3 Questions

On Wednesday's "Caves, Cribs and Cathouses: How Frontier Prostitution Helped Build the West," Laura Gonzales-Meredith speaks about prostitution during the 19th century at the St. Francis Auditorium. A former worker at Fort Union National Monument, she now teaches history at Luna Community College in Las Vegas.

Tell me about your work on frontier prostitution.
This particular project is work that I've done on my master's thesis. It started probably about nine years ago when I was working at Fort Union National Monument. I came across, with a colleague of mine, some articles in the archives regarding some prostitutes who had been publicly humiliated and run out of the fort at Fort Union. I just remember getting really intrigued by the story and the fact that it wasn't being told.

What interested you about these sex workers?
These women led such fascinating and misunderstood lives. I think in society we have this common interpretation about them, and it generally tends to be negative—we fault them for their choices and decisions—or we romanticize their lives. It's interested me to get to know them on a more personal level. They're a little hard to pinpoint, and they're all just so different.

What are breakthroughs you've had in your research?
I just started to see these women's lives were influential in the growth of the West. In a lot of these small, primitive frontier towns, they're dominated by male communities, and those communities can be pretty rough around the edges. And time and time again, these women are the ones that bring that element of civilization to it. They're often the ones that stay back when there's an epidemic of influenza or smallpox or something, so they're acting as nurses. Madams are acting as surrogate mothers to these women who have been abandoned in the West or have lost their family for some reason…They're making all of these contributions toward society, and yet in this society there's not a place for them, and they get shunned.

Santa Fe Reporter