Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth
Century
Mara L. Keire
Journal of Social History, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Summer, 1998), pp. 809-822.
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DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES: THE GENDERING OF
ADDICTION IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
By Mara L. Keire
Johns Hopkins University
As historian David Courtwright describes in Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in
America Before 1940, the typical addict of the late nineteenth century was an
older middle-class woman who first started taking drugs for medical reasons, while
the typical twentieth-century addict was a young man of the urban lower classes
who had originally experimented with drugs for pleasure.' This demographic
shift was dramatic, and Courtwright convincingly argues that the contrast between the ailing matron and the hustling junkie was significant in shaping our
national narcotics policy.2 But in the face of these undeniable demographic differences, imvortant cultural continuities remained. These cultural continuities
bridged ;he demographic shift and connected the medical addicts of the 1880s
and 1890s to the dope fiends of the 1910s and 1920s.
The most important cultural continuity was the perceived femininity of addiction. Starting in the 1870s, doctors injected women with morphine to numb
the pain of "female troubles," or to turn the willful hysteric into a manageable invalid. Up through the turn of the century, morphine was a literal prescription for
bourgeois femininity? Thus, by the 1890s, when the first drug epidemic peaked,
approximately two-thirds of the medical addicts were women, making women
medical addicts almost half of all addicts in the United States. As a result of this
thirtv-vear association of women with addiction, both users and observers saw
drug 'addiction as something feminine as late as ;he 1930s, long after men had
become the majority of users.4
To show how the femininitv of addiction connected the older medical addicts
to the nascent urban drug culture of the early twentieth century, this article will
focus on drug use among the sporting class in the urban red-light district. I have
two reasons for analyzing drugs in the vice district. First, the urban tenderloin
was the location of cities' disreputable leisure, and as such it was the site of
the new a d d i ~ t i o n Second,
.~
the new addicts either came from the sporting
class, which was comprised of prostitutes, pimps, thieves, gamblers, gangsters,
entertainers, fairies, and johns; or, they were youths who admired the sporting
men and women. In their efforts to join the ranks of the sporting class, the new
addicts emulated the sporting class's manners and mores-including their drug
use.6 By focusing on drug use by prostitutes, pimps, and the gay men known as
fairies. I will demonstrate how the continued cultural association of addiction
with femininity shaped the perception of addiction throughout society, and
influenced the decision of men to incorporate drug use into their rejection of
conventional male .
gender
roles.7
,
This article is divided into four parts, including a theoretical intermission.
The first section is a brief descri~tionof drugs in the vice district. In the second
section, I focus on opiate use by pimps and prostitutes, paying particular attention
w
810
journal of social history
summer 1998
to reformers' interpretations of the meaning of underworld addiction. After the
section on pimps and prostitutes, I halt the historical narrative in order to discuss
subcultures and subcultural style. When I re-engage the narrative, I conclude by
analyzing cocaine use among fairies as exemplary of how the nineteenth-century
feminization of drugs shaped twentieth-century male drug use.
Drugs in the District
Although never as prevalent as drinking, drug taking was an integral part of life
in the urban vice districts. A t the turn of the century, the members of the sporting
class who took drugs mostly smoked opium. They bought their opium at Chinese
restaurants, laundries, and opium dens, but the drug was also readily available in
brothels.* Indeed, a 1905 study on prostitution found it just as noteworthy when
opium was absent as when it was present.9 By the early teens, both the urban vice
districts, and drug use within them, had become more diverse. No longer just
saloons, parlor houses, and cribs, the vice districts included dance halls, pool
rooms, cabarets, gambling dens, movie theaters, and cigar shops. Concurrent
with this diversification of services, there was a diversification in drug use. Antivice investigators were as likely to hear about people using morphine, heroin,
and cocaine as smoking opium. While brothels and Chinese establishments
continued as mainstays to the drug trade, saloons, dance halls, and disreputable
pharmacies became increasingly important sites ofsupply.10These circumstances
changed dramatically during World War I, when the war fervor enabled reformers
to close the red-light districts and Federal officials to strengthen the enforcement
of narcotics laws.ll
As drug use diversified between 1910 and 1920, different cliques within the
sporting world distinguished themselves through the types of drugs they used.
As the price of opium rose, opium smoking, once so ubiquitous, became associated with the upper echelons of the sporting world-actors and actresses,
high-rolling gamblers, and wealthy slummers.'2 Prostitutes and their pimps continued to consume opiates, although it became more likely that they were taking
cheaper drugs like morphine than that they were smoking opium.13 Meanwhile,
reformers observed with growing alarm the gangs of boys who were adding cocaine and heroin use to their delinquent activities.14 It was in the face of these
continuities-opium smoking by prostitutes, gamblers, and entertainers-and
changes-heroin and cocaine use within the growing youth culture-that members of the sporting class and outside observers interpreted the new patterns of
drug use. They did so by drawing on, but altering, an older cultural reference:
the femininity of drug use.
