Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode

by Marion S. Goldman

In 1859 high grade silver bullion was discovered on the Comstock Lode. In a twinkling, Virginia City was transformed into a brawling silver boom town perched on a mountain of silver. Twenty years later it virtually disappeared, leaving behind played-out mines, tumbled-down shanties, and memories of those who sought their fortunes on the lode.

The fortune seekers were many: miners and madams, confidence men and dance hall girls. The fast life was as stratified as any proper community, ranging from expensively kept women to prostitutes living in cribs. Laura Fair, an elite member of the demimonde, shot her protector and, after a spectacular trial, retired to live modestly in San Francisco. Jessie Lester made a small fortune as a madam while middle rank prostitutes such as Julia Bulette died in debt. At the lowest end of the scale were "celestial damsels," nameless slave women brought from China to minister to the needs of Chinese workers. Chronicling it all was the lascivious pen of Alf Doten, writer, editor, and bon vivant.

In Gold Diggers and Silver Miners, sociologist Marion S. Goldman provides a detailed account of prostitution on the Comstock Lode. By considering sexual commerce in a community limited in space and time, she explores general relationships between prostitution and society, shedding light on sociological questions of importance today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History

248 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1981

Reviews

[Sheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book, all in all. While the author sticks to what's known, meaning she can offer only guesses as to what average prostitutes on the Comstock were paid, they are informed guesses, based on prices in San Francisco (which are known) and on other known factors (what various prostitutes owned when they died, for instance). I know a fair bit about prostitution of the time, so I was most interested in the "social life" aspect of her book, which she does a good job covering, I thought.

Although I knew going in that this book has some flaws, mostly due to the fact that Goldman didn't have access to the sort of data analysis we do today, which led her to the false conclusion that the majority of women in the Comstock were prostitutes. She also does not seem to have understood how Chinese concubines worked; she categorizes them as prostitutes, which they most certainly were not (somewhat ironically, she also recognizes that outsiders simply assumed Chinese women were prostitutes, even when that was not the case).

When it comes to prostitution and women's roles, the book Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community takes much of Goldman's book as a given, while also pointing out the flaws. Goldman was an innovator, and subject to the limitations of that position.

The only time I really rolled my eyes at her was in the last chapter, where she gets all Freudian for a few paragraphs. And yet, even there, she got me to thinking. I had not considered how profoundly some of the assumptions of the Victorian age had infected Freud. I've long been angry with Freud for how he turned tail and ran when people came down on him for rightly recognizing the existence of incest and how much it damaged women. Reading this book, and reflecting on the Victorian beliefs he was bucking (at least in terms of Victorian Americans, but a lot of the assumptions seem to have been held in Europe), it's quite amazing he even recognized what was going on in the first place, even though he did retreat and regroup when challenged.

Also made me think of the many men I've known whose romantic (and, presumably, sex) lives were messed up by a Victorian madonna/whore complex. I regularly complain about how our culture artificially divides sexuality and reproduction, but I had not considered how far back that divide goes! The chemical division follows on more than a century of cultural division, where female sexuality was divided into whores (who were not supposed to have children), and decent women (mothers who were not supposed to enjoy sex). I had recognized how artificial it is to divide sex from reproduction as we do, because the pill may prevent children, but it doesn't change the fact that our bodies developed in a world where that wasn't possible. I hadn't connected the Victorian division of sex from reproduction to the fall out of the chemical split before, or at least I hadn't recognized how much the Victorian era sexual ideals still resonates in the American consciousness. Probably not thoughts that would occur to someone who reads Goldman's book without having read numerous books on the Victorian view of women first.

Still, I would guess that Goldman considered herself a feminist when she wrote this book, or at least had a lot of feminist sensibilities, yet in her discussion of what's behind prostitution, she does not even remotely consider female sexual desire. For instance, she concludes that:

"Men comprise the vast majority of sexual buyers and women the majority of sellers because of the structured male-female differences in emotional needs and sex roles and the sex segregation and discrimination against women in the labor force."

But there are all external features, social features, yet that "male buyer, female supplier" split has been true historically and cross culturally. Even in cultures where women were viewed as sexual creatures in their own right, and where there were women powerful enough to purchase sex, it was not prostituted sex women purchased. Going on modern brain studies, that difference is biologically based. It is simply easier for women (and male prostitutes, for that matter) to sexually please men, than it is for men to sexually please women, because of how the two sexes are wired.

Female sexual response includes more "steps" in the brain, steps that usually rely on comfort, both physical (a woman whose feet are cold has a much harder time having an orgasm than an equally uncomfortable man does), and mental (women either need to feel safe, or they have to dissociate, to orgasm). Although the mental may be physical as well -- women simply have more reason to be concerned about safety, since, once they're in bed, upper body strength is far more important in any physical altercation, meaning the average man can overpower the average woman. So men may have the same safety issues going on in the brain, they're just rarely pertinent.

Also, it takes women longer to orgasm, meaning a cheap prostitute has to charge more in order to make the same. So while there are plenty of social factors that have an impact on prostitution and prostitutes, the fact that men are the majority of customers, while women rarely go beyond some sort of "kept man" or ongoing lover (who is paid, whether formally or informally), is likely more physical than anything. A prostitute servicing men can use the same techniques on everyone, with a 95% success rate. A prostitutes servicing women may need to change techniques entirely with every customer -- and even in cultures where a woman is sexually free enough to "own" her sexuality to the point of knowing what pleases her and being willing to describe it, the differences are still subtle enough it's partly a learned process.

When I think about it, in view of the many books I've read lately on prostitution, it's kind of amazing how many of them can write tens of thousands of words on the subject, without ever really grappling with what actually happens. That wasn't really what I was looking for, with this book -- I wanted to know how Comstock prostitution differed from the norm, and came into the book with a pretty good background on the general subject -- but it's interesting that the author, the one time the physical is most pertinent, backs away from it like that.

Prostitution is the ultimate expression of the idea that sex is something women (or socially powerless men) perform for men (or for socially powerful men). Happy Hookers may get the press, but the grand majority of prostitutes get no sexual pleasure from the act. It kind of bothers me that so few books on the subject recognize that fact. It is a profound power imbalance that matters -- but it only matters if female sexual pleasure matters.

[Jeff Garrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a lot of good information here, but also some questionable methodology to how she decided who the prostitutes were.

[Ash Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

it was great up until that final chapter—maybe i’m just not well-versed enough in Freud, but trying to link the oedipus complex to why prostitution is a thing is…absurd

[Douglas K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic. The level of research is impressive and the author creates an immersive, lost world. Highly recommend for readers of Western, mining, and prostitution history.

[Nicole C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at prostitution in 19th century Virginia City, Nevada, situated on the Comstock Lode. In a place with a drastically low ratio of 'respectable' women to men, what is historically termed 'the oldest profession" flourished, with not as much intervention from the law and 'decent' society as one might expect. Ms. Goldman had a wealth of primary sources at her disposal, which paint a very hard life in the wilds of this boomtown.

I can't recall how this got on my list, probably from raiding a bibliography of something else I read and enjoyed. Interlibrary loan came through for me. Received from Eckerd College, it still has a card pocket in the back! With a card still in it!