Disorderly House Keepers: Poor Women in Providence, Rhode Island, 1781-1832

This study examines the lives of poor women in Providence, Rhode Island between the end of the American Revolution in 1781 and the formation of Providence’s municipal government in 1832. In this same Early Republic period, many historians have described a crackdown by local authorities in cities throughout the northern United States on perceived threats to social order and stability, in stark contrast to the Enlightenment-inspired rhetoric of egalitarianism that marked the Revolution and its immediate aftermath. This crackdown was the result of long-term and interlocking economic, social, and political changes, and frequently took the form of the arrest and removal from town of women—both white and African American— associated with so-called disorderly houses. ‘Disorderly house’ was a blanket term used by local authorities to encompass a wide variety of illicit or suspect establishments like racially integrated boarding houses, brothels, unlicensed liquor stands, dance halls, or family homes that entertained company too late at night. Providence records, such as town council meeting minutes, county court records, deeds, and town directories, reveal that trends similar to those in major cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were present in a mid-sized regional town. They also demonstrate the importance of disorderly houses, both as a focus for town authorities’ efforts to prevent disorder by removing women through existing poor laws and in women’s resistance to removal. In Providence’s expanding maritime economy, disorderly houses provided income for women who were often left to fend for themselves as the result of a mariner husband’s absence at sea, an absence that was often permanent. At the same time, such houses also connected poor women with benefactors from the ranks of Providence’s elite, many of whom rented properties in the town’s disreputable neighborhoods, like Olney’s Lane and Hardscrabble, and sometimes turned a blind eye to disorder or intervened with the authorities to protect reliable tenants. Local evidence also demonstrates that Providence disorderly houses served as community institutions, providing women with cheap lodging, rudimentary social services, and a network in which to hide from town authorities.


INTRODUCTION
There's definitely a mutual covering of asses going on in the lower classes…I've even tracked down babysitters for employees who'd lost their child care and couldn't afford to lose their shift as well. Instead of letting an employee call off work and winding up shorthanded to boot, I called around until I found a cashier who was more than happy to babysit for a few hours for some extra cash. I loaned the cook the money to pay the cashier, and everyone got something they needed. We do shit like that a lot.
We'd never survive otherwise. 1 Linda Tirado wrote this description of working-class life in her 2014 memoir of her experiences on the economic margins of twenty-first century "Bootstrap America." In addition to how she made ends meet working several minimum-wage service jobs, she also describes humiliations large and small at the hands of capricious authorities and convoluted, understaffed social service bureaucracies that harmed more than helped. In one chapter, she dwells on the feeling that modern poverty has been criminalized, explaining the danger of being cited for minor offenses like public intoxication while drinking in her own front yard and the need to avoid police when she could not afford the fifty-dollar registration fee-equivalent to a day's wages-for her car. 2 Tirado likens these experiences to Dickensian England, but had she wanted to, she could have looked much closer to home for comparisons. Though she writes about Ohio and Utah in the early 2000s, many of Tirado's experiences might have 1 Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2014), 24-25. 2 Ibid.,[150][151][152] sounded familiar to Betsey Taylor, a woman of color living in early nineteenth century Rhode Island. Taylor, a daughter of slaves, moved to Providence a little before 1800, where she made at least part of her living catering to sailors' need for a good time ashore. Maritime commerce drove Providence's post-Revolutionary War economy, and the town soon sprouted dance halls, brothels, sailor boarding houses, and unlicensed shops for liquor and food. 3 Such activity was partially why the town council expelled Taylor in 1809, noting that she entertained "noisy company at unseasonable hours." 4 Returning to Providence in 1822, Taylor and her daughter Eliza set up shop in Olney's Lane, a neighborhood on the north edge of town with a reputation for drunkenness, prostitution, and sailors' riots. 5 It also had cheap housing, and thus attracted much of the town's marginalized and impoverished African American population. Again Taylor's activities caught the attention of the town authorities, who ordered her to leave on seven separate occasions between 1822 and 1830. When she either returned to town or refused to leave in the first place, the council threatened her landlords with hefty fines if they did not evict her.
