"Many Girls Just Like Her": Vice Districts, Gender Transgression, and the Fear of Female Modernity in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

A profoundly unsettled public perception of social order characterized America at the turn of the 20th century, in which the White middle class believed traditional American domesticity to be under attack due to tensions around race, class, and women's suffrage. Within this, the category of gender transgressions—any behavior threatening the sanctity and bounds of the traditional re-lationship between men and women—emerged as an outsized concern for legal and moral author-ities. Chicago's red-light districts, collectively known as "Levees," functioned as permissive spaces for all forms of vice. Examination of narratives of atypical gender performances and rela-tionships (spatialized within the vice district, especially as Chicago's First Ward Levee gained greater attention from the press) and the subsequent responses of media and governmental author-ity allows for analysis of the role cultural anxieties about changing gender roles played in attempts to create moral and spatial order within the city. Using documentation around arrests, trials, and reform missions, this project argues that the reciprocal relationship between vice behavior and vice districts that reformers established transformed "antisocial" behaviors into a culturally transmissi-ble spatial disease that necessitated punitive intervention. Gender transgressions, inasmuch as they threatened masculine hegemony, were treated under this framework as representative of a total breakdown of social order brought by unchecked modernity. The Levee(s), as more of a cultural idea of vice than a strictly geographically bounded district, served as an incubator for authorities' strategies of treatment for gender transgression and as a test case for cultural anxieties about urban disorganization.