These women were followed later in the same year by, as legal historian Judith Kelleher Schaffer described them, “other more respectable women.”  The "casket girls" - the name originating from the small chest or cassette that held a small allonment of cloting - had been carefully chosen from among good middle class families for skill in housewifely duties and excellence of character.  Shaffer continued:  “One historian has remarked on the incredible fecundity [of these new women] and the tragic infertility of the prostitutes, as almost all of Louisiana’s most important families of French descent trace their origin to the former while none claim to have descended from the latter.”

The French prostitutes-as-pioneers thing continued: 120 years later, in the early years of the California Gold Rush, another raft of fabled migrants arrived in San Francisco. At the time, only 300 women called San Francisco home, according to journalist Herbert Asbury in his 1933 “informal history” The Barbary Coast, “a third of which were harlots from Mexico, Peru, and Chili [sic].” The Pacific News printed a story in 1850 to announce the departure of 900 women “carefully chosen from the bagnios of Paris and Marseille,” wrote Asbury, to be sent to San Francisco, yet somehow only 50 arrived. “It has been said,” Asbury wrote, “that by the end of 1852, there was no country in the world that was not represented in San Francisco by at least one prostitute.”

Some of the laws used to target women who sold sex were holdovers from English common law, which outlawed “vagrancy” and “nightwalking” – in other words, appearing in public at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or while poor and female. One typical example is an 1817 law in New Orleans, which levied a $25 fine against “any woman or girl ‘notoriously abandoned to lewdness,’” writes historian Judith Kelleher Schaffer, “who committed scandal or disturbance of the peace.” If she could not pay the fine, she was to serve one month in prison. “Thus the ordinance did not prohibit prostitution,” observes Schaffer, “as long as no scandal or disturbance occurred.”

When laws did target actual sexual conduct, they didn’t just go after people in the sex trade. In the state of Louisiana, people in the sex trade along with men caught having sex with men could be charged with violating an 1805 law that declared engaging in oral or anal intercourse, for compensation or for free, to be a “crime against nature.” This law was ruled unconstitutional in 2012.

Though people in the sex trade experienced a disproportionate amount of profiling and arrest even in the 1800s, the ambiguous legal status of prostitution also gave them more room to demand fair treatment from police and city officials. Digging into New Orleans court cases dating before the Civil War, Judith Kelleher Schaffer found that most of the women who filed writs of habeas corpus during this period did so on their own behalf, “contesting their own imprisonment because they had been charged with vagrancy or some trumped-up charge designed to get them off the streets.”

The history of women and prostitution is one of our most fascinating tour topics.  Join Royal Tours for an engaging tour of the French Quarter while we discuss the origins and history of prostitution in New Orleans and bring to life many of the extraordinary women who cut their own path in life. Some women became infamous from their frequent run-ins with the law while others used their entrepreneurial spirit to create lavish brothels and great wealth.