The Underworld Sewer: A Prostitute Reflects on Life in the Trade, 1871-1909

by Josie Washburn, Sharon E. Wood (Introduction)

For twenty years Josie Washburn lived and worked in houses of prostitution. She spent the last twelve as the madam of a moderately fancy brothel in Lincoln, Nebraska. After retiring in 1907 and moving to Omaha, she turned to "throwing a searchlight on the underworld," including the "cribs" of Nebraska’s largest city. The Underworld Sewer, based on her own experience in the profession, blazes with a kind of honesty unavailable to more conventional moral reformers. Originally published in 1909, The Underworld Sewer asks why "the social evil" is universally considered necessary or inevitable. Washburn minces no words in exposing the conditions that perpetuate prostitution: the greed and graft of landlords, pimps, alcohol vendors, dope dealers, police officers, city administrators, and politicians; the competition for circulation by sensation-seeking newspapers; the indifference or intolerance of law-abiding, church-going citizens; the false modesty that prevents family discussion of venereal disease; the double standard that allows men to indulge their sexuality but punishes women who do so.

Genres: Nonfiction

350 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1997

Reviews

[Sheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books on prostitution tend to focus on the prostitutes, either glorifying them as "Happy hookers" or patronizing them as "the oppressed" or -- the best of the lot -- in calling on the reader to see them as individuals caught within an ugly system.

That's not what Washburn is doing. Washburn -- a very smart lady -- steps back and insists the reader recognize that prostitution exists because society wants it to, and that in order for it to exist, some women must be dis-empowered and dis-enfranchised. This, she believes, ought to change, if people of the time were the Christians they claimed to be.

And she is right, of course. But I suspect few people then realized just how financially driven prostitution is, nor did they recognize why both politicians and police organizations often wanted it to survive. Washburn recognizes that prostitution functioned as a financial system of support for most police organizations and politicians. Just as modern towns all around St. Louis (Ferguson was typical and far from the worst) prey on poor people to help subsidize their police systems, frontier towns and cities throughout much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth used the poor women forced into prostitution and their often financially marginal customers to support theirs.

While those were indirect profits, politicians and the politically powerful regularly got direct profits from prostitution, either by running whorehouses, or by renting them out at extremely high rates. These politicians were highly motivated to prevent women from finding other ways of making a living, meaning they were profoundly opposed to the "women's rightists" and suffragettes of the time, who were lobbying for the rights of women to hold down jobs that would actually support them. History has shown, time and again, that when women are able to support themselves financially, far fewer of them turn to prostitution. Those politicians understood that principle intuitively.

Josie is smart, but thoroughly of her own time, meaning her book can be a bit of a challenge if you're not in the habit of reading older books, and she is MUCH TOO PRONE TO CAPITALIZED SHOUTING, however if you think you'd enjoy this book despite that, you probably will. Not every chapter is absolutely fascinating (the one on the political and newspaper shenanigans in Omaha dragged for me), but the book as a whole is interesting and Josie herself is a dear.

One statistic she does not share is that most prostitutes -- at least in New York in the middle of the 19th century -- died within five years of taking on the career, mostly due to disease or drunkenness. Here's hoping Josie escaped those two demons and lived to a ripe old age.

[Eavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is AMAZING!!! Josie was SO ahead of her time!!! So many of the woman's issues she brings up are still being fought for and it's amazing to hear a voice that is so modern in a text from 1909. She brings up all the inherent issues of working as a prostitute as a woman in her time without any moralizing. She denounces the idea that a fallen woman is to blamed for anything—It is male governance and laws, it is cruel Christian morality, it is the lack of opportunities for women that lead them to be "forever tarnished" by the "underworld". And she doesn't even believe in tarnishing—it is only the Christian world that denies them the ability to be seen as anything but once a "fallen woman".

Her book made me realize the inherent discrimination issues of the sex industry that still need to be addressed while marveling at the incremental changes that have happened. A woman working in the sex industry has many more rights and opportunities than her late 19th-century counterpart, and it's so reassuring. But the fact that it is almost wholly directed and consumed by men makes it less than radical. I won't claim the industry is good until we can achieve complete sex equality. I do think though that in the next few decades or century it will have loosened its chains from near-complete male consumption, and we'll be able to take part without moral objection.

Anyways, this book rocks. She had some weird anti-alcohol thing going on, but I can't blame her for what she went through. In a stroke of irony I even made it to the bar named after her in Omaha, and had the "Josie Washburn" cocktail to boot :")

[Allison Landers · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a book club read. There's a lot of good to say about this book, however I did not enjoy reading it. Purely personal preference. It was good information with good insights but it was not "Let me tell you my story" it was "I WILL EXPLAIN TO YOU..." and I have to say I felt very preached at and even scolded despite not being her intended audience. Lol she had some very good ideas and was clearly ahead of her time in many ways but the language was a bit clunky to read through and she had a lot of ALL CAPS sections that felt like getting yelled at.

That said, I thought the insights into life at that time were very interesting. I liked that she called out double standards, she called out politicians, the upper classes, police, clergy, everyone really. She called out their hypocrisy and shamed them for their role in the downfall of these women.

I appreciate that she particularly advocated for teaching men and boys to treat women better and control themselves rather than teaching girls and women to avoid entanglements. Even though that's often still a problem, but at least we finally seem to be working on it.

I also find it very interesting how she explained the way politicians only promote their own interests and those of their benefactors and then only during election times they jump on the hottest topics to get people all fired up to vote and then after they're elected they make one or two small meaningless "changes" and then everything pretty much goes back to the way it was before. Sad to see we are still doing that over 100 years later lol.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books is still true today, over 100 years later.