Brothels vs ‘Pure’ Women: Sex and Double Standards 1900–1920

They look similar because on the surface it is all about sex and women’s bodies. In the early 1900s you had two female archetypes living side by side in the same town: the abstinent “good girl” who saved herself for marriage, and the prostitute in the red-light district. Same human needs, same men, same streets. Completely different rules.

What Brooke Shields’s film Pretty Baby hints at, in a stylized way, was real. American cities and small towns in the early 20th century often had regulated brothels, underage prostitutes, and a whole tolerated sex economy. At the same time, middle-class women were told that any premarital sex would ruin them socially.

Prostitution in the early 1900s was a commercial system that sold sex to men while preserving the public ideal of female purity. Respectable women were expected to be chaste, and prostitutes were the safety valve that let men break that rule without “tainting” the women they married.

To make sense of that contradiction, you have to compare the two sides directly. Same era, same culture, same men. Very different origins, methods, outcomes, and legacies.

Where did each role come from? Origins of the ‘pure’ wife and the prostitute

By 1900, the United States had spent most of the 19th century building a very specific ideal of womanhood. Historians call it the “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity.”

In this script, the good woman was pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. Middle-class advice manuals, sermons, and women’s magazines hammered the point: a respectable girl did not have sex before marriage. Her value was tied to chastity, then to faithful motherhood.

That ideal was classed and racialized. It was written with white, native-born, middle-class women in mind. Working-class women, immigrant women, and Black women were often excluded from the “pure woman” category before they even made a choice about sex.

At the same time, the same culture treated male sexual desire as natural and hard to control. Doctors and moralists worried that men who stayed abstinent would fall into masturbation or “perversion.” The solution many accepted, quietly, was prostitution.

Prostitution in the early 1900s did not appear out of nowhere. It grew out of 19th-century urbanization, mass migration, and industrial capitalism. Young women moved to cities for factory or domestic work. Wages were low, hours long, and there was no welfare state. A single missed paycheck, pregnancy, or abusive employer could push a woman into sex work.

In port cities like New Orleans or San Francisco, and in booming towns from St. Louis to Butte, brothels clustered in red-light districts. Some cities, like New Orleans with Storyville (created in 1897), tried to confine prostitution to one legal or semi-legal zone. Others simply tolerated it as long as it did not spill into respectable neighborhoods.

So you had two tracks. A girl born into a stable, respectable family with some money and protection was steered toward abstinence and marriage. A girl born poor, orphaned, abused, or simply unlucky might find that the only way to pay rent was to sell sex. The culture that praised the first quietly relied on the second.

So what? The origins of these roles show that “virtue” and “vice” were less about personal morality and more about class, race, and economic survival, which set up a double standard baked into early 20th-century life.

How did each system work day to day? Methods of control and survival

Respectable women’s abstinence was not just a private moral choice. It was enforced by families, churches, and law.

Middle-class daughters were chaperoned. Courtship was supervised. A girl who got pregnant out of wedlock could lose her job, her home, and her social standing. In some communities, she might be sent away to a “home for unwed mothers” or pressured into a quick marriage.

Sex education, where it existed, was usually framed as warnings about disease and “ruin.” Doctors and moral reformers told women that decent wives did not feel strong sexual desire. A “good” woman was expected to say no before marriage and, often, to say yes after marriage whether she wanted to or not.

Prostitutes lived under a different set of controls. In many cities, police and local politicians treated brothels as businesses to be managed. Owners paid bribes. Women were fined for “disorderly conduct” or “vagrancy.” Raids happened when public opinion flared or a reform group complained.

Inside brothels, madams controlled the work. In some houses, especially the higher-end ones, women might have a room, clothes, and some protection from street violence. In others, especially cheap “cribs,” women worked in tiny rooms, saw many men a night, and had little power to refuse dangerous clients.

Underage prostitution, the part that shocks modern viewers of Pretty Baby, did exist. Girls as young as 13 or 14 could be found in brothels. Some were runaways. Some were trafficked, tricked with promises of jobs, or sold by desperate families. Reformers of the era wrote about this in panicked language about the “white slave trade.”

Men moved between these worlds with little penalty. A man could visit a brothel, then court a respectable girl, and no one would say he was “ruined.” The same society that policed female virginity accepted male experience as normal, even healthy.

So abstinent wives and prostitutes were both controlled by men, but in different ways. The wife was controlled through respectability, dependence, and moral pressure. The prostitute was controlled through money, police power, and physical risk.

So what? Looking at the methods side by side shows that early 1900s sexual morality was less about protecting women and more about managing women’s sexuality for male comfort and social order.

What did each path lead to? Outcomes for ‘good girls’ and sex workers

For the “good girl” who followed the abstinence script, the expected outcome was marriage, children, and a home. That could mean stability and affection. It could also mean legal and economic dependence.

Before the 1920s, married women in many states had limited property rights. Divorce was hard to get and carried stigma. Birth control was restricted by Comstock laws that treated contraceptive information as obscene. A wife who discovered her husband had visited brothels had few legal tools and a lot to lose if she left.

Health outcomes were mixed. Respectable women were not automatically safer. Husbands who contracted syphilis or gonorrhea from prostitutes sometimes infected their wives. Doctors documented “innocent wives” with venereal disease, but public blame stayed focused on prostitutes.

