Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul

Posted on | April 14, 2011 | Comments Off

Okay, Okay, Okay, I get the message. I’m not that good at writing book reviews. Actually, what I’ve come to realize is that the biggest problem is I didn’t really know what book reviews are for.

Apparently, people don’t read book reviews to decide whether or not their going to read the book. They read the reviews because they enjoy reading them, which I actually find to be a little confusing. I’ve also realized that I don’t particularly like reading book reviews.

So, why am I still writing them? The thing is that I do read a lot of books. I’m in grad school, so I’ve put away a few pages. Some of them are ridiculously ancient. I mean, The Scarlet Letter? Nobody’s really looking for a book review of that tome, unless they’re looking for a free essay.

So, once again I’m stuck. What do I do with this blog? The best I can come up with is the tag line. Do you want to read with me? I read a lot, so I can keep you . . . . uh . . . reading. That’s worth something, right?

So, anyways, Sin in the Second City, by Karen Abbott. This was the hot book to read last year, if you lived in Chicago. If you don’t live in Chicago, you might have missed it, which would have been a shame. Abbott gives us an in-depth history of Ada and Minna Everleigh, the owners of the Everleigh club, which gave us the term “I’m getting everleigh’d” (which was eventually shortened to “got laid.”

There’s something very subtle about this book. It’s rarely graphic, staying within the social mores of the time. Considering all of the different ministers and Chicago politicians, it can be a little tough to keep track of everyone in the book, but it didn’t keep me from enjoying the book just on the descriptions of different brothels and the lives of the ministers who fought them.

If you ever needed an unconventional model of a female entrepreneur, these woman are it. They decide on a business model (elite brothel) and then do their research by visiting cities until they find one with an appropriate market (Chicago.)

And if you don’t know much about Chicago history, you are in for a treat! Let’s just say, they don’t call us “The windy city” because the weather.

Sin in the Second City is a book of non-fiction, and it reads like a dry novel, which I think is about right for historical non-fiction. There’s plenty of information here, but it’s the interesting kind: Old Chicago’s corrupt aldermen, the ministers who whipped up rallies against the strangely named “White Slavery,” a movement that momentarily captured the nation’s imagination, and then faded out of fashion like the hammer pants.

“White slavery,” if you can believe it, is what we call human trafficking today. The problem back then was that no one could believe that prostitutes could be either a victims or people making an independent choice. This profession, on a whole, had to be one or another. This caused reformers to regularly embarrass themselves in front of Ada and Minna’s “butterflies,” (they only hired women who had decided to go into the profession as a personal choice,) and throw out real cases of coercion because they simply weren’t scary enough.

Ultimately, they win this round, but human trafficking is still a huge, and very scary problem. I think you could read this book to get a little bit more background on today’s situation.

But I think you’d probably enjoy more as a non-fiction yarn of times passed.

Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul