Crimson streets and violent bodies: identity, physicality, and the twilight of Colorado's vice districts

Abstract

This master’s project focuses on the changing moral and legal status of Colorado’s vice districts during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The thesis argues that once informally organized vice districts were formally regulated and geographically delineated as “red-light districts” at the behest of middle- and upper-class Progressives near the end of the century they became more vulnerable to actual suppression. This result had not been anticipated. Reformers considered commercial sex an offensive but ineradicable behavior, and they hoped districting would be an effective way to control, document, and tax this vice – while keeping it separate and hidden from respectable society. To the surprise of reformers, the establishment of special vice districts rendered them not only more visible and subject to regulation, but also, more vulnerable to suppression and eradication. This may have seemed like a victory for vice reformers, yet prostitution did not disappear. Rather, the formal elimination of vice districts early in the twentieth century worsened the circumstances in which prostitution was practiced, and widened the differential societal treatment of prostitutes and their customers. Prostitution became more difficult to monitor and prostitutes became more susceptible to control by pimps, organized crime syndicates, and corrupt police. In addition to documenting the emergence and demise of vice districts in Colorado, this project examines the identity and experience of the women and men who frequented vice districts as prostitutes, sexual clients, pimps, and drug dealers.