Selling Sex in the Silver Valley
A Business Doing Pleasure
Once the largest silver producer in the world, Wallace became notorious for labor uprisings, hard drinking, gambling and prostitution. As late as 1991, illegal brothels openly flourished because locals believed that sex work prevented rape and bolstered the economy, so long as it was regulated and confined to a particular area of town.
The madams enjoyed unprecedented status as influential businesswomen, community leaders and philanthropists, while elsewhere a growing aversion to the sex trade drove red-light districts underground. Dr. Heather Branstetter’s research features previously unpublished archival materials and oral histories as she relates the intimate details of this unlikely story.
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“My favorite comment was attributed to a guy vacating his business below one of the brothels. When asked why his business failed he supposedly said ‘Revenues was okay but there was just too much …… overhead'”
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A New York Times article appearing during the 1973 [temporary] shutdown confuses some things, but offers an example of the high degree of acceptance the community had toward the madams and houses, and illustrates how wide Wallace’s reputation had spread, noting that a bartender at Albiâs had fielded 14 long-distance phone calls that day to ask if it was true.
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That’s right, she was a Rosie the Riveter. So were MANY of these women. We should really revise our collective understanding of Rosie the Riveter and think more about what happened to the actual women those images stand in for: many were in the sex industry both before and after the war. After all the patriotism and serving our country rhetoric, we were basically like, ‘thanks and good luck finding another job that pays a comparable wage.â€
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This past Monday I drove to Charlottesville to be interviewed for the nationally-distributed public radio show With Good Reason. It was interesting—and a little weird—to do what the producer Kelley called “performing a conversation.” You can listen to the show here (I’m the first 16 minutes or so): [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/194578165″ params=”color=79a4d1&show_artwork=false” width=”100%” height=’166′ iframe=”true” /] And here is a transcript featuring my […]
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This is the third (and final?) post in my Morality and Sex Work mini-series. The inspiration for the title comes from the famous story in Greek mythology about “cunning Odysseus” (his epithet in the ancient Greek is m’tis, which is also translates to mean “crafty” or “skilled”) hatching a plan to offer a giant wooden horse as an offering to the enemies, who bring the gift into their city, only to be destroyed after those hidden inside the horse crawl out in the dead of night and open the gates for a surprise attack.
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From time to time, Wallace makes it onto another one of those “cool small towns in America” lists, here, #38. Although this latest list celebrates the “rich history and culture” you find in small towns, it fails to plug the Oasis Bordello Museum, which was mentioned in Travel + Leisure’s 2012 list and Budget Travel’s 2009 list (which also features my current town, […]
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“You pretended to have an orgasm? Is that a common practice among prostitutes?” “It’s a common practice amongst anyone with a …
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“I don’t remember at all how I eventually found out that this was a thriving red-light district and had steady business, but when it was payday at the mines the place was really jumping.”