Browsing by Author "Kodama, Maki"

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    For the Relief of “Lewd and Abandoned” Women: An Urban History of Late Antebellum New Orleans
    (2022-11-15) Kodama, Maki; Sidbury, James
    For the Relief of “Lewd and Abandoned” Women: An Urban History of Late Antebellum New Orleans examines the precarious experiences of working-class women who faced various oppressions by state authorities from the 1840s until the dawn of the U.S. Civil War. While scholarship on the working-class women in New Orleans has often focused on the development of Storyville, a red-light district area that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, “disorderly” women in the antebellum New Orleans were already a social issue and faced stigmatization of being “lewd and abandoned.” Although these women hardly left behind records of their own, this dissertation provides a richer account of the working-class women who were considered unruly and ungovernable through analyses of five different institutions that were heavily invested in the problems of “lewd and abandoned” women in antebellum New Orleans—the police authorities, local presses, workhouses, a charity organization, and the military. Piecing together the fragmented documents created by the institutions, this dissertation shows that the state authorities perceived their “disorderliness” and lack of patriarchal figures as a threat to public order and imposed control over their bodies and labors by arresting, bringing them to trial, and temporarily incarcerating them at the workhouse. At the same time, the state authorities never completely intended to eliminate them. While some private charitable organizations tried to alleviate the situation by offering poor relief, the state authorities sought ways to claim their labor and pleasure, as did soldiers who engaged in commercialized sex with these women. For the Relief of “Lewd and Abandoned” Women contends how the working-class women experienced physical and geographical restrictions on their body, labor, and autonomy.