Immoral Women: Prohibiting Vice in the Paper Valley

This paper explores Progressive Era understandings of vice and immorality, focusing on the relaxation practices and professional choices of working class women in the Fox River Valley, Wisconsin.  From the 1880s through the 1920s, as the paper industry flourished in the region, a local labor shortage intersected with a national phenomenon.  Women in the United States were moving in record numbers into the public sphere as wage earners, entering a world beyond the parameters of acceptable, let alone “respectable,” American womanhood.  Largely a transient workforce, valley women left their family farms to take jobs as rag pickers in paper mills and door molders in area woodenware companies, filling an insatiable demand for human bodies. Yet others stepped outside of the drudgery of factory labor, choosing more mobile work that brought them into the local nightlife scene.  What social consequences did these laboring women encounter?

Whether frequenting as patrons or employees, when women visited Fox Valley leisure establishments, they transgressed Victorian notions of “civility” and contributed to middle-class concerns about rising moral decay in local communities. Social reformers, employers, and government officials all sought to limit the presence of women in taverns, dancehalls, hotels, and resorts in Wisconsin by enacting the Linley Law and creating the Teasdale Vice Committee in 1913. Examining these efforts to eradicate sex work and “immoral” behavior in an effort to keep the valley “pure,” my project emphasizes the ways in which working women’s daily decisions influenced the trajectory of local, state, and national labor reform efforts.