It is easy to see Betsey Taylor and those like her in Olney's Lane and other Providence black neighborhoods like Hardscrabble and Snowtown as disorderly troublemakers, feeding off an underworld of sex, liquor, and carousing Jack Tars.
Certainly many of her respectable neighbors thought that way about her, as shown by their numerous petitions to the town council complaining of women, both white and 3 While Tirado herself was never involved in the illicit economy of crime or prostitution in the same way Taylor was, she acknowledges an informal system of "sex as currency," where the prospect of moving in with a friend to save on rent or utility bills came with the implication of entering a sexual relationship. She also notes that "pushing dime bags is enough to pay a bill or two, keep your phone or gas on, and keep your car moving;" ibid., 98-99, 164. 4 Providence Town Council Minute Book, Providence City Archives (hereafter PTC), 9A:182-183. 5 Olney's Lane, renamed Olney Street, still exists in Providence today, just off North Main Street near a commercial strip mall with a Whole Foods and a Starbucks. black, whose "disorderly houses" and "houses of ill fame" disturbed the public peace and corrupted the local youth. 6 However, when put into the wider context of social and economic changes sweeping Providence, the state of Rhode Island, and the entire United States of America, the actions of women like Betsey Taylor and her fellowsdisorderly women like Eliza Granger, Rosanna Jones, Sally Andrews, Mahala Greene, and Susan Parr Gardner, whose names appear repeatedly in the Providence recordslook less like criminality and more like the kinds of hustles necessary to survive in a society that offered few other choices.
Historians have looked at the Early Republican period of the United States from multiple angles, and it has become clear that these women were caught in a vortex of interconnected social, political, economic, and cultural changes. In a summation of recent work in American social history, Christopher Clark has argued that the first half-century of the country's history, especially in New England, saw the breakdown of a colonial-era society in which the family, including slaves, servants, and apprentices, was the basic economic and social unit. The nineteenth century saw these integrated family economies break down into a pool of independent wage laborers, no longer tied to the land or a particular town and able to migrate in search of 6 Rhode Island at this time did have a significant Native American population, but the vast majority lived in the southern part of the state. I have chosen to restrict my analysis primarily because of difficulty in accurately identifying Native Americans in nineteenth-century Providence sources. While eighteenth century records differentiate between "blacks," "mulattoes," "mustees," and "Indians," by the nineteenth century, the council more often used the blanket designation "of color;" cf. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003 in this study, because the categories used by the council are such a muddle, I am using the terms 'black,' 'African American,' and 'people of color' interchangeably, with the understanding that the first two categories contain many people who are bi-or multiracial; for a full discussion of the implications of these various terms in the context of Rhode Island history, see Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016), 160-161 n8. steady work. 7 While the rise of manufacturing was one major driver of this process, port towns like Providence and Newport, with their large populations of wage-earning sailors, had helped catalyze the transition in the late eighteenth century. 8 However, while these wage laborers' newfound mobility mitigated locally or seasonally intermittent labor demands, it also cut them off from social support systems rooted in their families. 9 Young unmarried women often started new families after they left home, but in a port town like Providence, a husband who went to sea might not return for any number of reasons, thereby leaving a wife destitute. Officially, her only recourse then was to town poor relief, which was issued based on legal residency, which in turn was based on land ownership. Rather than spend money on perceived strangers and outsiders, town authorities usually resorted to removal of non-residents, with fines or public floggings to enforce it. 10 In fast-growing Providence, then, a growing number of landless migrant women faced poverty not just as material scarcity, but also as a threat of being torn from a community in which they had spent years, for some nearly their entire lives.
