| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sharon E. Wood. The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 321. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.
Sharon E. Wood's study of Davenport, Iowa, offers uncommon perspectives on the politics of sex in the late nineteenth-century United States. Mainly, she explores public discourse on prostitution, hardly a new topic for historians of urban life in the Gilded Age. But the focus on Davenport makes this an exceptional book.	1
The city's relatively small population made prostitution visible to one and all. Rough and respectable Davenporters often knew each other, and they routinely rubbed elbows in a downtown district where brothels operated next door to reputable businesses. Davenport's size also facilitates the reconstruction of individual lives via newspapers, census manuscripts, city directories, tax lists, police and court records, and other municipal archives, and Wood takes full advantage of these sources. Her book brims with vivid portraits of women reformers and prostitutes, city fathers and sporting men, police matrons and runaway girls, crusading priests and saloonkeepers.	2
As Wood establishes, commercial vice abounded in Davenport. Although Iowa became a dry state in 1884, the city continued to license saloons—more than 200 of them by the end of the decade. Similarly, in 1893 the city began to regulate prostitution. Prostitutes and brothel keepers had to register with the police and appear on a monthly basis to pay fines that amounted to licensing fees. Income from these quarters so swelled the city's treasury that Davenport repeatedly lowered property taxes until it abolished them completely in 1902.	. . .

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