Boudoirs to Brothels: The Intimate World of Wild West Women

by Michael Rutter

Come peek between the covers for an intimate look at the lives of women of the Old West. Once "fallen" or widowed, a woman had few options and almost none that were socially acceptable. Many turned to the red light district to survive. Illustrated with rare historical photographs, Boudoirs to The Intimate World of Wild West Women takes you inside the dark, dangerous lives of 18 madams and working girls.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Womens Studies, Feminism

193 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Michael Rutter has authored or co-authored nearly 40 books and 600 articles for magazines and newspapers. He was awarded the Ben Franklin Award for Outdoor Writing and the Rocky Mountain Book Publishers Association Award. Michael teaches advanced writing at Brigham Young University. He is also a Christa McAuliffe Fellow.

Reviews

[Clay Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like looking into an unknown world.

[Stina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book #16 for 2017
GenreLand Challenge: Biography & Memoir
Personal Challenge Prompt: A book with a woman on the cover
The Legendary Book Club of Habitica's Ultimate Reading Challenge Task: A book with a subtitle
PopSugar Challenge Prompts:
- A book with a subtitle
- A book with career advice (prostitution)

This book is an interesting and often unsettling look at the roles women were often forced into in the Old West. It examines a wide range of experiences and backgrounds and attitudes and also provides vivid descriptions of life in the Wild West at various socioeconomic levels. It really gave me a lot to think about for building characters as well as the world for my steampunk/weird west stories.

I purposely read this book slowly, trying to permit myself days between each profile, but some of them still ran together a bit in my head. This might be in part due to some of the women being friends and/or rivals. Many of the stories did stand apart, though, like those of Polly Bemis (the Chinese poker bride) and Dora B. Topham (Madam Belle London, who ran the Stockade in Salt Lake City).

I appreciated how clear Rutter was about his research and which aspects of the tales were documented (and how reliably so) as well as his willingness to repeat (with appropriate caveats) popular legends and even ghost stories. I did, however, find the structure of the book more textbookish than I like, with sidebars interrupting the flow of the women's personal stories. And this certainly isn't Rutter's fault, but I was disturbed by how often the stories kept referring back to their famous menfolk. I'd love to see a female film director use this as the basis of a series of films that focus on the women in these histories.

I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in learning more about life in the Western US in the 19th and early 20th centuries or who is interested in sex work, human trafficking, and/or intimate partner violence. It contains many insights that apply yet today.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read while traveling through Montana. 👍👍

[Havebooks Willread · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this one up while visiting Montana. I was intrigued by the many local books about the women who practiced "the world's oldest profession".

While I didn't particularly appreciate the writing style and the women's lives started to blur together so that they lost their distinct identities, I did find the book interesting. We hear so much right now about sex trafficking and this book just reminded me that "there is nothing new under the sun." Women (and young girls) got involved in prostitution 150 years ago for many of the same reasons sex trafficking continues today: kidnapping, sexual abuse, pimped by a man they loved, desperation for money, alcohol, or drugs (laudanum or opium back in the day), or a few who liked it because they were good at it and found it financially profitable.

[Rebecca Graf · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting read. Has prompted me to do more even more research and gave me several ideas for some future stories.

This book looks at individual women of the west who were on the more sullied side of society. It displays pictures of the individuals when available and tries to look into their private lives as much as the historial resources allow. I love how myth is explored as well as picked apart to see how much is factual.

If you are looking for an interesting non-fiction book on people rarely talked about, give this one a try.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote my master’s thesis over theater in the Old West. I wish had discovered this book as a source. Yes—brothels were a big form of entertainment in the West. Saloon girls and madams were just as important and cowboys and miners. This book details some more prominent madams across the Old West. Many of there stories are tall tales that the book attempts to ground. The problem is even when these women saved the town their profession less them less than respectable to their stories which are just as important as the cow punchers need to be preserved. A great read for anyone interested in all aspects of the American West and how the sporting women made it happen.

[Alli · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic itself is interesting which is why I picked it up while in the MT airport but I didn't love the writing style. I kept thinking that it is clearly written by a man because of the way he phrased certain things which was annoying and distracting.

[Mary Landis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really informative and fun read. I picked up this book in Rapid City to get a little history that wasn’t so mainstream about the area. It didn’t disappoint. I did get a bit angry at men for a while during my read of this book though.

[John Yelverton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty fascinating book which blends both biographies of known prostitutes of the old west, and encyclopedic knowledge of the circumstances they went through in their day to day lives. There's very little information about this topic out there, and so the author did a great job with what he had to work with, and any information is better than none.

[Amber Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for a bit more of a serious look at the lives of "soiled doves" on the frontier. Mostly, this is anecdotes and stories...some of them not that complete. Worth reading, but not a heck of a lot of depth.
I'm kind of interested in what happened to sporting women after their "professional" careers. Most seem to drift into addiction/minor lawbreaking and relatively early deaths, suicide, occasionally marriage, and honest jobs if they saved up. The only ones who got rich were almost always madams...it seems that it was only occasional sporting women who used the profession to get a grubstake for a more lucrative honest income.

[Kip Wolf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this and some other books from the Devils Tower Trading Post while touring South Dakota and Wyoming. With high hopes and cheerful expectation, I dove in thinking I’d finish it in a few sittings. However, I found myself slogging through it, putting it down and then begrudgingly picking it back up days later to try again. The book isn’t terrible, but I found the writing style to be difficult to digest and the stories began to blur. The writing went from pedestrian to pedantic, and was very presumptive rather than factual in many cases. Even when approaching the read as simple entertainment, the derivative nature of the stories with the hackneyed writing were a chore to complete.