This new economic precariousness was entwined, especially for poor women, with new social and cultural vulnerabilities. Historians of gender in America have 7 Christopher Clark, Social Change in America from the Revolution Through the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 21-27, 138-140. 8 Clark,Social Change,[97][98][99][100]; with regard to the growth of female wage labor in eighteenth-century towns and cities, see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977cf. Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998, 102-104. 9 See Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 6-7: she argues that, broadly speaking, the hierarchical structure of marriage and the family "organized the division of labor and power" and was "the main source of social security, medical care, and unemployment insurance." 10 In town council records, terms such as "vagrant" or "transient" simply meant a person who was not legally settled in that town. The most common procedure was to remove transients to their last place of legal settlement. For rural migrants in the nineteenth century, this often meant where a parent or grandparent had last owned property; see Chapter 2. long rooted a major shift in early nineteenth century New Englanders' perceptions of gender roles within marriage and the family in the rise of wage labor. The new family ideal was ostensibly more egalitarian than the rigid patriarchal hierarchy of the eighteenth century, as it emphasized spousal romance and a domestic role for wives that complemented their husbands' public one. However, this new ideal was the product of the middle classes, and poor women who failed to live up to it because they had to work outside the home and support their families were suspect. Outside the new bounds of respectability, they were dangers to public order and thus fit for harassment and removal by town authorities. 11 Racism also affected poor women, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.
The Revolution unleashed ideals of liberty and equality with disruptive effects across the new nation. In the North, many enslaved African Americans had used the Revolution to seize their chance at freedom, and in its aftermath, the northern states legally emancipated their remaining slaves. Though free, black men and women continued to struggle against racial discrimination that determined what jobs they could work, where they could live, and how quickly their neighbors complained about them to a town constable. At the same time, historians have noted calls for universal white manhood suffrage and the removal of property requirements for voting. 12 One of the side effects of this discussion was to exclude non-white males from the public 11 For extreme examples from New York, such as the opprobrium reserved for female boarding house keepers and the violence directed at prostitutes, see Wendy Gamber, "Tarnished Labor: The Home, The Market, and The Boardinghouse in Antebellum America," Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Summer 2002): 177-204 and Timothy Gilfoyle, "Strumpets and Misogynists: Brothel 'Riots' and the Transformation of Prostitution in Antebellum New York City," New York History 68, no. 1 (1987): 45-65. 12 Clark,Social Change,[113][114]; Rhode Island famously lagged behind the rest of the country in this respect, with expansion of suffrage only taking place in Dorr War of 1841-1842; see Patrick T. Conley, Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island's Constitutional Development, 1776-1841(Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1977, 290-371. While a thorough study of tensions between poor and middle class women or prostitution and urban sexual culture does not exist for Providence, the city's black population has received dedicated scholarly attention. Much of the early work focused on the formation of black middle class institutions, as it drew on the memoirs of prominent black citizens and institutional histories to show how the development of black schools, churches, and fraternal organizations produced independent leaders and served as a bulwark against white prejudice. 16 In addition to an analysis of institutional formation, Robert Cottrol adds quantitative analysis of census records to describe occupations, family structure, and the extent of property ownership in the Providence black community at mid-century. Despite some caveats, his findings can likely be projected back into the 1830s or 1820s. 17 While placed in the broad context of the Atlantic world, Jeffrey Bolster's work on black sailors, especially their economic advantages, also sheds light on a significant part of Providence's black community. Bolster, like Cottrol, focuses on black sailors' roles as "pillar[s] of free black society," but he also describes how black sailors became associated with disorder in the brothels, dance halls, and boarding houses in ports up and down the Atlantic coast. 18 More recently, Christy Clark-Pujara has gone over similar territory in her examination of how the legacies of enslavement and Rhode Island's continued 200; while Baltimore is as much Southern as Northern, Rockman's intersectional examination of poor women's survival strategies in a city with a significant black population provides a useful comparison for Providence's black community; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 16 See, for example, Julian Rammelkamp, "The Providence Negro Community, 1820-1848," Rhode Island History 7, no. 1 (1948: 20-33 and Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). 