
Secrets of the Streets: 10 Books of Captivating Prostitution Tales
Ten Classic Tales and Investigations of Vice, Poverty, Reform, and GenderBy George Bernard Shaw, George J. Kneeland, Fflorens Roberts, Robert O. Harland, Samuel Paynter Wilson, H. M. Lytle, Elizabeth W. Andrew, Katharine C. BushnellLength56h 33m
About this audiobook
Secrets of the Streets assembles ten compelling accounts of prostitution as a social, legal, and moral question, moving between dramatic critique, investigative reportage, reformist exposé, and documentary observation. Rather than treating the street as a merely sensational setting, the volume examines its hidden economies, coercive institutions, and gendered vulnerabilities. Its strongest pieces illuminate the collision of urban modernity with poverty, policing, public health, and sexual double standards, preserving the formal variety through which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers made social reality legible. The contributors bring together playwrights, journalists, social investigators, religious reformers, and advocates whose work emerged alongside campaigns against vice regulation, trafficking, exploitative labor, and unequal sexual morality. Their differing professional and cultural positions produce neither a single diagnosis nor a simple reform program. Instead, the collection reflects the era's vigorous traditions of social-purity activism, settlement-era inquiry, feminist critique, and progressive investigation, while revealing tensions between surveillance, compassion, moral judgment, and structural analysis. This volume is recommended for readers of urban history, gender studies, social reform literature, and cultural criticism. It offers an unusually concentrated opportunity to compare rhetorical strategies and ethical assumptions across genres, while tracing how multiple voices transformed an obscured social world into a subject of public debate. Its breadth makes it both an instructive historical resource and a fertile conversation among divergent approaches to justice, sexuality, and the modern city.
Audiobook details
GenreGeneral Fiction
Length56 hrs 33 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMar 4, 2025
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Physician's Anthology: 20 Timeless Storybooks from the Physician's Desk
26Smashing The Traffic
2Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. or Man of Pleasure's Kalendar for the Year, 1788
27Why Girls Go Astray
3A (pt. 1)
28More About the Traffic in Shame
4A (pt. 2)
29Crime in Chicago
5Tragedies of the White Slave
30The Police
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6Foreword.
31The Lost Sisterhood
7CHAPTER IV.
32Chicago’s Crowning Curse
8CHAPTER VIII.
33Gambling Hells
9CHAPTER XII.
34Criminal Operations
10Fifteen Years with the Outcast
35Life Under the Shadows
11Fifteen Years with the Outcast
36The Pawnbrokers
12FIFTEEN YEARS WITH THE OUTCAST
37Pacific Garden Mission
13CHAPTER VI.
38Churches
14CHAPTER XIII.
39Concert Saloons and Damnation
15CHAPTER XVIII.
40Divorces
16CHAPTER XXIV.
41Tramps’ Paradise
17CHAPTER XXXI.
42Theatres
18CHAPTER XXXVII.
43The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the World
19CHAPTER XLIII.
44The Vice Bondage of a Great City; or, the Wickedest City in the World
20CHAPTER XLIX.
45Preface.
21Chicago and its cess-pools of infamy
46CHAPTER II.
22PREFACE
47CHAPTER IV.
23CHICAGO
48CHAPTER VII.
24Chicago Society
49CHAPTER IX.
25The White Slave Traffic
50Twenty tales by twenty women: From real life in Chicago