Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945статья из журнала
Аннотация: Elizabeth Alice Clement's Love for Sale maps changing sexual norms among New York City's working class during the first half of the twentieth century. Her book is a welcome addition to research on U.S. sexual history, standing beside earlier works by Beth Bailey and Kathy Peiss—whose scholarship Clement is indebted to and often surpasses. Clement offers a lively account of the precursors and legacies of American dating culture that developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than treating prostitution as a separate topic with an autonomous history, Clement explores the symbiotic relationship between dating and vice. Love for Sale analyzes how women participated in and pioneered sexual gifting relationships that muddied boundaries between respectability and prostitution. Clement spotlights the informal sexual bartering system in which men gave gifts to women and paid for their evening's entertainment on the prospect that the women would provide them with sexual attention. Those treating relationships and the so-called charity girls who participated in them emerged during the 1890s in conjunction with expanding opportunities for women in the paid labor force and the rise of public recreation and consumer culture. Those changes allowed working women to be in public without people assuming that they were “public women” (that is, prostitutes). The intermediary space of the treating relationship permitted women to condemn prostitution even as they earned money, gifts, and entertainment in essentially the same way full-fledged prostitutes earned theirs; in so doing, charity girls developed sexual identities that publicly challenged the virgin/whore dichotomy.
Год издания: 2007
Авторы: Brian Donovan
Издательство: Oxford University Press
Источник: Journal of American History
Ключевые слова: Historical Gender and Feminism Studies, American History and Culture, European history and politics
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 93
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 1280–1280