17 Cottrol,[115][116]; much of his work also focuses on the growing antagonism between working class African Americans and Irish immigrants, but that development falls outside the scope of this study. 18 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 160-161, quote from p.189. involvement in the business of slavery-i.e., the links between the state's textile mills and the cotton-producing South-affected free blacks after emancipation. 19 While the above studies mainly concern male institutions and experiences, there are others that take a closer look at the women of Rhode Island's black community. In contrast to Cottrol's focus on black middle class men, Joanne Melish factors in the many transient and transplant women missed by the official censuses. 20 For example, she addresses their confrontations with town councils that accused them of 'disorderly conduct' or 'disturbing the peace.' 21 However, her descriptions of lower-class black women are set within the context of a much larger argument about how whites' association of African Americans with public disorder contributed to the hardening of racial categories in New England after gradual emancipation. 22 If we want to look specifically at the experiences of lower-class African Americans in Providence, the best places to look are studies of the nineteenth century riots. John Wood Sweet provides a good discussion of how the 1824 Hardscrabble Riot fit into the process of black exclusion from citizenship and respectability in the new American Republic. 23 Two other works deal specifically with the Olney's Lane Riot, the first by Howard Chudacoff and Theodore Hirt, who show how the riot was the final straw in a disorderly decade and led to Providence chartering a city government with increased police powers. 24 The other, by Joseph Sullivan, does the most to highlight that, despite its reputation as a black neighborhood, Olney's Lane remained racially mixed, and crackdowns on disorder affected black and white residents. 25 Given the attacks against them on multiple fronts, it is a wonder that women like Betsey Taylor hung on in Providence so long. In her case, she even returned to face down the council again after being successfully removed in 1809. Many other Providence women shared her persistence, from Sally Andrews, a white woman from Coventry who tried multiple times to set up a boarding house in the 1820s, to Phebe Potter, who defied nearly a dozen attempts remove her between 1807 and 1823, and Rosanna Jones, a single woman of color who both ran a successful boarding house in Olney's Lane and avoided the council's ire.
How these women survived in the face of poverty, accusations of disorderly conduct, riots, and the constant threat of removal is key to understanding urban life in Early Republic Providence. Of course, these women were not completely isolated in their struggles against the town council. While transient women had no access to a social safety net, not even the bare-bones aid administered by the town's Overseer of the Poor, they could draw help from those around them.
One of the easiest ways to look at these networks of support is to examine urban boarding houses. 'Boarding house' is a nebulous term, covering everything from a rented-out spare room to a multi-family tenement. Taking in boarders was a common survival strategy for single women. 26 In studies of New England women, and especially in Lisa Norling's and Elaine Crane's studies of maritime communities, 25 See Sullivan,"Olney's Lane." 26 In this study, "single" refers to women living without access to a male partner's wages, thus encompassing those who have never been married, who have been widowed, divorced or abandoned, women between relationships, or married women whose husbands are absent for some reason, such as being away at sea. boarding is often discussed as one of many ways in which wives contributed to a family income. 27 Excellent work has also been done on the economic role of boarding houses in facilitating urban industrialization in American and how their negative reputations helped cement middle class ideals of domestic femininity and the home. 28 Betsey Taylor-like many other women in Providence-seems to have relied on income from taking in boarders, especially when her husbands were absent at sea.
However, most of these previous studies look at boarding houses from the perspective of the middle class, both as proprietors and tenants. Most of the women in Cott's studies are middle or lower-middle class, while Lisa Norling primarily looks at the wives of captains and officers in the New England whalefishery. Wendy Gamber's study of mid-nineteenth-century New York boarding houses primarily relies on diaries and prescriptive literature griping about bad housekeepers and shady fellow boarders. Of course, a focus on materials produced by and for the middle class makes perfect sense, as these were the people with the education and free time to produce the vast majority of written records about boarding and boarding houses.
