Passez à l'illimité avec Magzter GOLD

Passez à l'illimité avec Magzter GOLD

Obtenez un accès illimité à plus de 9 000 magazines, journaux et articles Premium pour seulement

$149.99
 
$74.99/Année

Essayer OR - Gratuit

LOVE FOR SALE

The New Yorker

|

December 16, 2024

When America tried to get on top of the sex trade.

- REBECCA MEAD

LOVE FOR SALE

American exceptionalism, the historian Eva Payne argues, had sexual dimensions.

On Christmas Day in 1872, the atmosphere was restive among the forty female residents of a medical institution on the outskirts of St. Louis. The women were patients, not prisoners, so they wondered why they were obliged to spend the holiday as they would any other day: confined to their wards, knitting or chatting, without music or revelry of any kind. Half a dozen of the boldest ones took it upon themselves to defy the steward and the matron, and to circumvent the gatehouse guards, who were ostensibly there to prevent undesirable visitors. The women made a break for more entertaining precincts downtown, "bent on a regular old-fashioned "bender,'" as the Missouri Republican reported at the time. But the authorities quickly tracked them down. Four of them were brought back to the institution, while the remaining twoperhaps in an unruly state of intoxication-were, as the newspaper dryly put it, "left in the calaboose to ruminate upon the inscrutable ways of Providence and the police."

The institution from which the women escaped was the Social Evil Hospital, an isolation hospital for female sex workers who had tested positive for sexually transmitted diseases. The hospital had been discreetly established in the suburbs of St. Louis the previous year, as part of an innovative attempt to regulate prostitution in the city. The furnishings of the main building, where white women dwelled, were tasteful and comfortable, albeit sparely decorated. Black women were quartered separately, on the second floor of the gatehouse. The food was plentiful if plain: no oysters were served in the dining room, to the annoyance of the residents. They also chafed at the rule against smoking, and regretted the absence of a common room. Largely, though, they were reportedly more or less satisfied with their environs.

The New Yorker

Cette histoire est tirée de l'édition December 16, 2024 de The New Yorker.

Abonnez-vous à Magzter GOLD pour accéder à des milliers d'histoires premium sélectionnées et à plus de 9 000 magazines et journaux.

Déjà abonné ?

PLUS D'HISTOIRES DE The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

ROME POSTCARD: THEY CAME, THEY SAW

The first presentation in Dolce & Gabbana's annual couture extravaganza—a display of its fine-jewelry line Alta Gioielleria—was supposed to take place on a summer's eve at Hadrian's Villa, in Tivoli, near Rome.

time to read

3 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

THE PICTURES: SIDEKICK

The actor Paul Walter Hauser emerged onto Fifth Avenue to pick up an açai bowl from a guy on a bicycle, then headed back up to his hotel room. He wore slippers, shorts, and a black tank top that exposed his biceps tattoos: on the right arm, his nineties comedy heroes (“Short & Stern & Farley & Varney & Carrey & Williams”); on the left, “1 Corinthians, 6:19-20” (“Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”). “I was in a weight-loss challenge with my brother-in-law,” he explained. “We said whoever loses has to get that tattoo, which is very like my family: just hella religious and extreme decisions. I lost thirty-five pounds. Then I booked ‘I, Tonya’ and had to put it all back on.”

time to read

3 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

MIND THE GAP

What we get wrong about racial wealth disparities.

time to read

16 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

PERIOD PIECES

Was the Renaissance real?

time to read

15 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

“EMMA” UNRATED

Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one years of age, and blessed with a comfortable home and the expectation of an ample income in due time, found herself curious, one spring day, about a young man named Knoxville, the new neighbor across the grange. Frequenters of the village and dispensers of its gossip told extraordinary stories. Mr. Knoxville, they said, had offered the villagers on Michelmas Day last an entertainment he called a “Fire-Hose Rodeo,” in which he suspended a canvas fire hose from a thirty-foot-tall cranelike structure, climbed the structure, clutched the fire hose with both arms and legs near its nozzle, and attempted to hold on as the hose writhed and flapped about with water from the village hydrant rushing through it at extremely high pressure.

time to read

3 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The Bridge Stood Fast

She was a busy little item.

time to read

32 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT OVERRULED - In February, 1983, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union in Georgia faced a dilemma.

time to read

4 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

THE POPE'S ASTRONOMER

The Michigan man—and meteorite expert—who runs the Vatican Observatory.

time to read

22 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

GONE COLD

L.A.’s food culture, transformed by immigration raids.

time to read

7 mins

August 04, 2025

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

CHECK YOUR BILL

The industry lobby supporting No Tax on Tips wants server wages kept low.

time to read

22 mins

August 04, 2025