Fashioning Streetwalkers: Dress, Race, and Sexual Policing in Early 20th-Century New York

This paper explores the role of fashion in racialized sexual policing in early twentieth-century New York, focusing on the New York Women’s Court. A product of Progressive-era legal reform, the Women’s Court was established in 1910 to deal with prosecutions for prostitution and waywardness. As young working women gained increased access to leisure and finery, their attempts to fashion themselves in the era’s latest styles collided with an increasingly zealous regime of private and public policing and an expansive court system that equated particular ways of looking and being a woman with criminality. Black women and girls in particular were disproportionately represented in prostitution arrests and convictions.

Margot weaves together court records, reformers’ texts, newspaper accounts, and visual depictions of fashion in early twentieth-century New York to explore how women were legally fashioned as ideal or deviant subjects through their dress and appearance. How did police officers, prosecutors, and judges determine who did and did not possess the legal status of prostitute? One way this occurred was through legal fashioning–the process by which agents of the state perceived women’s dress and appearance, assigned meaning to it, and treated them accordingly. Analysis of Women’s Court cases reveals that police, prosecutors and judges often assigned deviant and criminal meaning to kinds of garments increasingly popular among young women in and outside the home. As they circulated through the pages of Vogue, department store catalogs, and the runway of New York City streets, silk chemises, kimonos, and lace petticoats became signs of style and luxury. When police and judges pointed to young women’s shorter hemlines, negligees, or makeup as proof of moral and criminal guilt, they signified that they were behind the sartorial times–and that they were ignorant to what young female New Yorkers thought was cool.