[Claudia Mundell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of people would not touch this subject, but being the warped person I am, I loved reading about the Soiled Doves. I had ready other books about Painted Ladies and Bawdy Women, but this one is super. While a lot of women suffered severely in the area of prostituion in the Old West, some of author Micahel Rutter's women thrived...became rich...did some great things...they were smart, industrious women successful in the business world...just a seedy business. The Grit of these women was uplifting to read about!

[Alan Lampe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Rutter has done excellent research into each of the soiled doves highlighted in this book. We all know the stories about the cowboys and the men who tamed the West, but this book, along with "Upstairs Girls" tells the female side of the West story. I learned a lot and it will help me with the story that I am writing. I read these two books for research and I'm very happy I did. I learned a lot from his work. I hope that should I venture to any of the cities in which these women worked, I'll take the time to see their historical sites.

[Nina Frisby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was everything I ever wanted to read and more. Bite-sized profiles of famous prostitutes were interesting and easy to read, and pictures made it that more easier to imagine them as real people.

[Michele Lawson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an interesting book that I picked up while visiting Deadwood SD. I think it glamorized the lives of these women during a very violent time.

[Marci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Rutter has now published four books of very similar content about the shady women who were part of the Old West of America. This is the latest, and so I suppose it is likely the most complete, but do be aware that some of the same people appear in each book, and probably there is a lot of repeated content. He uses a combination of fictionalized story-telling, straight historical fact reporting, and record analysis to present a rounded if not full picture of his subjects, and he does a good job with each one. The book is written as a collection of essays, each focusing on a woman who lived and worked in the Old West; it is not a chronological or otherwise connected study except by subject.

While most of these women of necessity or of choice lived on the seamier side of life, the author presents their stories without pulling punches but also without resorting to titillation, which I appreciated. It's a well done collection that introduces the reader to famous women and to some whose names are not well known anymore. I have a better understanding of the Old West from reading this book.

[Jacob Moon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw this in a Pinterest feed and ordered a copy. Very interesting read about the Wild West and one of the trades that was very much a part of it, usually openly in most towns. The book is a fairly quick read, with cool photos of some of the towns as they were then, as well as some of the female personalities. If you like history, have a reverence for the Wild West, and aren't offended easily, check this one out. It isn't as tawdry as you might think--certainly nothing that you wouldn't see on a History channel special or some other cable show. I like how the author depicted these women (who were much more than prostitutes; indeed, many were intelligent business-women, had real relationships, were benefactors to their communities, and just real people who had to carve out an existence the only way they knew how), making them human and relatable.

Overall, the book is well-written, although in places it does become a bit redundant as some of the chapters tend to spill over into each other. Highly recommended for anyone interested in history, and especially the Wild West.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every few years we take a trip to the Black Hills. On each trip I pick up one or two books about the area of the time period of time of the old West and the founding of Deadwood among other famous towns. Most recently I purchased this book. This isn't the first book I have read on the subject of prostitution, but it is one of the better ones.

The difference between the old west prostitution in the movies and the reality of how these women lived is a giant contrast. Little to no romance was involved and there is a lot of stories of very tough women doing what they needed to in order to survive.

This is an easy, informative read that was obviously reliable researched. If you are a fan of the old west at all, this is a great read.

[Chris Zable · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enh. The life stores a a bunch of different Old West prostitutes and madams. It's oriented more towards storytelling than being a book of history, and there are some quirks in the writing that irritated me, like using slang of the period without defining it, or leading the reader down the garden path with a tall tale before saying that that isn't how it actually happened at all. Rutter gives a list of sources, but there aren't references in the text that tell you which ones pertain to which women. So, some interesting enough stories, and if that's all you're looking for you might rate it higher than I did.

[John Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It is a collection of biographies of women who for one reason or another turned to prostitution. There are many anecdotes throughout the book which sharpen the reader's image of the individuals and places being discussed as well as the culture of the late 19th and early 20th century. It is apparent the author did considerable research in writing this book. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to gain insight as to the character of the more successful women in this line of work.

[Ashley (Tiny Navajo Reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up
An excellent collection of some of the most famous bawdy girls and madames of the Wild West. I like that these were written narratively and there seems to be an air of mystery that they just can't shake. And this is my own personal complaint, I wish for a little more substance to some of the stories, a little more fact woven into their fiction.
Other than that, an lovely little peek into the world of "fallen angels."

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes the men are pathetic and the majority of the so-called "upstanding" women of the community, also pathetic for turning their backs on those in need. Talk about collusion, the Mormon leadership in the Salt Lake government were hypocritical for the monetary gain received from a proffesion the church deems sinful.

[Blaire Foote · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was hoping this book would be about how brothels were run and how the lives of the women who worked in them were like. It ended up being about famous prostitiutes of the west. It was still an interesting read and had a lot of information about the times and settings of each famous prostitute it talked about.

[KarlaLou · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories are engaging and flow smoothly, making it feel like a conversation rather than just reading. With so many books focused on lawmen and outlaws, it’s refreshing to read about the women and their journeys (forced and voluntary) of how they impacted the frontier.

[Mike Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A step back in time.

Great fun. Very interesting to see how these women helped mold these boom towns. The pictures help you understand what they were up against.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It tells the stories of 18 women. Some have pictures so you can put a name with a face. There are a couple side stories telling the conditions and towns.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great resource, but as other reviews state, the author often writes about these women with a strange and sexist tone.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting piece of history

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very easy read, individual stories mixed with historical information made reading this book an enjoyable experience.

[Cindy Sa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of short chapters about different Madams. Interesting, but had to force myself to keep reading.