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9781498508681

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This richly detailed account enhances our understandings of early twentieth-century Americans' beliefs about prostitution and moral reform within the complicated geography of a transformed urban environment. -- David Ruth, Penn State, Abington James H. Adams's book casts a much-needed critical light on urban reformers in early twentieth-century Philadelphia. Adams astutely demonstrates that reformers actually did very little to reform one of the most recognizable figures of urban vice-the prostitute. Instead, they used sensational cultural discourses on prostitution to serve other political, social, and moral agendas. More often than not, such discourses on prostitution were used to draw clear boundaries between the urban and the rural, between racial others and whites, between promiscuous and virtuous women. -- Jill Suzanne Smith, Bowdoin College, author of Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933

This richly detailed account enhances our understandings of early twentieth-century Americans' beliefs about prostitution and moral reform within the complicated geography of a transformed urban environment. -- David Ruth, Penn State-Abington James H. Adams's book casts a much-needed critical light on urban reformers in early twentieth-century Philadelphia. Adams astutely demonstrates that reformers actually did very little to reform one of the most recognizable figures of urban vice-the prostitute. Instead, they used sensational cultural discourses on prostitution to serve other political, social, and moral agendas. More often than not, such discourses on prostitution were used to draw clear boundaries between the urban and the rural, between racial others and whites, between promiscuous and virtuous women. -- Jill Suzanne Smith, Bowdoin College, author of Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933

[S]pecialists will add this effort to their bookcases. * Journal of American History * This richly detailed account enhances our understandings of early twentieth-century Americans' beliefs about prostitution and moral reform within the complicated geography of a transformed urban environment. -- David Ruth, Penn State–Abington James H. Adams’s book casts a much-needed critical light on urban reformers in early twentieth-century Philadelphia. Adams astutely demonstrates that reformers actually did very little to reform one of the most recognizable figures of urban vice—the prostitute. Instead, they used sensational cultural discourses on prostitution to serve other political, social, and moral agendas. More often than not, such discourses on prostitution were used to draw clear boundaries between the urban and the rural, between racial others and whites, between promiscuous and virtuous women. -- Jill Suzanne Smith, Bowdoin College, author of Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933

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James H. Adams is lecturer of history at Penn State–Abington and Southern New Hampshire University.

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