Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,151

This is the grave of Martha Ready, though she was known as Mattie Silks in the world of the brothel.

Born in 1846 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, Martha Sands grew up poor. We know almost nothing about her childhood, as is common among the poor. They appear in the 1850 census in Indiana. Sometime in the early 1860s, she left home and eventually made her way west.

This is a chance to talk about sex work. It is not easy to portray sex workers in a series like this. They are, like most poor people, largely forgotten about on the individual level. This is not because they are sex workers per se. It’s not easy to find anything out about an individual coal miner or logger either. Of course, women had fewer economic options than men, but that didn’t mean more economic options for men meant a higher quality of life because it did not, for the most part.

Ready became a sex worker. By 1865, we know that she ran a brothel in Springfield, Illinois. This definitely means she was working as a prostitute before that. Probably that took place in Abilene, Texas and Dodge City, Kansas, both hard frontier towns. There was a big market for sex workers in places like this. These were overwhelmingly male spaces, as was most of the American West past 1900. Most men, well they are going to find something to fuck out there. In many cases, as historians such as Susan Johnson and Peter Boag have documented in their pioneering books, it was each other. At times, in certain situations, it could be the animals in their care. But for most men, the preference was women. There weren’t a lot of single women in towns like that. There were often a few elite women, the wives and daughters of town leaders. And then there were sex workers. If you were a woman without a man to take care of you, sex work was a logical economic choice. For a few women, it was the path to real economic success.

In about 1877, Silks took her business to Denver. That was a big booming cow and gold town. Lots of opportunities for sex workers in a place like that. She had at least been visiting there since 1869. We know that she was arrested for public drunkenness there in 1877 and it was about that time that she bought a house for a brothel. There were a ton of brothels in 19th century cities. That wasn’t just in the American West either. In the Manhattan of the 19th century, it was difficult to walk five blocks without seeing a brothel. There were brothel districts, where they dominated the street. But like the corner store, there was always one available.

Now, when discussing western madams like Mattie Silks, problems arise. Those problems are that they are famous because people see the past as “colorful,” with crazy people in old clothes doing things that we can laugh about today or even romanticize. In the case of Silks, it is that she and another woman named Katie Fulton had a duel in the middle of a street. You don’t see a lot of women in duels. There are different accounts about what this was about and who knows which if any are true.

What we can say is that Silks became the dominant madam in Denver for the next twenty years. She bought a lot of property, invested in real estate, and became quite wealthy. That’s why we know her and she has a marked grave and everything while the vast majority of sex workers do not. In 1875, she married a man with the last name of Silks, so it’s actually a married name and not a sex worker renaming of herself, even if Mattie Silks actually sounds like that. The marriage didn’t really take and she a few serious relationships and eventually married again, to a man named Cortez Thompson. He was an abusive asshole and they were together and then not and then back together and in fact are buried together. She continued to run brothels for a long time, until they were largely made illegal in the 1910s I think. Silks died in 1929, after falling. She was around 82 or 83 years old.

Now, since we are discussing the history of sex work a bit, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss how sterile the sex worker debate is in the present. There are two leading themes here, both of which are bullshit. The first is the second wave feminism theme that all sex work is bad and all these women are oppressed and need help. The second is often pushed by the customers of sex workers but also some workers themselves, which is that sex work is in fact liberating and even good for society. The truth of the matter is that both of these explanations are largely self-serving. If we just think of sex work as a job, which is all it is, then the entire conversation changes. Do we want the job to be safe or dangerous? Do we want to solve the health problems associated with it or do we want to let these workers suffer?

As for the liberation/oppression issue, the answer is….it depends on the individual and it always has. Are there people in sex work who were sexually abused as a child and have learned the only way to survive is to sell their bodies? Yes, and that’s horrible. Are there people who grew up in completely normal middle-class environments and weren’t abused at all and go into sex work because it makes a lot of money and they like sex and might as well get paid. Yes, of course there is. And a whole lot in between.

We need to respect the worker as an individual here–because that’s what they are. Self-serving narratives about work–see “we shouldn’t hire people to pump gas because that job doesn’t provide meaning in their lives” as if you know what the fuck provides meaning in an individual human’s life–need to die in a fire. Workers must be respected on their own terms and that includes if they fuck for a living, past, present, or future. Whatever reasons they have for being in that position, our job as other humans is to support them, do what we can to ensure they have options, and if we use their services, to treat them in a correct and moral manner based on human decency. Because in the end, for a lot of people, very much including sex workers, they have a shitty job where they are treated as they should be and our moral position should be to ask them what they want from their jobs and then help them get that. Whatever it is.

Martha Ready–or Mattie Silks–is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.

If you would like this series to visit other sex workers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Julia Bulette is in Virginia City, Nevada and Eleanore Dumont is in Bodie, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.