Before Storyville

My primary interest is in deviant behavior in New Orleans in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, so I intend to look further into prostitution. In preparation, I have reread Al Rose’s Storyville and Alicia Long’s The Great Southern Babylon. My next step will be to take a half step or so back in time, to the time before Storyville with Judith Schafer’s Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in Antebellum New Orleans and Emily Landau’s Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans, which covers about thirty years prior to the founding of Storyville as well as the history of the district itself.  I am hoping to find a particular woman, or girl, to follow more closely in the archives, either through court documents, a journal or diary, or letters, possibly even mentioned in some doctor or charity hospital records, since these women were frequent visitors to the free clinics and emergency room in many cases, as a professional hazard.

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