The Freedom of the Streets

“A meticulous and imaginative use of sources. . . . A remarkably rich and nuanced portrait of Davenport’s prostitutes. . . . Packed with compelling and richly detailed vignettes.” — Business History Review

“Contributes significantly to the extant literature on prostitution in the late-nineteenth-century United States. . . . A fascinating read.” — Journal of the History of Sexuality

“Valuable. . . . A model for grounding us in the larger geography of human interaction that lies at the heart of the history of sexuality.” — Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

“[A] skillful excavation of lives of Davenport’s middle-class working women/reformers, prostitutes, and public men. . . . Wood’s analysis of the relationship of middle-class working women and the city’s lower class women involved in sex commerce reveals new insights into the lives of each.” — Western Historical Quarterly

“Wood masterfully unearths a striking set of women on the wrong side of Davenport’s line of respectability, and she situates these wayward girls and prostitutes in a shared urban space with that other group of independent women of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the civic-minded reformers. Wood’s research base is terrific and rich, bringing scores of women to life and putting Davenport’s geography of sex and feminism on the historical map.” — Patricia Cline Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara

“This book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on urban women at the turn of the century, the modernization of the city, the history of sexuality, and Gilded Age/Progressive Era politics. Wood has done truly remarkable research that has enabled her to give us colorful, cradle-to-grave portraits of her key characters. These portraits significantly shift our understanding of who local and state level professional women and women’s movement leaders were and how they operated.” — Sarah Deutsch, Duke University