Prostitutes and Pimps
With prostitutes, the association of addiction with women was literal and
direct. Prostitutes were women and prostitutes took drugs.15 In his 1880 study of
Chicago opiate addicts, Charles W. Earle observed that nearly three quarters of
the addicts were women, and that fully a third of these women were prostitutes.16
Thus the cultural continuity in the early twentieth century was twofold. Prosti-
DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES
tutes had taken drugs in the earlier period and women had taken drugs for medical
reasons. Like nineteenth-century matrons, prostitutes took drugs to treat a whole
range of problems euphemistically called "female troubles." These ailments included dysmenorrhea, injuries from childbearing, ovarian cysts, uterine cancer,
and venereal diseases.17 The Chicago Vice Commissioners believed that a high
percentage of prostitutes became addicts, either as a result of self-medication
or a doctor's prescription, because their work increased their vulnerability to
venereal diseases.18
In addition to the medical explanation, there was a moral explanation for
prostitutes' addiction that also drew on "common sense" assumptions about
women's nature. Like most of their contemporaries, anti-vice reformers believed
that women were inherently modest and sexually unaggressive.19 For women
to act so contrarv to their nature-to
submit to sex with countless strangerssomething must have undermined their essential purity. Anti-vice reformers
found the cause in drugs, alcohol, and the imperatives of addiction-but not
always the culprits. Many reformers asserted that prostitutes had had no choice
in either their addiction or their work: "white slavers" used intoxicants to trick
young women into prostitution, and then they forced their prostitutes to continue drinking or taking drugs so that they would not resist their sexual servitude.
Anti-vice reformers interpreted prostitutes' dependence on drugs and alcohol
as proof that prostitutes found their work distasteful. They believed that prostitutes' addiction was a sign of the extremes to which the agents of vice had to go
to overcome women's innate moral it^.^'
While the medical and moral expianations had a logical coherence, prostitutes' behavior challenged reformers' image of them as passive victims. The occasional report of a prostitute helpless within a brothel, stupefied by "a deadly drug,"
and covered with abscesses, reinforced reformers' conception of the world.21
More often than not, however, the stories from the street called into question
the morality tales that reformers sought to tell. For example, in a 1908 report to
the United States delegation of the International Opium Convention, a "newspaper detective" described the daily routine of a Baltimore streetwalker. She
solicited until two or three in the morning, at which time she took her earnings,
bought the night's supply of opium, returned home to her pimp, and together
they smoked for the next few hours. She then slept until six or seven in the
evening, took a shot of morphine, and went back out on the street to earn more
have more o ~ i u mThis
. ~ ~storv was shockmoney so that she and her ~
m ~
. i. could
ing in part because of its role inversion-it was the woman who was leaving the
house, earning the money, and providing for the man. Yet, despite the role inversion, this story had a domestic inevitability that the detective did not find
as horrifying as what a different investigator witnessed six years later in New
York City. In a saloon at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, an
investigator watched two women crush tablets of heroin and snort them with
no self-consciousnessabout the other Datrons. That these women took drues
" in
a public place, not a private room, was part of what the investigator found so
repugnant.23 The difference between the private opium smoking in 1908 and
the public heroin consumption in 1914 challenged reformers' explanations of
prostitutes' addiction. The more active and public role that prostitutes displayed
812
journal of social history
summer 1998
in acquiring and taking their drugs in the 1910s called the prostitutes' assumed
powerlessness into question.
Evidence that prostitutes introduced young men to drugs was even more damaging to their image as passive victims than the agency they exhibited in acquiring their drugs. One of the most scandalous discoveries made by the Chicago
Vice Commissioners was that messenger boys working in the Levee, Chicago's
red-light district, were learning drug use from prostitutes.24The messenger boys'
stories probably resembled the one that an addict told sociologist Bingham Dai
in the early 1930s. In his youth, the man had worked as a messenger boy in
Butte. Montana's restricted district. There he attracted the attention of several
prosti;utes who were looking for pimps. At first he was bashful, but eventually
the messenger boy raised his courage to talk to one of them. After confirming
with a fellow messenger that the prostitute was a good money-maker, he agreed
to be her pimp, and started living with her. In the course of their relationship,
she slept with him, gave him money, and taught him to smoke opium.z5 It was
stories like these that led researchers to sum up the causes of the new addicts'
habits with ~hraseslike "bad associates" and "tenderloin life."26
While the investigative reports gradually undermined the progressive-era portrayal of prostitutes, urban reformers generally remained sympathetic to prostitutes, even addicted prostitutes, but reviled their pimps. Reports of the pimps'
addiction only increased this antipathy. With pimps and prostitutes alike, their
drug use was a sign of how far they had fallen, but for prostitutes it reinforced
a victimization that was consistent with gender roles in mainstream societv.
Women were supposed to be helpless, ailing, and even addicted-after all, it
is likely that some reformers had older female relatives who were themselves
addicts.27The pimps' addiction, however, was an affront to American masculinity, for as Surgeon General H. S. Cumming asserted in 1925, "opium makes a
man effeminate."28
If the dominant nineteenth-century image of a female addict was the ailing
middle-class matron, the stereotyped male addict of that period was the pigtailed Chinese coolie or perhaps an aesthete inspired by Thomas De Quincey
or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Either image implied an orientalized decadence at
odds with middle-classm a s c ~ l i n i t vIn
. ~the
~ earlv twentieth centurv.
,. these images
translated into a feminization of male addicts, including pimps. Exhibiting their
biases about the nature of men and addicts, contemporary commentators did not
believe that boys became addicts because they aspired to be pimps, but rather
that they became pimps because drug use made them unfit for any kind of active
work. According-to ~.u b l i chealth official Lawrence Kolb. "the ultimate effect [of
opiates] is to create a state of idleness and dependency which naturally enhances
the desire to live at the emense of others and bv anti-social means."30 In other
words, addiction made men less manly.
