Prostitutes

A private cite, that was dug up, has come up with thousands of artifacts that not too many people in Boston are proud of, or want many people to know about. The world’s oldest profession is prostitution…and many people in Boston want to be discrete about the findings of over three thousand artifacts that lead many archeologists to believe that this was a huge discovery that shouldn’t be covered up. This discovery is evidence that this city’s “prim Victorian” image of itself, is not really all that its cracked up to be. There was a thriving, racy economy that the city tried and is still trying to cover up. Many of the people are even ashamed of what has been discovered. “It’s certainly not what historians and people in charge of the Duck Tours want to be part of what Boston was all about,’’ said Mary Beaudry, a Boston University archeology professor. The findings have not been previously publicized outside any academic or archeological circles. Boston University students have studied many of the items, but limits of funding have forced the items into private storage and only occasional examination by students and other researchers. The research on housing records show that there were over 5,000 prostitutes worked in Boston in the last half of the 19^th Century. Now, this may not seem like a lot for a town like Boston, but you have to recognize that this was in the 19^th Century and there weren’t as many people in Boston as there are now. Many of the prostitutes were farm girls or immigrants. Most of them were under 25 years of age who had moved to Boston to find jobs, and ended up having to sell themselves in order to eat. Sadly, many of these women had to “work” in basement rooms where they became diseased and would meet up with sailors, poor men, and petty criminals. It’s hard to sit here and read that just because people don’t want to be associated with prostitutes, these women who thought that they could do nothing more in order to survive but to sell themselves, their lives should be covered up under the dirt that their belongings were buried under. This is a part of not only Boston’s history but of America’s. Not everything that this country has done is something to be proud of, but that does not mean it should be shoved under the rug.


http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/10/18/north_end_dig_provides_rare_look_into_boston_brothels/?page=1