A Walk on the Dark Side

In City of Eros, Timothy Gilfoyle skillfully represents mid-nineteenth-century New York City as the carnal show case of the Western world. Exploring shifting boundaries of sexual behavior, he details the changing geography and structure of prostitution and the relationship between political power and the underworld economy of commercial sex. Gilfoyle extends his description to cover the subculture of sporting life as an integral aspect of commercialized sex in the United States' largest nineteenth-century city. Gilfoyle details the convergence of prostitution, the sporting life, and machine politics, providing explanations for a new violence against women. He integrates recent contributions in social and women's history to explain not only the function of this violence for the subculture of the sporting life but also to explain how and why prostitution became increasingly managed by males, who displaced the once independent madams. His analysis of the Helen Jewett murder, among the more notorious trials of the nineteenth century, improves upon previous interpretations. He shows the symbolic importance of the trial as a turning point in the early urban-industrial development of the city, explaining its attraction as a rallying point for the growing population of clerks adrift in the city. Estimating the population of prostitutes at between 5 and 10 percent of the city's women, Gilfoyle calculates that during economic depressions the population expanded beyond 10 percent. Between 1840 and 1870, New England and Ireland swelled the ranks of Gotham's prostitutes. Native-born prostitutes tended to be found in brothels and immigrant women were more likely to be street walkers. Gilfoyle supports Ruth Rosen's conclusion for the Progressive Era that women moved in and out of the ranks of prostitution. Both accept, but minimize the idea, that prostitutes were victims of the white slave traffic. Gilfoyle's analysis of male identity contributes substantially to understanding the illusion of freedom that the sporting life provided and how that