{"title":"The other women's rights movement: ‘Streetwalkers’, habeas corpus and anticarceral activism in New York City, 1830–1860","authors":"April Haynes","doi":"10.1111/1468-0424.12810","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article reconstructs the earliest known movement for sex workers' rights in US history. It interprets collective assertions of due process as a strategy to overturn vagrancy laws, which permitted municipal officials to summarily commit ‘common prostitutes’ to the penitentiary for months. Mass arrests sparked an anticarceral movement of ‘streetwalkers’ who refused to be contained. Unlike the middle-class Woman's Rights Movement, which sought equal rights for their own sake, streetwalkers acted to build a world in which they could control their own labour, have sex without punishment and move freely through their city.</p>","PeriodicalId":46382,"journal":{"name":"Gender and History","volume":"36 3","pages":"840-858"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-0424.12810","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Gender and History","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0424.12810","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article reconstructs the earliest known movement for sex workers' rights in US history. It interprets collective assertions of due process as a strategy to overturn vagrancy laws, which permitted municipal officials to summarily commit ‘common prostitutes’ to the penitentiary for months. Mass arrests sparked an anticarceral movement of ‘streetwalkers’ who refused to be contained. Unlike the middle-class Woman's Rights Movement, which sought equal rights for their own sake, streetwalkers acted to build a world in which they could control their own labour, have sex without punishment and move freely through their city.
期刊介绍:
Gender & History is now established as the major international journal for research and writing on the history of femininity and masculinity and of gender relations. Spanning epochs and continents, Gender & History examines changing conceptions of gender, and maps the dialogue between femininities, masculinities and their historical contexts. The journal publishes rigorous and readable articles both on particular episodes in gender history and on broader methodological questions which have ramifications for the discipline as a whole.