She notes an overall decline in women's working conditions, which exacerbated their marginalization in the sex/gender system.
As she argues, the rise of pimps was linked to a decline in bordello-style prostitution in the city. In the opening lines of "Assessment," McGowan tells readers that she is "part Cherokee Indian. Numbers running, gambling, underground clubs, and other forms of illegal businesses became vital to building economic networks in the communities of black of the city.
McGowan's employment practices similarly suggest that racial markers determined a woman's value in the sex market. According to Taylor's study, the police were more likely to target women in sub-district areas of the city where they practiced a “visible politics. When placed in the larger context of its historical experiences, these actually fit its larger political objectives.
Her story also shows how McGowan cultivated a working-class and feminist subjectivity through her experiences in the city's vice districts. Prior to the development of a widespread feminist movement that challenged gender and sexual inequality in the country, McGowan formulates a sharp critique of the sex-gender system that developed in the mid-twentieth century. Motor City Madam also provides important insight into the conflicting roles that race played in the city's vice districts.
McGowan's own businesses reflected the broader racial and ethnic lines that developed in the city, where white and white-ethnic workers could rise to higher levels of the trade.
NOTES
7 McGowan uses the terms "prostitute" and "lady" in her text, so I have chosen to use these throughout the essay in order to stay consistent with the terminology of the period. Gray, Red Lights on the Prairies (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1971); Douglas McDonald, The Legend of Julia Bulette and the Red Light Ladies of Nevada (Las Vegas: Nevada Publications, 1980); Lael Morgan, Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush, 2nd ed. Burnham, "The Medical Inspection of Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45 (May Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, Inc. , 1987).
9 On the Progressive Era and Western society, see: Roy Lubove, "The Progressives and the Prostitute," The Historian 24, no. Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale: Courtship, Treatment, and Prostitution in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Much of the North American scholarship has been influenced by Judith Walkowitz's seminal study of Victorian England, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in the Archives: Problems and Possibilities of Documenting the History of Sexuality in the Archive,” American Archivist 57 (summer. Josh Lukin (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press Kaye Mitchell, “'Who is she?') Identities, intertextuality and Authority in Non-Fiction Lesbian Pulp of the 1950s,” in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, ed. 38 Historians have traced the ways in which male violence has shaped the culture of the auto industry.
See: Meyer, Manhood on the Line; Jeremy Milloy, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017). It is not entirely surprising that a Mexican woman is among the interviewees in the vice investigation. Zaragosa Vargas, “Life and Community in the 'Beautiful City of the Magic Engine': Mexican Immigrants in 1920s Detroit,” Michigan Historical Review 15 (Spring.
50 Under Michigan Penal Code 15471, Section 197, "Keeping House of Ill-Fame or Inducing Women to Enter, Etc., For Purpose of Prostitution," a madam could be charged with a felony, sentenced to up to five years in state prison and a fine of $1,000. 55 Virginia Sobotka, "A Comparative Study of Prostitution: Trends in the Social Characteristics of the 'Street-Walking' Prostitute from 1935 to 1957," (MA thesis, Wayne State University, 1961), 41. 62 This is in direct contrast to the views of some feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s who argued that prostitution itself was the embodiment of patriarchal exploitation.
Lizabeth Cohen further demonstrates that the concept of the "citizen consumer" continued to grow after the war. 93 Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press.