Book Review

Madam Millie: Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan. By Max Evans. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. xxi + 315 pp. Illustrations. $23.95.)

Prostitution is an integral, and never dull, aspect of western history. Novelist Max Evans's affectionate tribute to his friend, Mildred Clark Cusey (1906–1993), is an uninhibited, decidedly non-scholarly account of Cusey's career as a prostitute and madam from the 1920s to the 1960s. Evans reconstructs Cusey's life from his many interviews with his subject and those who knew her; historians offer a brief scholarly context in both an introduction and an epilogue. Her candid portrait of brothel economics and culture dovetails with recent scholarship examining both nineteenth-century prostitution and the Nevada brothel industry from the 1970s to the present. "Madam Millie's" biography highlights the continuities of American brothel prostitution across the generations, as well as its pronounced decline during the twentieth century, a significant social development awaiting further investigation by historians.

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Cusey's early life followed a pattern typical for many nineteenth-century prostitutes. Born Willette Angela Fantetti to Kentucky tenant farmers, Cusey was orphaned as a child, endured poverty and abuse, and became the sole supporter of her tuberculosis-stricken older sister when she was only fourteen. But Cusey found that two full-time, low-paying jobs were insufficient to cover expenses, so two years later she turned to prostitution. She explained, "Men ... had exactly what I wanted, you see. It was just figuring how to get it out of them" (p. 24).

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