Women on the Comstock

During its profitable years, the Comstock was controlled by a small upper class that include mine and ore grinder owners and superintendents, stock brokers, smashed merchants and politicians. The middle class consisted of less wealthy merchants and service establish ment owners and mining professionals, such as hotel and eatery owners, mining engineers and independent craftsmen. Finally, the working class compiled the largest group and included miners and mining- link laborers and hotel, restaurant, boarding house and saloon employees. Al some 50 percentage of this working class was foreign-born; many of them single men or men who had left their wives behind in their root word countries. Thus, at the beginning of the first Comstock boom in 1860, around 2,379 men and 147 women lived in the two towns. The ratio of men to women proceed to decrease everyplace the next few years, however, due to the numbers game of " decent" women who accompanied their husbands and "painted women" who followed their careers to the Comstock.

Clark Spence of the University of Illinois describes the American public's traditional sight of the Comstock as:

the quintessence of the western mining camp. It was the wild and bemused boom town, lawless and uncurried, where wealth abounded, violence dominated, whiskey flowed exchangeable the waters of the Truckee itself, and every ill-use had a he

George Moss paints a very different, if considerably less decisive and detailed, portrait of life in the Comstock's entertainment districts that suggests prostitutes might thoroughly have chosen their careers as considered trys. For example, he maintains that a "hurdy-gurdy dancer could make $40.00 a night counting tips from favorite customers." He also discusses the general feeling of taking a gamble that pervaded the Comstock, particularly in its early years and refers to the "not respectable" women who "plied the world's oldest profession profitably." Moss's discussion as a whole, however, tends to gloss over the seamier aspects of life on the Comstock, making his analysis, particularly as related to women's social and economic dynamics, suspect.

It is far more likely, as Goldman suggests, that most Comstock women involved in prostitution were "common prostitutes" who lived a relatively unpleasant life in Virginia City's vice districts.

The idea that women who worked extraneous the home were less respectable than other woman is an pellucid result of social ingrained notions of female inferiority. But, in the condition of the Comstock, the link between women's respectability and their economic activity is both(prenominal) magnified and arguably clarified. For example, a woman such as Mary Matthews, who engages in economic activity without actually stepping out of doors of her acceptable asexual domestic role, cannot, on the Comstock, aspire to the laid-backest levels of society. She does, however, live relatively respectable when compared to any other woman who engages in economic activity in which her sexuality plays a role.

These high status prostitutes were, more often than not, Caucasian. Many of the prostitutes were foreign born, and prostitutes from the coupled States and European countries were considered to be a better class of prostitute than all others. For example, Goldman notes that French and German prostitutes were particularly valued because of "a mystique of
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