The pimp's addiction represented just one aspect of his deviation from mainstream male gender roles. Pimps lived off the earnings of "immoral womenn-and
the more money that their prostitutes earned, the better they could dress, the
more drinks they could buy for their fellows, and the higher the stakes at which
they could gamble.31The flamboyance of the pimp's life had a direct correlation
with how much money his prostitutes were earning. As such, the pimp's relaL,
L,
DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES
813
tionship to prostitutes resembled an inversion of the bourgeois gender relations
that Thorstein Veblen de~cribed.~'
Women's work supported men's conspicuous
consumption. Thus, the pimp did not just deviate from the bourgeois masculine
ideal: he lived its inverse.
Nevertheless, as historian Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us in her 1975 essay, "Women on Top," inversions are rarely simple and they "u&rmine as well
as reinforce" hierarchies of power.33 The pimp threatened conventional gender roles because he offered a masculine model that linked male domination
to supposedly feminine patterns of consumption and idleness. The pimp inverted middle-class conventions, but he was not an invert in the emerging
medical sense of the term-he was a heterosexual male. The pimp retained his
masculinity because he retained his power over women. Although the pimp
transgressed bourgeois gender roles, his gender relations were consistent with
patriarchal ideals: the domination of women was at the foundation of the pimp's
identity?4 Thus, even though middle-class reformers portrayed the pimp as a
feminized villian, within the sporting class, pimps were the height of suave
masculinity.
Middle-classreformers recognized this conundrum and feared that pimps provided a viable, although perverse, alternative for working-class youths. They
believed that young men in the ghetto would eschew the bourgeois values of
hard work and restraint and embrace the sporting class's leisure and free-spending
c~nviviality.~'Some observers, including sociologist Frederic M. Thrasher,
warned that the increasing drug use among boys in urban angs was an indication that they were choosing to emulate the sporting class3 Like the messenger
boy in Butte, Montana, urban youths were t ing drugs because they were "part
and parcel of the r6le of a successful pimp.''
By the early 1920s, the majority
of new drug users were urban youths who imitated the lifestyle of the sporting
class. These young men took drugs despite their long-standing association with
femininity, because ironically that association was an integral part of the pimp's
heightened masculinity.38
Theoretical Intermission
Up to this point, I have interpreted the feminity of drug use from the perspective of middle-class observers. I will now switch perspectives and address how
a particular group within the sporting class-fairies-used
cocaine as a way to
signal their social and sexual identity. In order to do so, I must discuss at greater
length subcultures and the transmission of cultural style.39
The sporting class was a distinct urban subculture. Although contemporaries
defined the people associated with the urban vice district as a separate class,
values and style, not income or family, defined membership. The elements that
set the sporting class apart from respectable society were not only how they
spent their time, but also their clothing and public presentation. The members
of the sporting class, like those of other subcultures, adopted distinctive clothes
and body language in order to announce their participation in that subculture.
These stylistic elements were their ~i~nifiers.~'
Signifiers were not only physical
objects-for example, a prostitute's ankle-flashing short skirt-they were also
814
journal of social history
summer 1998
cultural messages: at the turn of the century, a short skirt equaled sexual availability. Thus a pimp's flashy clothing and jewelry were signifiers of his group
identity, his wealth, the quality of his prostitutes, and his rejection of the work
ethic of respectable men.
The sporting class, however, also had distinct divisions. The most notable
distinction was between those who worked in the district and those who played
in it. For prostitutes, their revealing dress and cosmetics were literal advertisements of who they were and what they were selling. Thus the adoption of the
prostitute's distinctive trademarks of short skirts, cigarettes, a slow saunter, and
bold eye contact, were "professional" signifiers. Other members in the sporting
class-the consumers-had choices in their identification. The gang members,
fairies, and charity girls (sexually-active young women who were not prostitutes) adopted certain types of dress and gestures to signal what were usually
leisure-time identities41 This distinction is crucial. Although the sporting class
consisted of both consumers and producers, these two groups had vastly different
reasons for adopting their cultural signifiers. Producers used signifiers to make
their living, consumers used them to express their identity.
The people who set the tone and offered the cultural models within the
tenderloin were the madams, pimps, and prostitutes-the people who worked
in the district. The prostitutes provided, while pimps and madams enabled, the
sexual commerce that was the foundation upon which all other activities in the
district were built. As a result of their centrality, the successful madams, pimps,
and prostitutes had the highest status within the district and established the
cultural styles. Charity girls, fairies, and other groups who were socializing in
the district by choice rather than financial necessity looked up to the sportingclass elite. In forming their own group identities, gang members, fairies, and
charity girls often appropriated elements of the sporting elite's style as signifiers
of their own subcultural identity.42Fairies, for example, borrowed heavily from
the "professional" signifiersof prostitutes to create their leisure-time identitiessignifiers they later carried beyond the district into the general culture.
Fairies
The keynote of fairies' subcultural identity was their effeminacy. In Gay New
York, historian George Chauncey has ably described fairies and their subcultural
style. He argues that fairies, who socialized in the urban tenderloin and the most
transgressivecommercial dance halls, self-consciouslyrejected masculine gender
roles by selectively adopting "feminine" signifiers. As he observes, "In the right
context, appropriating even a single feminine---or at least unconventionalstyle or article of clothing might signify a man's identity as a fairy." These cultural cues could be suede shoes or a red tie, plucked eyebrows or bleached hair,
and most stereotypically an exaggerated walk, a limp wrist, or arms akimbo.43
Cocaine was another signifier that some fairies adopted to distinguish themselves from conventional society. These fairies chose cocaine because, like their
contemporaries, they associated drug use with femininity.
Fairies took prostitutes as their model of femininity. Chauncey argues that
fairies purposely adopted prostitute's style and slang. A n important element of
prostitutes' style was drug use, which fairies copied as well. New York Police
DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES
815
Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham described this cultural transmission when
he wrote to public health reformer Hamilton Wright that,
the classes of the community most addicted to the habitual use of cocaine are
the parisites [sic] who live on the earnings of prostitutes, prostitutes of the lowest
order, and young degenerates who acquire the habit at an early age through their
connection with prostitutes and parisites [sic].44
While fairies may have taken prostitutes as their feminine model, these "degenerates" reinterpreted that femininity in the process of making it their own. Like
all cultural transfers, there was an alteration in the vrocess. Prostitutes used a
range of drugs, but they were best known as opiate adhicts. Fairies, on the other
hand, were most closely associated with cocaine.
There are two possible explanations for why fairies incorporated cocaine,
instead of the opiates, into their subcultural style. The first is functional, cocaine
provided an excuse for "trade," conventionally masculine men who were sexually
interested in fairies, to approach fairies. As an anti-drug reformer noted, "the
practice of sniffing also leads to more social contagion, since the offer of a pinch
of cocaine may be as simple a gesture as to offer a cigarette." In saloons and dance
halls, cocaine functioned in much the same way as cigarettes did when men were
picking up each 0ther.4~Other drugs, which involved more paraphernalia, could
not function in this simple fashi0n.4~The second reason for fairies' choice of
cocaine was its physical effects. Prostitutes may have taken opiates to anesthetize
themselves to their work, but fairies' identities were tied to their leisure, not to
their work. One of the keynotes of their leisure identity was a bright flamboyance
which suggests why fairies favored cocaine over the opiates. Cocaine could
~roducea brittle effervescence that made it more attractive to fairies than the
iffects of opiates, which suggested a laid-back "hipness" inconsistent with fairies'
cultural style!' These functional and physical explanations of fairies' cocaine use
explain why fairieschose cocaine over other drugs, but not why they incorporated
drug use into their cultural style. Fairies made cocaine part of their subculture
because it was a feminine signifier.
One of the best examples of the association of a fairy with cocaine use was
in the storv of Daisv, a regular at Martin's Saloon in Brooklvn. At Martin's,
Daisy flirted with the patrois, borrowed a powder puff from investigator ~ a t a l i e
Sonnichsen, sang a dirty song, and performed a dance imitating sodomy with
Elsie, another fairy. In order to confirm the disreputable goings-on, the general
secretary of the Committee of Fourteen, an anti-vice association, sent out a male
investigator, S. M. Auerbach, to determine whether the fairies were soliciting.
When Auerbach approached Daisy, he began the conversation by asking Daisy
whether he was a "cocaine fiend," and if he had any "coc" to spare. Although
Daisv was all out. he readilv admitted that he was a "fiend." While Auerbach
did not use this exchange as the first step to setting up a date, Daisy let Natalie
know that he "had designs on Mr.
Daisy's story illustrates the subcultural
style that fairies adopted. Daisy signaled that he was a fairy by using feminine
gestures such as borrowing Natalie Sonnichsen's powder puff. Daisy's style was
not, however, a demure femininity-his outrageous antics were more playful
versions of prostitutes' public sexuality. Moreover, Daisy's frenetic sociability
suggested to Auerbach that Daisy was a "cocaine fiend which gave Auerbach,
816
journal of social history
summer 1998
who was quintessentially "trade," an excuse to approach Daisy. In other words,
for Daisy, cocaine was one of a range of feminine signifiers that he adopted in
order to communicate his identity as a fairy.49
Fairies' adoption of cocaine as a signifier meant that cocaine eventually became a general gay signifier, and with that shift the association of drugs and
femininity became increasingly tenuous. By the 1920s, the association of drugs
with homosexuality had spread beyond the urban vice district. When the Hollywood Scandals of the early twenties revealed that movie stars were using drugs,
the media began speculating about the sexual orientation of leading actors and
director^.^' It was the association of drugs with fairies that informed John Dos
Passos' characterization of Tony Garrido in The Big Money, the final book of
his U.S.A. trilogy. Tony was an attractive Cuban expatriate, but it was his addiction as much as his "mincing walk that confirmed his homosexuality to his
wife Margo D o ~ l i n Whether
~ . ~ ~ they were playing off of these associations or
informing them, members of wealthy gay artistic circles continued using cocaine
into the 1 9 3 0 s . ~ ~
Although the connection between drug use and homosexuality became increasingly tenuous after World War 11, drugs continued to appeal to people disaffected with conventional society, including gay men like William Burroughs
and Allen Ginsberg. Even though the hustling junkie now seems more masculine than feminine, William Burroughs was "queer," and it was through his
infamous addiction. as well as his sexual b reference. that he communicated his
rejection of mainstream masculinity.53The Beats were a long way from the ailing matrons of the nineteenth century, but the fairy and the pimp-alternative
masculine models from the progressive-era vice districts-provide the genealogical link that spans the seemingly unbridgeable demographic difference between
nineteenth- and twentieth-century addicts.
Conclusion
Since the 1970s, historians have argued that the demographic differences between the ailing matrons of the late nineteenth century and the dope fiends of
the early twentieth century powerfully influenced Federal enactment of antidrug laws. Historians have not, however, recognized how the femininity of
addiction-the cultural continuity that connected the old and new addictsshaped the early enforcement of narcotics laws. The perception in the 1920s
that addicts were unmanly-weak, untrustworthy, and constitutionally flawedinformed how agents enforced, judges interpreted, and the public supported
narcotics laws as ad hoc responses hardened into long-term Federal policy.
