A Look Back at The Everleigh Club

How The “Sexual Revolution” has brought down the price of sex

The first thing to bear in mind is that sex is actually pretty cheap these days and prostitution doesn’t command the same premium that it once did. Like any service, the price varies with supply and demand. One of the things about prostitution that has made it more affordable for the average Joe these days is a by-product of the so-called sexual revolution. Because so many women are engaging in sexual activity these days for their own pleasure and excitement, coupled with the availability of effective chemical birth control and the fact that at least in mainstream society there is basically no longer a stigma to engaging in sex outside of marriage, the price of sex has been effectively slashed in many countries around the world.

This wasn’t always the case. There was a fascinating article in the London Sunday Times that appeared in late 2010 that analyzed the earnings of the high-end escorts working in London today in comparison with the girls working at the Everleigh Club in the very early 1900s.

The Everleigh Club (often pronounced ever lay) was perhaps the most upmarket brothel in the United States at the time. It was located in Chicago.

On an inflation adjusted basis the average girl working there at the time made the equivalent of around $400,000 a year in today’s money. A high-end escort in London averages around $150,000 these days, according to The Times. Now that’s still a decent living if you are say qualified as a nurse and decide to chuck in your salary ranging between £17,000–33,000 a year depending on what part of the country you live in.

The reason, however, that the average earnings are lower today than they were 110 years ago is because sex commands so much less of a premium than it once did. Although there is clearly still a demand for prostitutes these days, there are many more ways for men to obtain sex than there were in the past. In 1900 if you were an unmarried male that was basically your only possible outlet unless you were rich and had access to your servants.

I also suspect that in the 19th century that brothels were used by the middle classes as a form of birth control. A respectable middle-class woman wouldn’t have much access to birth control beyond abstinence. Also, she was not expected to have sexual desires whatsoever.

Communities that put any kind of emphasis on female sexual pleasure such as the Oneida community were exceedingly rare. In the community young men were trained by the middle-aged women to withhold ejaculation so as to prolong intercourse. The only sexual position that was approved by the sect’s founder was a rear entry position with the couple lying on their side.

Sometimes trying to parse the language of another century is difficult. In the earliest days of the community there was one woman who was having sex with the founder and two other men on a regular basis. She was described by one of them as “Being perfectly built for love”. I am guessing that he meant that she was multiply orgasmic by that comment hence her ability to ‘love’ all of them with facility.

For a fascinating look into the Oneida community please see ‘Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community by Spencer Klaw, New York, 1993.

Another example from the 19th century that gave women access to sex for pleasure was in the early Mormon community. Polygamy in the early Mormon church worked because Joe Smith and his buddies contracted celestial marriages with women whose husbands were away on missions so clearly the girls who would have been otherwise deprived of sex were also getting some fun out of the celestial marriage structure the Mormon Prophet created.

There is a fascinating book about Joseph Smith by a fallen away Mormon, what we in the United States call a “Jack Mormon” named Fawn M Brodie, ‘No Man Knows My History, The Life of Joseph Smith’, published in 1971.

Ms. Brodie recounts a number of Smith’s sexual antics.

The norm in the 19th century, however, was a set of social mores where respectable women did not desire sex and performed it as part of their marital obligations.

The existence of brothels in most cities provided a sexual outlet for the men and the prostitutes understood and practiced various forms of not always entirely effective birth control. But my guess is that this did keep the birth rate among ‘respectable’ middle class women down and the fathers of any offspring resulting from interactions in the brothels had no legal or financial responsibilities towards any children thus sired.

The women in this profession at the time, became to a large extent social outcasts known as ‘soiled doves’. Regrettably, almost every human society has somehow managed to define sexual intercourse as an activity that is somehow unclean and, in many cases, various religions have introduced ritual cleansing as both a prelude and a postlude to sexual activity. Part of this had to do with disease but in my opinion, it is mostly a function of guilt associated with the intense pleasure that we derive from sex.

Partly motivated by this guilt and enhanced by the negative attitudes towards sex that developed in the Christain churches, sex and prostitution have always brought out a certain degree of hysteria in various societies. In the case of the United States, it seems to have reached a peak of frenzy in 1910. In other words, at about the same time that establishments such as the Everleigh Club were in their heyday.

In my opinion, this was driven in part by the growth in urbanization which meant that large numbers of young women were in fact beginning to enjoy some degree of unchaperoned sexual freedom that had never been accorded to them before. God only knows what the US District Attorney who wrote the following words would have made of Tinder and other dating apps!

One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards “white slavery” in places of this character. —

Extracted from a pamphlet called The War on the White Slave Trade by Ernest A Bell, 1910.

If the ice cream parlor was the den of iniquity a century ago, what is it today? Starbucks perhaps?

Glenn M Stewart

Pugilist, polemicist, Oxford Arabist, financial mastermind, international man of mystery, film producer, playwright, part-time-poet, full-time provocateur…