Virginia Cain PhD Student

Specialty

• Gender and Women's History
• United States History

Research Interests

• Late-19th and early-20th Century U.S.
• Women and Gender History
• Prostitution
• Respectability
• Urban Space

Current Projects

• My dissertation explores Birmingham, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee from 1870 to 1930 as turn-of-the-century boomtowns where laws and morals were continuously negotiated. This indeterminate environment allowed people such as sex workers, who nominally operated outside respectable society, to push through those permeable boundaries. Some sex workers leveraged the growing demand for their services to advocate for the respectability of working women. Government officials’ and reformers’ responses to sex workers changed the shape and organization of Birmingham and Nashville.