Front cover image for Pursuing johns : criminal law reform, defending character, and New York City's Committee of Fourteen, 1920-1930

Pursuing johns : criminal law reform, defending character, and New York City's Committee of Fourteen, 1920-1930

"In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members' attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men's patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city's immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s, led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john's law.""
Print Book, English, ©2005
Ohio State University Press, Columbus, ©2005
History
x, 297 pages ; 24 cm.
9780814209882, 9780814290620, 0814209882, 0814290620
56494025
"To live correctly": themes and the significance of character
"Only the Barbarian waits": New York City's committee of fourteen
Drifted: feminist reformers and prostitution's changes in the twenties
"The time has come": vagrancy law, police procedure, and proceeding against the customers
People v. Edward N. Breitung: not the "simply immoral"
"To make it an offense for a man to buy what the prostitute has to sell": public policy debates
"The fruitful mother of blackmail": hope and opposition to the customer amendment
"Out principles demand": hearings and disappointments
"Mr. Veiller again prevailed": disappointment and death
Reflection on a reform