To understand the experience of boarders and boarding houses further down the social ladder, it is necessary to look at different sources. To gain access to the experience of people who were mostly illiterate and rarely left accounts of themselves, it is necessary to follow Gilfoyle's recommendations for researching historically marginalized groups like prostitutes in New York. Gilfoyle urges historians to look for evidence where marginalized peoples' lives came in contact with government 27 See Cott, Bonds of Womanhood;Crane, Ebb Tide;and Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 28 See Gamber, "Tarnished Labor." record keeping. 29 In Early Republic Providence, that means turning to the records of the town council, whose meeting minutes record biographical details for hundreds of transients examined to determine their eligibility for poor relief, and who also received dozens of petitions, letters of complaint, and town watch reports that further illuminate life in neighborhoods like Olney's Lane and Hardscrabble. Ruth Wallis Herndon has already demonstrated the possibilities for constructing biographies of transient paupers with her work on eighteenth century Rhode Island. In Unwelcome Americans, she constructs detailed individual lives, based on the relatively abundant information in examinations and associated documents like petitions to town and state authorities, warrants, and treasurers' accounts. 30 However, in the nineteenth century, examinations got shorter while becoming more numerous, as if the council were rushing through them. The result is that, while it is hard to develop individual portraits, it is possible to look for connections and networks between people based on scattered references to occupations, family connections, and where people were living in town. When combined with information gleaned from town directories, court records, and deeds, a picture arises in Early Republic Providence of a mixed-race poor community in which connections between and within so-called disorderly houses played a key role in shielding women from the council's increasingly harsh attempts to marginalize and remove them. 29 See Timothy Gilfoyle, "Prostitutes in the Archives: Problems and Possibilities in Documenting the History of Sexuality," American Archivist 57 (Summer 1994): 518-521. 30  To discern this role, it is necessary to read past the sources' use of terms like "disorderly persons" and "disorderly houses." Based on clues in the records and analogies from contemporary cities, these vague terms could apply to anything from brothels to unlicensed liquor shops, noisy families, or boarding houses with racially mixed tenants. When they do apply to illicit activities, like brothels or selling liquor without a license, it is also necessary to strip away the implications of moral depravity.
For poor single women with few options, Providence's high population of sailors in search of entertainment supported an illicit economy in which they could sell liquor or food or sex, often for more money than they could hope for in domestic service or by taking in washing. Each of these business ventures relied on the same pool of customers, so these women also relied on each other to keep business brisk. African American women faced additional hardship, as the council's refusal to issue them licenses made their businesses disorderly by definition. What the council saw as disorder was in fact poor women working together to keep their heads above water and avoid abject poverty for themselves and their families.
In addition to an income, disorderly houses provided some rudimentary services to people who never expected aid from the town, charities, or mutual aid societies, and had no political institutions to advocate on their behalf. Some disorderly house keepers were successful enough to become property owners and were thus shielded from the council's main weapon against disorder-removal. Those keepers who paid rent also had success cultivating the protection of the wealthy men of Providence, many of whom owned buildings in Snowtown or Olney's Lane and looked the other way as long as payment came in regularly. This protection also 13 possibly allowed some keepers to avoid the attentions of the council if a tenant or customer did not appear for a summons or was absent when the town sergeant turned up to carry out a removal. There may have also been an informal network of boarding houses through which people passed to elude officers sent after them and to keep ahead of the council. Finally, evidence exists as well of boarding house keepers providing childcare for single women, negotiating rent, and extending credit to tenants in particularly hard times. As freed slaves and poor whites moved into the port of Providence and put their hopes in the postwar boom, the nature of maritime labor made whatever prosperity they found there fragile. With the British West Indies closed to American shipping following independence and Newport falling behind, Providence flourished as local merchants pursued trade with the Baltic Sea and the East Indies, thus ensuring plenty of work for sailors and for laborers on the docks and in the shipyards. 42 The town was especially attractive to freedmen since one of the few places skilled black men could earn equal pay for equal work with white men, and where they could expect promotion based on merit, was aboard a ship. 43 However, families did not always share in Providence's maritime prosperity, and many a wife, daughter, or sister found herself tossed onto the labor market by the death, abandonment, unemployment, or absence at sea of a male relative. Sudden poverty was a special concern for those relying on mariners' wages, which came as a lump sum at the end of a voyage, not at regular intervals. Thus, while their menfolk were at sea or unemployed at home between voyages, many women had to fend for themselves. 44 41 Melish,Disowning Slavery,[71][72][73] McLoughlin, Rhode Island, 110-111. 