The "deviant" gendering of drug addicts tipped the balance from uneasy toleration to unquestioned prohibition. David Musto has argued that the passage of
narcotics laws and their stringent enforcement required a reviled "other" in order
to create an anti-drug consensus.54These "others" have included the "cocainecrazed" Southern black man at the turn of the century, the marijuana-smoking
Mexican migrant of the late 1930s, and, most recently, the pregnant crack whore.
In each of these cases, however, race and class alone were not enough to create
public consensus-it was their alternative, and often threatening, sexual roles
that decisively alienated drug users from the mainstream. This process of "other-
DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES
ing" was necessarily multivalenced, and the allegations of deviant sexuality and
the transgression of conventional gender roles critically reinforced other, more
obvious, racial and class antipathies toward drug users.
Ironically, this process of "othering" often strengthened the cultural appeal of
drug use. Media representation made casual drug use within subcultures an emblematic signifier of those cultures. Criminal prosecution turned drug users into
romantic outlaws, while labeling simplified complicated subcultural rituals into
easily imitated affectations. As a result, people who felt disaffected with conventional society could express their alienation by taking drugs and-however
tenuous their connection-signal their affinity for the reviled others. Thus, the
association of drugs with transgressive subcultures has meant that although the
particular cultural connotations have changed, the overriding reason for drug
experimentation in the twentieth century has been rebellion against the restrictions of conventional society. The gendering of addiction at the turn of the
century continues to haunt reform efforts, for the recurring tension between
othering and embracing the other remains the central conundrum of America's
ongoinging "war on drugs."
Department of History
Baltimore, M D 2 12 18
ENDNOTES
The research for this paper was artially funded by a grant-in-aid from the American
Institute of Pharmacy History anBa travel fellowship to the Rockefeller Archive Center.
1would like to thank my advisors Ronald G. Walters, Dorothy Ross, and David Musto
for their support. I owe scholarly debts to David Courtwright, Nadja Durbach, Chris
McKenna, Laura Street, Cheryl Warsh, and the anonymous reviewers. I presented earlier
versions of this paper at the Conference on Historical Pers ectives on the Use and
Abuse of Illicit Drugs in the United States held at the Yale ~ c K mof
l Medicine and the
Conference on Historical Perspectives on Alcohol and Drug Use in American Society,
180C-1997 at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 1would like to thank both the
conference organizers and participants for their insights and their encouragement.
1. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 1-4.
2.
David Courtwright, Herman Joseph, and Don Des Jarlais,Addicts Who Survived: An
Oral History of Narcotic Use in America, 1923-1965 (Knoxville,Tenn., 1989), 3-5.
3. For a discussion of bourgeois feminine ideals, hysteria, and the ailments of women's
reproductive system, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg,"Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of
Femininity in Nineteenth-Century America," and "The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles
and Role Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of
Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 182-2 16. Smith-Rosenberg beautifully
describes nineteenth-century doctors' understanding of female health and their resulting
advice, but she does not examine the therapeutic measures that doctors adopted to treat
their patients. On doctors's use of o iates to treat hysteria and "female troubles," see
Opium, Morphine, Chloral and Hashisch Habits
H. H. Kane, Drugs That Enslave:
(Philadelphia, 1881; reprint, New York, 1981), 18, 25; Charles E. Terry and Mildred
Pellens, eds., The Opium Problem (New York, 1928), 96-100; David T. Courtwright,
"The Female Opiate Addict in Nineteenth-Century America," Essay in Arts and Sciences
10 (1982): 163-4; H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Soclal History, 1800-1980
TL
818
journal of social history
summer 1998
(Syracuse, 1981), 39-40. For the congruence between addiction and gender roles for
middle-class women, compare Smith-Rosenberg's descriptions with Kane, h g s That
Enslave, 49; T. D. Crothers, Mor~hinismand Narcornaniasfrom Other Drugs: Their Etiology,
Treatment, and Medicolgeal Relations (Philadelphia, 1902; reprint, New York, 1981), 104;
and E E. Oliver, "The Use and Abuse of Opium," Massachussett State Board of Health,
Third Annual Report (Boston, 1872), 162-1 77 in Yesterday's U c t s : American Society and
Drug Abwe, 1865-1 920, ed. H. Wayne Morgan (Norman, Okla., 1974), 49.
4. David Courtwright argues that during the "first wave" of American drug use, 18701940, the peak of opiate addiction was in the mid-1890s. At that point, he estimates that
in the United States there could have been no more than 313,000 addicts or 4.59 per
thousand. Within the addict population, almost half were women medical addicts from
the middle class. After the effective prohibition of narcotics in the late 1910s, and the
creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the available numbers become so politically
loaded and statistically unreliable, that Courtwright, even after an exhaustive search,
was not able to produce e uivalent numbers for the later period. He does posit, however,
that in 1920 there couldRave been no more than 210,WO addicts, or approximately 2
addicts per thousand. Moreover, the number of addicts kept declining throu h World
War 11. From contemporary observations, it is clear that from 1900 onwards, t!ere were
progressively fewer medical addicts and that there were proportionally more recreational
addicts-most of whom were young men from the city. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 28,
36,34, 113-115.
5. John Phillips, "Prevalence of the Heroin Habit: Especially the Use of the Drug
by 'Snuffing,'" Journal of the American Medical Association 59 (1912): 2147; Clifford B.
Farr, "The Relative Frequency of the Morphine and Heroine Habits: Based Upon Some
Observations at the PhiladelphiaGeneral Hospital," New Y o r k M e cJournal 101 (1915):
893; Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 90, 192 n22; Morgan, Drugs in America, 57,91.
