| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.3

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 5.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Devils and Details: The Geography of Sexuality in Gilded Age Iowa

WOOD, SHARON E. The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 344 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0807829390; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-6501-0.
For historians of sexuality the Gilded Age is the mother lode. In the rising late-nineteenth-century industrial nation, villages either withered away or became bustling towns and then growing cities. Whole new worlds conjoined and produced communion, conflict, saloons, dance halls, prostitutes, new policing systems, prosecutions, marching women, angry men, and last, but most profoundly not least, great record keeping. If your town hall was not destroyed by fire, your city too may become the next great excavation site for historians seeking to uncover the complex social interactions that make Gilded Age communities so endlessly entertaining and instructive.	1
Sharon Wood has carried this tradition forward in her valuable new book, Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City. Wood unpacks the clashing public cultures of sex, labor, and politics in Davenport, Iowa during the 1880s and 1890s. Given its somewhat licentious reputation within Iowa—reasonably well-deserved for its saloons, brothels, and billiard parlors, as Wood shows—it is perhaps surprising that such a rich source of sexual history had not been mined before. Yet Wood has clearly made a case here that this oversight was both undeserved and potentially risky. In this crisp and engaging book, Wood will have us understand that to know Davenport is to know America itself in this formative moment.	2
Because of its location on the Mississippi River and at the crossroads of rail traffic, Davenport offered transients and locals alike tempting opportunities for sin as well as community redemption. A heavy German immigrant presence with a well-regarded beer hall tradition kept otherwise raging prohibition forces at bay. It all reinforced the sense of Davenport as a small city with big city possibilities.	3
Wood's reformers constitute the central axis as she uncovers a complex, gendered political and sexual geography in Davenport. A small group of powerful and accomplished female activists directed reform traffic. An elite group of local male politicians either resisted or tried to co-opt them. Wood dramatically tells their stories and the reader comes to know them all intimately. Remarkable women like the amazing Dr. Jennie McCowan, one of Iowa's first woman physicians (who seemed to have a hand in every element of Davenport life), and Phebe Sudlow, Davenport Superintendent of Schools in the late 1870s (not to mention President of the Iowa State Teachers Association), are but two of the numerous accomplished women Wood recovers and brings vividly to life.	4
The same is true for those tragically ensnared in the local sex industry. Gracefully enlivening dry testimonies and newspaper accounts, Wood produces fully engaged narratives of small agonies that carry larger implications. For example, in her richly textured chapter "Prostitution as Employment," Wood selects a handful of the women whose names appear frequently in court records and traces their lives in depth. One, Kate Huber, a prostitute who, according to Wood, was "held in contempt even by other women in the trade" (89), provides a horrific tale of child abuse. "They saw Kate Huber 'whipping' her six-year-old daughter Lena with a 'stick of firewood as thick as my wrist' according to one woman....Doris Schestedt 'proposed to go and stop her whipping,' but her companion held her back, warning, 'she would strike you if you interfered'"(88). That child died, and Huber's other children led miserable lives. To read this book is to be caught up in a web of such intimate moments and private lives. Although completely steeped in their universe, Wood does not stint on placing her individuals in their larger world.	. . .

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