The Madams of San Francisco by Curt GentryMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A very interesting and detailed overview of six decades of Bay Area bawdy houses from the humble beginnings of a handful or working girls in a sea of thousands of 49ers up to a high point of a thriving sex industry in the last half of the Nineteenth Century until a fitful and slow dying off in the early Twentieth Century under the weight of women's suffrage and the moralistic Temperance Movement. Compiled largely from period memoirs, newspaper accounts, and court testimony this work recalls such spirited "procuress" pioneers as Ah Toy, Belle Cora (Arabella Ryan), and more.
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