"The Oldest Profession in Winnipeg" 1909-1912

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

I'm bursting with pride..:) Though we seemed to have become quite backward since our glory days.

 

Peace

MG

[nelle 2165]

I like anything historical. I find that very interesting and an interesting topic on here. I can't wait to see that documentuary.

[just2enjoy 1621]

Wow, legal brothels in wpg once upon a time! Now that makes me proud! Maybe with all the legal stuff in Ontario, the future will be back to the good ol' days - welcome Winnipeg's Bunny Ranch

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Following is highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in history, and for anyone with an interest in understanding both how much the world has changed in the last century, and in how little the world has changed during that time:

 

Rhonda L. Hinther of McMaster University published a wonderful 10,000-word paper on "The Oldest Profession in Winnipeg: The Culture of Prostitution in the Point Douglas Segregated District, 1909-1912" in Manitoba History, Number 41, Spring / Summer 2001:

 

http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/41/oldestprofession.shtml

 

 

The same subject in the news:

 

Historian Allan Levine puts current legal events surrounding prostitution in an historical context. From the Winnipeg Free Press, 7 Apr 2012

 

Full Article: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/red-light-district-redux-146513905.html

 

Excerpt:

 

... Historically, we have been down this road before. Canada has never been without prostitution, though the fight to combat the "social evil," as it was referred to, began in earnest in the 1880s as cities like Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg confronted the dark side of urbanization. A whole new breed of social reformers emerged determined to combat the poverty, crime, and corruption that had engulfed cities.

 

"Underneath the seemingly moral surface of our national life," declared a Canadian Salvation Army journal in 1887, "there is a terrible undercurrent of unclean vice with all its concomitant evils of ruined lives, desolated hearth-stones, prostituted bodies, decimated conditions, and early dishonoured graves."

 

Ridding the cities of prostitution was one of the first orders of business. As we know now, eliminating it proved impossible. "Prostitution always has been, is everywhere, and always will be," the adage of the times went. Still, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers and police (some of them, at any rate) were vigilant in their efforts to stamp it out, or, at the very least, to segregate and control it.

 

That was what happened in Winnipeg in 1909. The city's chief of police, "Big" John McRae, decided that he would never permanently solve the prostitution problem and concluded that segregation was the answer. "There is no city I know which is free from it," he later testified at a provincial Royal Commission on vice. "It is like the poor, evil is always with us."

 

He sent for Minnie Woods, the head madam in the city, affectionately known as "Queen of the Harlots," and after lengthy negotiations, it was decided that the new red-light district would be on two streets in the North End working-class neighbourhood of Point Douglas.

 

Neither the chief nor Woods bothered to ask the residents already living in the area what they thought about this idea. Within days, a real estate agent named John Beaman, apparently on a tip from McRae, bought up many of the inexpensive houses on these two streets. He then proceeded to sell them back to Woods and her friends for steep prices. By most accounts, Beaman was reported to have made an exorbitant profit of $70,000 on these transactions, though there is no evidence to suggest that McRae received a kickback. In any event, by 1910, there were 50 brothels operating in Point Douglas.

 

While Minnie Woods managed to stay in business well into the 1930s, Winnipeg's more upstanding citizens were hardly impressed by McRae's actions or the poor publicity the city received because of it. Winnipeg was soon labelled "the wickedest city in the Dominion."

 

There has been a tendency by novelists, popular historians and old movies to romanticize the brothel business of this era with its elegant furniture, expensive whiskey and high-class beautiful harlots. But the truth of the matter was that then and now most women who worked in brothels did so out of desperation and poverty, or were forced to do so by unscrupulous pimps and madams.

 

Many were destitute immigrant girls with few other options, like a young Russian-Jewish woman named Ethel, who was forced to work as a prostitute in Winnipeg in 1910 by Louis Liew, who was also a newcomer. He married Ethel with false promises and then threatened to beat her if she did not do what he wanted. After about two months, she was rescued by a friend from the old country, who happened to hear Liew bragging about his exploits. There are dozens of tragic tales like this and many which are far worse. Ethel was able to start her life over again; other women once involved in the trade became alcoholics or addicted to cocaine and morphine, cutting their wretched lives short. The law did little to protect them.

 

Eventually, segregated brothel areas were shut down in Winnipeg and elsewhere. Yet this did not halt the sex trade, which was merely moved underground and out of the sight of the police, moral reformers and other upstanding citizens.

 

And so now we have seemingly come full circle. Nikki Thomas, who by her account chose freely to work as a prostitute, may be correct: Legalized brothels, like they have in Amsterdam, among other cities, are the answer to protecting some prostitutes in Canada from harm. But even in Amsterdam legalized prostitution has not eliminated exploitation, victimization and tragedy for many defenceless women -- and we should not expect anything different if Winnipeg's red-light district is reborn once more.