6. Richard Dewey to Hamilton Wright, 5 November 1908, file: "U.S. Data: Rhode
Island to Wyoming," box 2, entry 47, Record Group 43, National Archives at College
Park, Maryland (hereafter, NARG followed by the record group number); Joseph McIver
and George E. Price, "Drug Addiction: Analysis of One Hundred and Forty-Seven Cases
at the Philadelphia General Hospital," Journal of the American Medical Association 66
(1916): 477; L. L. Stanley, "Mo hinism and Crime," Journal of the American Institute of
Criminal Law and Criminology 8 8 9 1 8 ) : 749-56 in Yeswdayl Addzcts, 83.
7. I use the term "fairies" deliberately. Historian George Chauncey has convincingly
argued that in the early decades of this century, people did not see sexuality as a binary
heterosexual/homosexual split. Instead, he argues, it was not just sexual preference, but
also style that determined sexual labels. Fairies-a self-description-were flamboyantly
effeminate men who took the "woman's role." There was also a class dimension to this
category. Fairies were usually from the working class, while "queers," who were less overt
in their sexual display, were from the middle class. See George Chauncey, Gay New York:
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York,
1994), 12-23.
8. "Prostitution in Precinct XV," [1901], 2, Committee of Fifteen, Rare Books and
Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library; "Several Raids Made on 'Joints' Last
Night," New York News, 17 March 1901, Newspaper Clippings, Committee of Fifteen;
"Quan Yick Nam," 19 February 1901, Committee of Fifteen; "Arthur E. Wilson States,"
1 March 1901, Committee of Fifteen.
9.
"Parlor Houses," file 6.8, box 91, Lillian Wald Papers, Columbia University.
10. New Orleans Ifem, 9 August 1907, 25 July 1914, 13 November 1Y15,23 December
1910, and 22 January 1915.
DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES
11. On the closing of the red-light districts as a wartime measure, see Allan M. Brandt,
No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880,
With a New Chabter on AIDS (New York. 1987). 70-77. On how concerns about war
preparedness inflienced the moie stringent incedietation of the Harrison Act, see David
E Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, Expanded Edition (New York,
1987), 135,328 n35.
12. Frank A. McGuire and Perry M. Lichtenstein, "The Drug Habit," Medical Record
90 (1916): 185; Mclver and Price, "Drug Addiction," 478; Courtwright, Dark Paradise,
83-84.
I
13. [Vice Commission of Newark, New Jersey], Report on the Socud Ewil Cotufttions o
Newark, New Jersey to the People of Newark (n.p., [1914]), 126-30; Courtwright, Dar
Paradise, 2.
14. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York, 1909; reprint,
Urbana, 1972), 63-67; Pearce Bailey, "The Heroin Habit," The New Republic 6 (1916):
3 14-16 in Yesterday f Addicts, 172.
15. Male prostitution was a barely recognized phenomenon during the Progressive era.
16. Charles W. Earle, "The Opium Habit: A Statistical and Clinical Lecture," Chicago
Medical Redew 2 (1880): 442-46 in Yesterday's Addicts, 53. In Earle's sample of 235 addicts,
169 were women. Earle wrote that a third of these women were prostitutes, which would
mean that a proximately 56 women were addicts-making prostitutes approximately a
quarter of alfdrug users in the sample.
17. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 52.
18. Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions, with Recommendations (Chicago, 1911), 84-87, 289. See also Ruth Rosen, "Introduction" in The Maimie Papers, ed. by Ruth Rosen and Sue Davidson (Old Westbury,
1977), xiv, xli n5. Interestingly, at the municipal maintenance clinic in Shreveport,
Louisiana, which was open from 1919 to 1923, the most frequently given explanation
for opiate addiction was venereal disease. Of the 449 patients, 28.5 percent (121 men,
8 women) said they had started taking opiates because of "venereal disease" or "gonnorrhea." When "blood poisoning" and "french fever," both of which were euphemisms
for sexually transmitted diseases, are added to the tally the percentage increases to 30.0
percent (127 men, 8 women), History Sheets, Narcotics Division, Louisiana State Board
of Health, Willis Butler Papers, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Noel
Memorial Library, Louisiana State University in Shreveport.
19. On nineteenth-century feminine ideals, see Nancy E Cott, "Passionlessness: An
Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology," Signs 4 (1978): 219-236 in Women and
Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt (Madison, 1984), 57-69; Carroll SmithRosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, "The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views
of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of American History
60 (1973): 332-356 in Women and Health, 12-27; and Ronald G. Walters, ed., Primers
for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Englewood Cliffs, 1974), 6.
20. The Socd Evil in Chicago, 285; Sara Graham-Mulhall, "Experiences in Narcotic
Drug Control in the State of New York," New York Medical Journal 113 (1921): 106-1 1
in Yesterday's Addicts, 211; The Vice Commission of Philadelphia, A Report on Existing
Conditions with Recommendations to the Honorable Rudol h Blankenburg, Mayor of Philadelphia (n.p., 1913), 34; George J. Kneeland. Commercia&ed Prostitution in New York City
(New York, 1917; re rint Montclair, N.J., 1969), 15-16. This explanation also had a
racist version in whici authors asserted that opium smoking was the only way that white
prostitutes could endure having sex with Chinese men; for a typical example, see I. L.
820
journal of social history
summer 1998
Nascher, The Wretches of Pmertyville: A Sociological Study of the B o w q (Chicago, 1909),
134.