43 Norling,Captain Ahab,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34] While Rhode Island textile mills were on the rise after 1790 and employed a little over 9,000 people by 1832, only 360 of them worked in Providence factories. Rhode Island mill owners also preferred to employ whole families, and relied especially on child laborers, who made up a third of Rhode Island's industrial workforce by the 1830s. Furthermore, early industrialists like Samuel Slater only mechanized one or two of the steps of cloth manufacture, such as spinning thread or carding, with the rest left to domestic labor on rural farms through the putting-out system. The complete mechanization and consolidation of textile manufacture under one roof and the employment of a large workforce of single women was mainly practiced in Massachusetts, most famously in Lowell, where factories were established in the 1820s. Thus, industrial work was not a significant source of income for the vast majority of lower-class women in Providence in this period. See Coleman,Transformation,93 (Table  7), 98 ( domestic labor, either in the homes of the middle class-the primary beneficiaries of Providence's new-found prosperity-or by taking in washing or sewing clothes.
Providence's growth in the years following the Revolution also ensured that peripheral businesses-shipbuilding, blacksmithing, tavern-keeping, marine insurance, banking, teamsters, retail-also flourished and produced a prosperous white middle class. With the growth of an urban middle class, women in the families of prosperous merchants or middling clerks found their lives to be very different than those of their mothers and grandmothers on rural farms. Farm wives provided many of their families' necessities through their own labor, from spinning yarn and weaving cloth to baking bread and churning butter, along with caring for children and the sick, cooking, cleaning, and making soap or candles. As more women moved to cities and towns as early as the late eighteenth century, especially to thriving commercial ports like Providence, they found many products that had previously been produced domestically-mainly textiles and basic foods-could now be purchased for cash. 50 Urban middle class women also found a large pool of domestic help in the growing population of the urban poor. While rural wives might have employed a neighbor's daughter or indentured servant-or owned a slave or two in Rhode Despite these available jobs, many women-single, widowed, abandoned or with a husband at sea, white or of color-still teetered on the edge of poverty due to a combination of gendered and racial assumptions that depressed their wages and restricted their job prospects. Women's low wages in the urban market economy were a holdover of wives' and daughters' places within the interdependent labor arrangement of the family farm. 61 In rural colonial New England, the family was a largely self-contained economic unit, in which a husband was the authority figure with all other members-children, servants, apprentices, wife-dependent on him for their 56  financial and physical well-being. 62 In cities, families were no longer self-sufficient, and rather than producing goods, members earned wages with which to purchase them. This economic shift led to a concurrent one in gender ideals, to that of the socalled separate spheres, in which a wife maintained the home, or domestic sphere, while a husband went out into the public sphere to work and provide for his family. This new gender system did much to change women's roles and responsibilities within the home, but left their assumed dependence on their husbands and fathers intact. 63 While the rich and some middle-class women could afford to maintain the female domestic ideal and remain at home while their husbands worked, in many poor families, one person's wages were not enough to live on, and thus women-in addition to domestic labor and childcare in their own homes-had to work as well. 64 However, women earned much less than men because, according to Cott, "wage rates reflected the expectation that they would rely on men as providers. All these men and women crowding into Providence exposed cracks in age-old systems for dealing with poverty, thus producing a reaction from town authorities that put the stability of many poor families at risk. Rhode Island towns had long dispensed, via the local Overseers of the Poor, some local tax revenue to provide basic relief for resident paupers, with the town council deciding who merited relief. If an Overseer of the Poor determined someone was "likely to become chargeable to the town," the council had to first assess if the person was a legal resident eligible for assistance. 78 According to Rhode Island law, a person gained legal residence by 75 Ibid., 115-116. 76 Cottrol, Afro-Yankees, 119-121; Cottrol bases his portrait of the Providence black community on data from the 1840s through the 1860s, so property ownership was probably higher than earlier in the nineteenth century, while mariners probably played a less important economic role; see Bolster, Black Jacks, 225-232 on the decline of black maritime participation in the 1830s and 1840s. 77  owning and paying taxes on a certain amount of land or serving an apprenticeship in a town. Women gained residency through marriage, and children followed the residency of their parents. Simply being born in a town did not confer legal residency if the parents were legally settled elsewhere. 79 Rhode Island had inherited this system from England, where a series of laws developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like the Settlement Law of 1662, had allowed towns to distinguish who fell under their jurisdiction and obligations to provide relief, and who did not, thus preventing the resources of any one community from being overstretched. If the Providence town council determined a pauper was a legal resident, its first step was to require any family members living in town and able to provide support to take her in.
