Sin in the Second City

"It is not adequate to define a prostitute simply as a woman who sells her body...That is done every day by women who become wives in order to gain a home and a livelihood." Havelock Ellis

  

Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott, follows the lives of the Everleigh sisters, Ada and Minna, madams of Chicago's most notorious brothel, the Everleigh Club.  The sisters move to Chicago's Levee district just after the Worlds Fair in the late 1890's, when whoring was a well practiced and accepted vice, from the very wealthy to the destitute.  The sisters created a brothel like no other Chicago had seen.  Their "butterflies", the finest females courtesans, were surrounded with the best care and finest clothes, and the club itself was furnished like a palace where its "customers gained entry only with a solid letter of referral".

The sisters were honest, upstanding women who managed to survive and succeed in a city sick with corruption.  By night, the Everleigh Club entertained Chicago's most powerful politicians and lawmen, famous businessmen and entertainers from all over the world.  Yet would suffer mightily under constant public scrutiny, growing political pressures and religious reformers by day.

"I don't mind mankind's crimes, but I do mind its hypocrisy" - Minna Everleigh

Not only does Karen Abbott open our eyes to this first class brothel, she parallels this story with other brothels that were in stark contrast.  The majority of the other brothels in the city were filthy, with drug addicted prostitutes or "white slaves", under the control of madams/owners who sought only to make money no matter the consequences.  

This trafficking of women became a national concern as nearly 100,000 girls a year were abducted, tricked or forced into prostitution.  The religious and political prosecution of ending "white slavery", a major part of this novel, would eventually lead to the end of the Levee district in Chicago.

Karen Abbott is a skilled writer, compiling an amazing amount of information with astonishing detail of all aspects of life in Chicago during the first decade of the 1900's.  She has expertly woven different strands of life, facts, and happenings into a seamless story that is both interesting and educating.  Sin in the Second City is not a fast read, or one that effectively held my attention the whole time, but I did gain from reading it.  It read like a novel yet has the meat of a history course.

Educational and entertaining, yet requires a commitment to complete.