2 1. Christina Kuppin er, "Report for May, To the Officers and Directors of the Midnight
Mission,.' May 1911, fipe 2, box 5, Ernest Bell Papers, Chicago Historical Society.
22. "Baltimore Notes," 17 July 1908, file: "Miscellaneous Correspondence," box 2, entry 48, NARG 43; "Philadelphia Notes," 20-21 July 1908, 2, 5-6, file: "Miscellaneous
Correspondence," box 2, entry 48, NARG 43.
23. "135 Fourth Avenue-Saloon Hangout-Drugs," box 28, Committee of Fourteen
Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. See also "3 17
West 41st Street-Black and Tan Saloon-Drugs," box 28, Committee of Fourteen.
24. The S o d Evil in Chicago, 242-244. Although he did not state whether they were
messenger boys, L. L. Stanley found in a study of 100 prisoners in San Quentin that 15 had
learned drug use fromprostitutes; Stanley, "Morphinismand Crime," in Yesterday's Addicts,
80-83. This pattern continued into the 1940s; see Teddy's interview in Courtwright et
al., Addicts Who Survived, 5 1.
25. Bingham Dai, Opium Addiction in Chicago, (1937; reprint, Montclair, N.J., 1970),
144-148. See also L. L. Stanley, "Morphinism and Crime," in Yesterday's Addicts, 85.
26. S. Dana Hubbard, "The New York City Narcotic Clinic and Differing Points of
View on Narcotic Addiction," New York City Department of Health, Monthly Bulletin 10
( 1920) in The Opium Problem, 123-1 24; "The First Annual Summary of the Clinical Work
on Opium Addiction in Philadelphia General Hospital for the Philadelphia Committee
by the Clinical Staff," Part I1 (1926), 6-7, file 552, box 1, sub-series 1, series IV, Bureau
of Social Hygiene Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center, Tarrytown, New York.
27. Ann Douglas Wood, "'The Fashionable Disease': Women's Complaints and Their
Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America," The Joumal of Interdisciplinary History 4
(1973): 25-52 in Women and Health, 227; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For
Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, 1978), 23,92-96,
103; Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fanrasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture
(New York, 1985),25-37. Harriet Beecher Stowe's daughter Georgiana is an example of
an addict within a reform family; Courtwright, "The Female Opiate Addict," 163-164.
28. H. S. Cumming, "Control of Drug Addiction Mainly a Police Problem," The American City Magazine (November 1925), file 126, box 3, sub-series 1, series 111, Bureau of
Social Hygiene; John S. Haller, Jr. and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sermality in
Victorian America (Carbondale, IL., 1974), 302. One of the physical effects of opiate addiction is male impotence. Knowledge of this side effect may be one reason that people
associated addiction with effeminacy; see Kane, Drugs That Enslave, 45; W. M. Kraus,
"An Analysis of the Action of Morphine upon the Vegetative Nervous System of Man,"
Iournal of Nervous and M e n d Diseuses 48 (1918 ) in The Opium Probkm, 46 1; and W. Hale
White, Materia Medica, Pharmacy, Pharmacology and Therapeutics (1924) in The Opium
Problem, 462; Morgan, Drugs in America, 189 n56.
29. Morgan, Drugs in America, 35-37, 54-55. O n turn-of-the-century conceptions of
manliness and fears about the "feminized male," see E. Anthony Rotundo, "Roots of
Change: The Women Without and the Woman Within," in American Manhood: Transformations inMusculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993), 247-283.
30. Clifford G. Roe and Clare Teal Wiseman, The Prosecutor: A Four-Act Drama (n.p.,
1914), 33-34; W. A. Bloedom, "Studies of Drug Addicts," U.S. Naval Medical Bulletin
11 (1917) in The Opium Problem, 494; Lawrence Kolb, "Drug Addiction in Its Relation
to Crime," M e n d Hygiene 9 (1925): 75.
DOPE FIENDS AND DEGENERATES
3 1. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1 918 (Baltimore,
1982), 109.
32. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, with an introduction by Robert
Lekachman (1899; reprint, New York, 1979), 80-82.
33. Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modem
France (Stanford, 1975), 131. Emphasis in original.
34. In turn-of-the-century medical literature, "invert" was the term for gay men who
transgressed gender boundaries and were more like women than men; see John D'Emilio
and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of S e d t y in America (New York,
19881, 226; Chauncey, Gay New York, 48-49.
35. "The White Slavery Films: A Review," The Outlook 106 (1914): 345-50; James
Bronson Reynolds to Frederick H. Whitin, 24 October 1914, box 3, Committee of Fourteen. Bruce Raeburn of the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University
has observed that jazz great Jelly Roll Morton's boast that he was a pimp exemplifies the
pimp's prestige in the early twentieth century.
36. Frederic M. Thrasher, "Drug Addiction and Adolescent Behavior (Study Completed
July 5, 1929)" (typescript), 15,28, file 128, box 3, sub-series 1, series 111, Bureau of Social
Hygiene. Although John Devon was not a pimp, the things that Leroy Street admired
about him-his leisure, his dress, and his worldliness-were the kinds of things that urban
youths admired in pimps. It was a result of this type of hero worship the Leroy Street and
others picked up their idols' drug habits; Leroy Street in collaboration with David Loth,
I Was a Drug Addict (New York, 1953), 11-13.
3 7. Dai, Opium Addiction in C h g o , 149.