If that option was unavailable, the council authorized the Overseer of the Poor to provide money for necessities like food, firewood, or lodging; the council could also bind out paupers or their children as indentured servants to avoid expense. If a pauper was not settled in town, because she had moved to find work or follow a husband, the council ascertained her last legal place of settlement. Once that was determined, the town sergeant or constable conveyed her to that town, and she became another Overseer of the Poor's problem. According to Herndon, town poor relief was a "severe charity," and in the years leading up to the Revolution, many transients preferred to leave town and try their luck elsewhere rather than submit to the Overseer of the Poor. 80 79 Public Laws [1798], 346-347; there was a distinction, however, between children born within marriage, who followed the father's residency and those born outside of marriage, who followed their mother, see ibid., 346. 80 Herndon, Unwelcome Americans, 6; though Herndon covers roughly the last half of the eighteenth century, the system she describes remained largely unchanged well in the nineteenth century. Starting around 1815, however, the number of examinations and removals rose rapidly and remained high until Providence established a city government in 1832. In contrast to the low rates of examination and removal in the previous three decades, 84 see ibid., vols. 5-9B; between 1784 and 1815, there were only nine years in which the council removed more than five people in one day. 85 Ibid.,; on the former occasion, ten people were removed, and fourteen on the latter. A third major spike in examinations, to 18 in 1797, took place in October, in a year when funds for poor relief were probably tight from caring for residents with smallpox. In the end, few of those examined were actually removed; see ibid., 7:195-120. 86 Ibid.,6:97. 87 The highest number of people removed in a single day in 1789 was five people removed on September 14, nearly a month before the council started trying to clear people out before winter; see ibid., 93-94. this stretch of seventeen years contains twelve in which the council removed more than five people on a single day. 88  The town council's power over poor transients had increased since the Revolution. Through a town meeting as early as 1796, the council gained the power to hold out-of-state transients in the workhouse when it was "utterly impossible" to convey them to their proper homes or a they were source of "great trouble and expence." 92 The workhouse also presented further options if the volume of in-state transients made removal or binding out too difficult. Later, in 1828, care for many of the aged, insane, and poor was taken over by the Dexter Asylum. The state law code 88 See ibid., 9A-12. 89 Ibid., 11:178-188, 230-241, 285-294;cf. 1818 96 Ibid., 431-432; a significant factor is these removals was the women's purported bad fame; a further exploration of this topic will be the subject of Chapter 3. While simply ejecting paupers from town saved constables time, the lack of supervision also sometimes backfired, leading to the further problem of transients ignoring orders to leave or quickly returning to town after ostensibly complying. One particularly troublesome case was that of a single white woman named Betsy Azuba Herendeen, who was twenty years old when the council first examined her in July 1826. She had been in Providence about three months and was boarding somewhere in town; the council determined she was "likely to become chargeable" to the town and was an "unsuitable person," to become an inhabitant, a hint the council had objections to her besides poverty. Since her father owned property in Douglas, Massachusetts, she was ordered to leave in two days. 101 However, Betsy soon returned and-despite five separate attempts to remove or punish her in 1827 and 97 Ibid., 5:258, 6:233; these removals across state lines did have limits. Paupers from New Jersey or South Carolina, to which an escort was obviously impractical, had long been instructed to just leave. 98  Between 1813 and 1823, Phebe Potter went before the council over a dozen times.
