My past two blog posts have been about prostitution in St. Joseph, Missouri, during the late 1800s, focusing respectively on madam Mollie Williams and on how the system worked. This time I thought I'd take a look at how young women in the late 1880s came to turn to prostitution, focusing still on St. Joseph and Mollie Williams's "palace of sin."
On the evening of November 21, 1884, a merchant from King City, Missouri, showed up in St. Joseph looking for Leona Mann, a 17-year-old girl who had been enticed away from the home of her relatives near King City two weeks earlier by a 27-year-old paramour named Cay Craynor. The next day Craynor was located on the streets of St. Joseph and taken to police headquarters for questioning. He denied any knowledge of Leona's whereabouts at first, but when the police chief threatened to have him taken to jail and "chained to the floor," according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, he instantly weakened and told the chief that the girl was "holding forth at Mollie Williams's bagnio."
The chief went to Mollie's place and asked that all the girls in the place be brought to the parlor. "The request was complied with," said the newspaper, "and among those who put in an appearance was Miss Mann." Leona was taken to the marshal's office, where she was allowed to talk to Craynor before being interrogated by the police chief.
Leona told the chief she had left King City two weeks earlier in company with Craynor, who had promised to marry her. They came to St. Joseph, where they stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, and "as a matter of course her ruin was accomplished." After a few days, they went to Kansas City, where Leona thought they would be married, but Craynor refused to keep his word. On November 20, they returned to St. Joe, where Craynor deposited her at Mollie Williams's place. Leona told the chief she was anxious to leave Mollie's but that she owed the landlady ten dollars. The King City merchant stepped in at this point and said he'd pay the ten dollars. Leona "declined to prosecute her seducer," but the chief ordered him out of town under threat of being arrested for vagrancy. Described as "an innocent country girl" with "considerable beauty..., large blue eyes and auburn hair," and a form that was "almost perfection," Miss Mann was taken to a secure house in St. Joseph to spend the night, but the Gazette-Herald reporter thought she would probably return to her relatives in King City the next day.
On Wednesday morning, September 11, 1889, Frances Hammond, "a comely looking 16-year-old girl with black hair and eyes, five feet high and weighing 114 pounds," ran away from her St. Joseph home "with the avowed intention of entering on a life of shame," according to the St. Joseph Herald. She had confided her plans to a friend of hers and had complained of mistreatment at home. Her father and the police located her Thursday night, according to the St. Joseph News, "in the ranch of the notorious Molly Williams." They took her away, and the father took her back home. The girl was "glad enough to get away," said the News, and "apparently regretted the step she had taken." However, the father planned to have Frances placed in a reformatory "to make sure of her leading a virtuous life."
On Friday morning, June 27, 1890, a man from Champaign, Illinois, named William Ross arrived in St. Joseph looking for his daughter, whom he had heard was living in "a sporting house" in St. Joe. That afternoon Ross set out to search all the prominent bawdy houses in town. At the second one he visited, Mollie Williams's place, all the girls in the house were ushered into the parlor, according to the Herald, and Mr. Ross found himself "face to face with his own daughter," who immediately began weeping.
Few words passed between father and daughter, but she immediately promised to accompany her dad home. "The reprimands came afterwards," said the Herald. The father could not or would not say for sure why his daughter had left home, but he intimated that she had been "coaxed away by a traveling man" from Chicago. The girl, who had gone by the name Lillian Brown while at Mollie's place, was described as about 20 years old, "not beautiful but good looking." She had supposedly "repented of her past action." Friday evening, she left with her father for Kansas City, from where they planned to take a train for home.
Illustrating that there might be at least some validity to the stereotype of the fallen woman "with the heart of gold," Mollie Williams came to the rescue in early January 1891 to take in a homeless baby when no one else seemed to care. On Sunday, January 4, a young woman, giving her name as Mila Myers, appeared at police headquarters with an infant that she said had been left in her care by a couple named Cornwall, who had adopted it out of a house of prostitution, where it had been born to one of the inmates. The police advised Mila to take the baby to the Home of the Friendless, but the supposed charitable organization refused admittance to the child when the young woman took it there. Turning sadly away, Mila started down the street with the infant in her arms and paused in front of Mollie Williams's bagnio to contemplate her sorrowful situation. The woman finally turned in at Mollie's place, and, according to the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald, the madam "agreed to keep the little waif and find a home for it."
Later investigation revealed that the infant, in fact, was Mila's child and that Mila was a fictitious name. According the St. Joseph Weekly News, the young woman had come to St. Joseph from Marshall County, Kansas, in "an unfortunate condition, the victim of a prominent farmer in that district." As "a last resort," "Mila" had taken up residence at Maud Norris's house of ill fame, and when the baby was born, she determined to "give up her evil companionships." She induced the Cornwalls to take the baby, but they returned it to her shortly afterwards when they were getting ready to leave town. When she told her story to Mollie Williams, Mollie "took pity on her," according to the Daily Gazette, and was able to promptly find a home for the infant.
Although I've continued to focus on St. Joseph in this post, I'm pretty sure some the examples I've cited about how young women ended up in houses of prostitution could just as well have been drawn from almost any other town where prostitution flourished during the late 1800s or from almost any other era, for that matter. In the 1880s, women who turned to prostitution often did so because of desperate circumstances. Often they were girls running away from abusive home environments, young women who had been "ruined" and cast adrift by fickle lovers, or divorced women with few other ways of supporting themselves. I suspect the same is still true today. And this is not even to mention women forced into prostitution through threats, intimidation, and physical assault.
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