Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West by Anne Seagraves review

After having purchased this book ten years ago this summer, I finally got around to reading it. I found it in a shop in the small town of Creede, CO, where I was interning at the repertory theatre. One of the doves in the book was from Creede, which was basically a silver mining boomtown in the nineteenth century.

The information in this book is very interesting, though it is presented in an overly simplistic manner of writing, as if the text was written for a third grader. Given the subject manner, I can't see why the it needed such an elementary treatment, though I am unfamiliar with the author's of books to know if that is just how she writes. In addition, the sections of the book are broken-down strangely; some chapters are devoted entirely to one madam or prostitute, while others focus on states, towns, the hierarchy of different establishments and the ladies therein, but have all sorts of little mini-chapters about various madams and prostitutes. The general flow of information could have been arranged differently, or in a more sensical manner.

The title of the book also clearly states the subject of the book is the early west, when in fact much of the matter spans the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, which really not, in my opinion, early west.

Like I said, though, there is a lot of very interesting information, broken down into digestible tidbits. If I were so inclined, I'd look into the resource material Seagraves used to compile the information; much of what she used appeared to be first-hand accounts of people from the time, diaries and newspaper archives. There are some lovely photographs so that some of the names can be put to faces, but I couldn't seem to find exact years for some of them, which makes me wonder how accurate some of the photos were as far as their correct place in time for the information provided.
/ [Ms. Steel]

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