For prostitutes, outcomes varied by class, race, and luck. Some white women in high-end brothels made more money than they could in any other legal job. A few madams accumulated real wealth and local influence. But that was the exception.

Most sex workers faced violence, disease, and early death. They had little access to medical care. Police protection was unreliable. Black and immigrant women were more likely to be in the lowest-paying, most dangerous parts of the trade.

Respectability was almost impossible to regain. A woman who tried to leave prostitution and take a factory or domestic job could be blacklisted if her past was known. Charitable “rescue homes” existed, often run by religious groups, but they came with strict rules and moral judgment.

Children were caught in this system too. Some prostitutes raised children in or near brothels. Others gave children up, or saw them taken by institutions. The fictionalized child in Pretty Baby reflects a real pattern: kids growing up in the shadow of the sex trade, absorbing its risks and its stigma.

So while the abstinent path promised security, it also trapped women in marriages without much power. The prostitution path offered cash and a kind of independence, but at a steep cost in health, safety, and social exile.

So what? The outcomes show that both roles were shaped by a system that limited women’s choices, just in different directions, which helps explain why later generations pushed so hard for legal and sexual reforms.

How did reformers react? The ‘social purity’ crusade and the vice wars

By the early 1900s, the contradiction had become hard to ignore. Reformers, many of them middle-class women, launched what they called the “social purity” movement. They wanted to protect girls, clean up cities, and reshape sexual behavior.

They wrote exposés about brothels and “white slavery.” Journalists published lurid stories of innocent farm girls lured to the city and forced into prostitution. Some of these stories were exaggerated or invented. Others were based on real abuses.

This panic helped push through new laws. The Mann Act of 1910 made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” States toughened penalties for procurers and brothel owners. Cities began closing red-light districts. New Orleans shut down Storyville in 1917 under pressure from the U.S. Navy, which did not want sailors catching diseases before shipping out to World War I.

These campaigns did not question the double standard as much as they attacked its most visible outlet. Reformers often wanted men to be more self-controlled and women to be more protected, but they still idealized female chastity and motherhood.

At the same time, some early feminists and socialists argued that economic inequality was the real engine behind prostitution. They pointed out that as long as women had fewer job options and lower pay, sex work would remain attractive or necessary for some.

So you had two kinds of reform: moral purity campaigns that targeted brothels, and social reforms that tried to improve wages, housing, and welfare. Both changed the environment in which prostitutes and “good girls” lived.

So what? The vice wars of the 1900s and 1910s helped shut down open red-light districts but left the sexual double standard mostly intact, which pushed prostitution underground and set the stage for modern debates about sex work and morality.

What survived? Legacy of the double standard and the Pretty Baby problem

By the 1920s, the script began to crack. World War I, women’s suffrage, and the rise of youth culture changed expectations. The “New Woman” and the flapper drank, smoked, and sometimes had premarital sex. Dating replaced chaperoned courtship.

Yet the old split did not vanish. Respectable women still faced harsher judgment for sexual activity than men. Prostitution did not disappear when red-light districts closed. It moved to streets, hotels, and more hidden venues, often more dangerous for sex workers.

The idea that some women are “good” and others are “bad” carried into the 20th and 21st centuries. You can see it in slang: Madonna/whore, wife/girlfriend vs “side piece,” “good girl” vs “slut.” The early 1900s brothel vs pure wife divide is an earlier version of that same mental sorting.

Films like Pretty Baby shock modern viewers because they force us to look at something the past tried to keep offstage. A child in a brothel is not an exaggeration. It is a reminder that the system that protected some women by sacrificing others had real, young, human faces.

Today, debates about sex work, pornography, and “respectability politics” still echo the old arguments. Is sex work inherently exploitative, or is the exploitation rooted in poverty and stigma? Should the law punish buyers, sellers, or both? How do you protect minors without criminalizing adults?

Understanding how early 1900s America managed its brothels and its “pure” women helps answer a basic question: whose sexuality was allowed to exist in public, and on what terms?

So what? The legacy of this double standard shapes modern attitudes toward sex, consent, and respectability, and it explains why stories about brothels and “good girls” still provoke discomfort and argument.

Origins, methods, outcomes, legacy: why they looked similar but were not

So, side by side, what do we see?

Origins: Abstinent “good girls” came from a middle-class ideal of pure, domestic womanhood, backed by family resources. Prostitutes emerged from economic pressure, migration, and a culture that treated male desire as something that needed an outlet.

Methods: Respectable women were steered and constrained through social pressure, religion, and dependence on husbands. Prostitutes were managed through brothel systems, police power, and cash. Both were controlled, just with different tools.

Outcomes: The abstinent path led to marriage, some security, and legal dependence, but also limited autonomy. The prostitution path led to income and a measure of independence, but at the cost of health, safety, and social exile.

Legacy: The double standard that made this system feel normal did not vanish with the brothels. It evolved. Modern arguments about sex work, victimhood, and respectability still carry the DNA of those early 20th-century town streets where the pastor’s daughter walked past the red-light district on her way to church.

They look similar because both roles were built around men’s expectations of women’s sexuality. They differ because class, race, and money decided who got to be called “pure” and who was left to absorb the blame.

So what? Seeing the comparison clearly helps strip away nostalgia and moral fog, and it shows that the line between “good woman” and “fallen woman” was drawn by power, not by nature.