38. McIver and Price, "Drug Addiction," 477; C. Edouard Sandoz, "Report on MorCriminology, and Police
phinism to the Municipal Court Boston," journal ofcriminal h,
Science 13 (1922): 24,36; "The First Annual Summary of the Clinical Work on Opium
Addiction in Philadelphia General Hospital for the Philadelphia Committee by the
Clinical Staff," Part 11, (1926), 3, file 552, box 1, sub-series 1, series IV, Bureau of Social
Hygiene; Terry and Pellens, eds., The Opium Problem, 474. The argument can be made
that pimps were the antecedents for hi ster jazz musicians; Jill Jonnes, "'The Sky Is High
: History of America's Romance With
and So Am 1,' " in Hep-Cats, Narcs, a d p i p e ~ r e a m sA
Illegal Drugs (New York, 1996), 119-140. Howard Becker's description of dance musicians
and marijuana smoking also shows the clear continuities between drug use and alternate
masculine models; Howard S. Becker, Outstders: S&s in the Sociology of Deviance (New
York, 1963).
39. For an excellent discussion of subcultures and group identity, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979). See also Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton,
eds., The Subcultures Reader (London, 1997).
40. For a further explanation of signifiers, see "Myth Today," in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paris, 1957; reprint, New York, 1972), 109-159.
41. Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, 2d rev. ed.
(Chicago, 1927), 68-69, 79; Chauncey, Gay New York, 44, 51-56; Kathy Piess, Cheap
Amwements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Centusy New York (Philadelphia,
1986), 5 7 , 6 2 4 7 .
42. Thrasher, The Gang, 252, 255-257, 262; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 66.
43. George Chauncey, Gay New York, 51-55, quotation on page 5 1.
822
journal of social history
summer 1998
44. Chauncey, Gay New York, 60-61,69, 286; Theo. A. Bingham to Hamilton Wright,
23 June 1909, file: "United States Data, New York," box 1, entry 47, NARG 43. See
also the story of a fairy who started taking morphine on the advice of prostitutes in Dai,
Opium Addiction in Chica o 163. Ir is .important to note that although "degenerate" had
a variety of meanings in t e medlcal literature, in common parlance it generally denoted
homosexuality;Charles Johnston, alias Hattie Ross, to Robert S. Bickerd, 29 July 1910,
box 1, Committee of Fourteen.
81
45. The quotation is from page 9 of an unidentified report in file 51, box 7, Bureau
of Social Hygiene, Rockefeller Boards, Record Grou 2, Rockefeller Family Archives,
Rockefeller Archive Center; Chauncey, Gay New
64, 188. See also, The S o d Evil
in Chicago, 290.
YOTI,
46. Courtwright et al., Addicts Who Survived, 97.
47. The term "hip" was originally associated with opium smoking which occurred "on
the hip;" see Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, 125.
48. "Martin's Saloon. Op site Jackson Avenue Park," 1 August 1912; "Martin's Saloon," 8 August 1912; anC!%4artin1sSaloon. Jackson Avenue," 14 August 1912, box
29; and "Dance Hall and Martin's Saloon," 15 August 1912,box 28, Committee of Fourteen. Cocaine and fairies were associated with other transgressive places where "anything
went," see "Memo," 18 August 1913, box 3, Committee of Fourteen; "Re saloons etc.,
Queens Boro," 24 July 1913,5-6, box 29, Committee of Fourteen; George Chauncey,Jc,
"Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion?Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era,"]oumal of Soclal History 19 (1985):
189-2 12 in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Bauml
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989), 297. I would
like to thank George Chauncey for bringing it to my attention that the Newport investigation targeted sexual perversion and cocaine use, see U.S. Senate, 67th Gng., 1st sess.,
Committee on Naval Affairs, Alleged Immoral Conditions at Newport (R.I.) Naval Training
Station (Washington, D.C., 1921), 17 reprinted in Jonathan Kaa, ed., Gwemrnent Versus
Homosexwals (New York, 1975).
49. There are a number of examples of cocaine functioning as a gay signifier in German
and Swiss medical literature. For an overview of this literature, see Oriana Josseau Kalant,
ed. and trans., Maier's Cocaine Addiction (Der Kokainismw) (1926;reprint, Toronto, 1987),
43,50-54,160-162,167, 182-185.
50. Sins of Hollywood: A Group ofActual Happenings Reported and Written by a Hollywood
Newspaper Man (Hollywood, 1922) in The Movies In Our Mldst: Documents in the Cultural
History of Film in America, ed. Gerald Mast (Chicago, 1982), 177, 180; "Slain Film
Director Believed Victim of Love Revenge Plot," New York H e r d , 3 February 1922,
William Desmond Taylor Clippings, Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
51. John Dos Passos, The BigMoney (1933; reprint, New York, 1969), 287-90,402-403.
52. Barry Paris, Louise Brooks (New York, 1989), 239,367-369.
53. Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, 208-2 10; William S. Burroughs, Queer
(New York, 1985).
54. Musto, The American Disease, 5-8, 11,4344, 219-223.
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Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century
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Endnotes
6
Morphinism and Crime
L. L. Stanley
Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 8, No. 5. (Jan., 1918), pp.
749-756.
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19
Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850
Nancy F. Cott
Signs, Vol. 4, No. 2. (Winter, 1978), pp. 219-236.
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27
"The Fashionable Diseases": Women's Complaints and Their Treatment in
Nineteenth-Century America
Ann Douglas Wood
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 4, No. 1, The Historian and the Arts. (Summer, 1973), pp.
25-52.
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48
Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of
Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era
George Chauncey, Jr.
Journal of Social History, Vol. 19, No. 2. (Winter, 1985), pp. 189-211.
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