Breaking the Silence. Sex Workers in 19th and 20th-Century Detroit: Findings from the Femme Beings Project.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Femme Beings Project, established by the authors in 2024, is a collective of scholars from Wayne State University in Detroit-area heritage institutions. The project investigates women’s experiences as sex workers and the conditions they lived under in the Detroit area between 1830 and 1930 by examining historical archaeological evidence related to three archaeological sites in Detroit and the adjacent city of Hamtramck. This presentation introduces our findings and discusses how they reveal the identities of the women who worked and resided in these spaces. It also builds from documentary evidence to reassemble the wider social and environmental contexts of sex workers’ lives in historic Detroit. Two of the sites are places where sex work likely took place: the Gass Saloon and boardinghouse and Bandemer’s Hotel. The third site is a women’s prison and homeless shelter, where sex workers were either incarcerated or may have resided.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cities on the Move: Reflecting on Urban Archaeology in the 21st Century   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow