Women’s History Month: History Professor Challenges Stigmatization of Women’s ‘Immoral’ Labor

Katie Hemphill, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of History, researches gender and sexuality and teaches courses on the History of Crime in America, the Early Republic, and Manhood and Masculinity in the U.S. 

Hemphill’s research also focuses the significant but often ignored contributions of women in labor, sexuality, and urban economies. During Women’s History Month, her work draws attention to how women’s labor, often overlooked or stigmatized, has shaped history. Historically, capitalism has devalued women’s contributions, and much progress remains in acknowledging their roles.

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“Politicians, market bankers, capitalists were men at the time,” Hemphill said. “The 19th century is a period we associate with the de-valuing and de-recognition of women’s labor.”

In the 18th century, household labor was a shared responsibility, and although women’s contributions weren’t always regarded as equal, they were still recognized. However, with the shift toward labor outside the home in the 19th century, women’s work was dismissed and often went unrecognized. The belief that unpaid domestic work isn’t real work persists to this day.

“Women perform a disproportionate amount of uncompensated domestic labor in many households, and the value of that labor often goes unrecognized,” Hemphill said. “There was also the idea that women who labored outside of the home for a wage only did so to supplement household earnings rather than to support themselves or survive.”

Hemphill’s goal was to write a book that not only recognized and valued women’s contributions to the urban economy but also examined how the shift toward a market economy and the devaluation of women’s labor drove them into the sex trade. Her book, Bawdy City, which draws from her doctoral dissertation, focuses specifically on prostitution and the critical role of women’s sexual labor in Baltimore's early economy.

“I ended up writing a book because I wanted to look at how women’s sexual labor contributed to the early capitalist economy in American cities,” Hemphill said.

More recently, her research explores how gender, race, and class influenced policing practices and the labeling of areas as “red light districts,” which often unfairly stigmatized both women and the neighborhoods in which they worked.

The term red light district originated in 19th-century U.S. cities, when saloons used red lights because the light traveled well. This lighting, combined with the overlap of saloons, prostitution, and drinking, contributed to the term’s rise.

Hemphill was invited to contribute an essay to a special issue of the Radical History Review that examined troubling terms related to sex work.

“I wrote an essay on the history of the term because everyone uses it in their work to describe areas where prostitution is concentrated, but very few of them tackled the question, ‘Where does that come from?’” Hemphill said. “I wanted to figure out why that's the term that we use and what that means for how scholars use that in their work."

Digging deeper, she discovered various explanations, including one that railroad brakemen would leave their lights outside brothels when they went in.

The answer turned out to be more complicated than that. 

“There are a lot of transcultural associations between red and either love or desire that go back a long way and sometimes have particular associations with spiritual practices,” Hemphill said. 

She added, "It really took off when the railroad came in because on the rails, red lights meant stop and danger. A lot of the early rail towns, the sex establishments tended to be clustered pretty close to where the railroads were because that’s who they counted on for their clientele.”

The red light outside an establishment signaled people to stop, and these places often marketed themselves as dangerous and edgy, so the lights worked for them.

Moralists, disturbed by how common prostitution had become in the 19th century, saw the red light as a symbol of damnation. Both those trying to attract customers and those arguing against prostitution were drawn to this image.

In the early 1890s, as cities tried to control commercial sex for moral reasons, the term red light district became widely used. These neighborhoods, where sex work was most prevalent, often overlapped with poor, immigrant, and Black communities.

“I argue that a lot of what people labeled red light districts are not just areas with a high concentration of prostitution, but also tend to be poor neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods, and places where Black city residents were confined,” Hemphill said.

“When people label those red light districts, it kind of casts that glow of sexual immorality over the whole neighborhood and makes that the defining characteristic,” Hemphill said. “It’s a way of denigrating other populations that lived there and casting them all as sexually suspect and immoral.”

Hemphill emphasizes that the term is not neutral and its use has significantly shaped how people have understood urban geography. She challenges the negative labels on women’s work, advocating for recognition of their lasting impact on history.

“We as a society continue to look down on and marginalize women (and others) who are involved in prostitution and other forms of sex work,” Hemphill said. “They are often subjected to a lot of moralizing and excluded from conversations about labor. I try in my work both to explain the historical factors that have driven the expansion of the sex trade at particular moments and to acknowledge the ways that women working in the trade have shaped our cities and their economies with their labor.”

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