During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in New York, Chicago, and other major urban cities, well-to-do whites found entertainment in the lower class districts’ nightclubs, cabarets, brothels, and opium dens. Although women who participated in “slumming” seemed freer, they were not completely liberated. The women’s suffrage movement introduced more freedom to women, such as voting, but many women suffered ridicule from society for straying from tradition. Public and private reform organization spent most of their efforts dissuading white females from mingling with lower class immigrants. Scare tactics and slander were the main strategies employed by reformers as a means to prevent female perversions associated with urban prostitutes.
