On a casual Sunday night a family came home to be bludgeoned to death by an axe murderer. On June 10th 1912,a monday morning, 6 children and 2 adults were found in their house with their heads bashed to death. In other words, someone inside the house must have been in the house judging that the doors were all locked and the axe belonged to Josiah. Whoever killed the Moore Family must have had a grudge on them and been mad enough to murder them. The Moore family was murdered by William Blackie Mansfield who was hired by Frank F. Jones because Josiah was thought to have an affair with Frank's daughter and they once worked together until Josiah quit.…
In 1907-1917, Progressive moral reformers used the white slavery story of the sexually coerced maiden to express extreme criticisms of the business of vice. Therefore, with economic references, reformers depicted the business of prostitution as a “trust” composed of allied interests, viewed red-light districts as marketplaces were “Vice Trust” brought and sold prostitutes, and correlated white slavery with debt peonage. Thus, moral reformers used their economic interpretation of urban vice to push for stricter laws in handling…
1 )Thousands of people have been wrongly locked away and have falsely admitted to many murders, but we will never know the real truth behind it all. Although we wish to see inside the mind of a killer, we may never get to. The real reasons people get murdered, are simply beyond our knowledge. Since we cannot dive into the psychological and mental reasons people murder others, we can stick with diving into the fascination of the unsolved cases. For many years now, people have been obsessed with creepy and unexplainable cases.…
The murder of Helen Jewett attracted a lot of attention, because it was about a well-educated woman and a young man both taking paths to get into trouble. The expansion of the newspapers made everyone know about the case from all across the United States. New people were coming into New York City which was bringing a greater population expansion. It was quicker for people to move around the city because there was transportation and Richard Robinson and Helen Jewett were not being controlled as much like the smaller cities, such as walking. The resulting media attention on the murder of Helen Jewett created panic while it highlighted the affect of the expansions of newspapers, population, and technology on the societies ability to control youth.…
The dime museums would exploit those who were hermaphrodites as well as those who had STD’S. The museums featured rooms where they displayed diseased sexual organs damaged by syphilis and gonorrhea. The exploitation of those with sexual diseases is ridiculous given that in the 1800’s 353 out of 1,000 had an STD. It was not uncommon. Sears talks about a man named Milton Matson who was arrested for obtaining money under false pretenses and placed in jail. Two weeks later the jailer received a telegraph addressed to Luisa Matson, the jailer then realized that Milton was a women. Matson’s charges were dropped but his public image was tarnished. He was then approached by a man who ran a freak show and was offered a job to be a performer. That soon started the popularity of cross-dressers being regularly seen in the dime museums. This essay/ article demonstrated the unjust gender regulations in the nineteenth century cities, and really brought forth issues that are never shared in academic textbooks or taught as history. I really enjoyed reading this because Sears touched on the social psychology aspect of those who were fascinated with the "freaks" or the…
In the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, a young girl faces a fateful ending in a story about awareness and beauty. The author, Joyce Carol Oates’, main inspiration of this story was that of a Tucson serial killer during the 1950s (citation). In the mid-20th century, serial killers were highly publicized, with most of them being killers of women. With the high traffic of serial killers in the media, there is no surprise as to why Oates’ chose to write a short story not only to take the media image of celebrity away from serial killers, but to make the events more realistic to women everywhere, therefore spreading awareness and caution.…
Judith Walkowitz’s book Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, deals with the social and economic impact that prostitution had on English society in the mid to late 19th century. Throughout her piece Walkowitz illustrates the plight of women who are in the prostitution field and that are working the streets throughout England. She starts with the background of most of the prostitutes in Victorian England then talks about the Contagious Disease Act in 1864 that attempted to curb the venereal diseases being spread by prostitutes. Walkowitz also discusses two specific cities in England that prostitution was a ‘social evil’, Southampton and Plymouth, where the repeal campaigns were successful.…
In the year 1592, in a book on low-life called The Art of Conny Catching, Robert Green says that such thieves, “pull out of a window any loose linen cloth, apparel, or else any household stuff.” The implication is that the hooker catches her clients by a similar, though less tangible method. There is much speculation as to where the term originated, and it’s mystery and the stories behind it are often referred to as folk etymology. It is uncertain whether any of these events sparked the term hooker and it’s reference to prostitution.…
+ The short story, “No Name Women”, was shocking, horrifying, and almost unfathomable for me. I cannot imagine any person, much less a community, that would punish a family in such an inhumane manner as the raid described in the story. I am amazed by the dramatic differences that time and culture impose upon attitudes toward adultery.…
William Sanger, along with future researchers, documented how economic conditions generally pushed women into prostitution. Most professions wouldn’t hire women at that time and, if so, there was rampant sexual harassment and wage discrimination. One study by a Berkeley Chief of Police found that most of the prostitutes he interviewed had previously worked in degrading, low paying jobs, generally as a domestic or factory worker. Domestic servants were not only paid poorly and treated like trash, but they didn’t even have the benefit of autonomy outside of work as their employers often tried “to change the way they dressed, courted, and carried on their social lives.” One woman explained, “I’d rather do this than be kicked around like a dog in a kitchen by some woman who calls herself a…
"Temptress", whose pages and cover alike overflow with a lavish visual collection of photographs, paintings and illustrations of the femme fatale, examines the extraordinary and fascinating history of sexual, or sexualised, women and the journey taken in receiving the infamous title of the femme fatale.…
In England, prostitution was widely punished with branding, labels, and even public whipping. (“Punishing…” 1) The women who were selling their bodies were labeled as “Winchester Geese”. The men who employed prostitutes were even punished by “…branding them on the face.” (1) The prostitutes themselves were also punished. The “Branding Act” passed in 1623 said that “any woman convicted on taking goods valued at more than…
Price tags can be found on almost anything tangible and intangible, even if the goods for sale aren’t morally aligned with society or the laws of our country. In America supply and demand rules the roost, and for Natalie Dylan a 22 year old college graduate, even virtue has a price. For some she is nothing more than a high-priced prostitute but from an economic stand point she appears only as another entrepreneur. The free market system is a venue for all types of goods and services to be exchanged, an intangible good like virginity is ruled by supply and demand just like everything else.…
"The philosophy seems to have been that the male population was entitled, without sanction, to seek the services of prostitutes, but insofar as the morality or health of the community might be compromised by such an activity, the target of the law was properly the purveyors and not the customers of the business "…
In this passage we are given a rather violent and painful image of prostitution as scooping out chunks of flesh to be sold. We are told that women will do this for something as meager and cheap as a few bars of soap. They’ll scoop out their flesh like someone might scoop out beans or rice from a bin to weight and purchase making human flesh worth next to nothing.…