Resolutely single and with two children of her own, Lucinda and Almira, and relying on the wages and job prospects available to a single women of color, Phebe Potter was in constant danger of becoming chargeable to the town. 106 Certainly, acquiring property and gaining legal residency was out of her reach. At first, removal was easy for her to deal with: between 1813 and 1818, the most she could expect for returning without the permission of the council was a night or two in the Bridewell and reremoval to East Greenwich. 107 Sometimes, the constables left her at the town line, making her return to Providence easier. 108 Beginning in September 1818, however, the council began meting out harsher punishments, when they confined her to the Bridewell for two weeks. The next time she was caught, in September 1819, the council read her the legal penalties for returning without permission and threatened her with a hefty seven-dollar fine, to be paid the following day by noon, or seven lashes. 109 Over the next few years, the council tried to deter Phebe from returning with the threat of increasing corporal punishment, sometimes to ten lashes, other times to twelve or fifteen. They also kept moving up the deadline for the payment of her fine from noon the next day, to eleven, then ten, then noon the same day, perhaps implying that she somehow managed to scrounge up the money and frustrate their desire make a public example of her. 110 When she finally refused to pay the fine, "pleading inability" in 1822, it may have been because the council demanded it immediately. 111 The last time she appears in the records is in September 1823, when the council members threw up their hands and instead of trying to whip her, just sentenced her to two weeks in the Work House. 112 Perhaps that worked in the end, and Phebe finally moved on from Providence, or perhaps once she was released, she found a male partner or job that meant she was no longer in danger of becoming chargeable to the town. The record does not say.

The lives of Lucy and Phebe Potter illustrate many of the trends that made
Providence both a beacon of opportunity and a harsh place to live for poor women in the Early Republic. Both women were part of a large influx of newly freed slaves and 108 See ibid., 9B:121, 557. 109 Ibid., 10:223-224. 110 Ibid.,[223][224]238,454,584,593. 111 Ibid., 11:2. 112 Ibid.,129. their descendants that flooded, along with their poor white neighbors, into Providence from Rhode Island's declining hinterlands. Both women's dogged efforts to stay in town despite the council's efforts to eject them speak to the hopes of many that the expanding opportunities for urban wage labor were the surest way to prosperity.
However, this wage economy also proved Lucy and Phebe's downfall, since their move to Providence, where they owned no property, meant they were in constant danger of being removed from their community of choice and sent back to the small country towns they wanted to get away from. Of course, in an ideal world, Lucy and Phebe would have earned the money to buy property to achieve a settlement in their adopted home, but several factors conspired against them. The first was the predominance of a maritime economy and labor system in Rhode Island that cost Lucy Potter her husband. Deprived of a male income, gendered assumptions of female dependency handicapped both Lucy and her unmarried daughter's attempts to earn wages and support themselves and their children. Combined with their lack of legal settlement, both women's poverty meant they were in constant danger of being arbitrarily torn from a community in which they had put down roots and lived in for years. In one major way, however, Lucy and Phebe were atypical: by the 1820s, public disorder, and especially so-called women of bad fame, were much more of a concern for the town council than women who, like Lucy and Phebe, were simply poor. It was this concern over disorder that was at the root of the council's major crackdown on poor women. 37 Hardscrabble, an awareness dramatically brought home by the two riots in 1824 and 1831. In many ways, this increased concern over disorder was a reflection of local conditions, from the disruption of Providence's economy by President Thomas Jefferson's trade embargo to the growth of local institutions' ability to deal with other problems like disease. However, it also had parallels in major urban areas up and down America's Atlantic coast, and was a symptom of deep social changes occurring in new American Republic, from shifting views of race and gender that rendered working women suspect to growing calls for universal suffrage for all-and onlywhite men. In response to calls from respectable citizens to do something about neighborhoods like Snowtown, the authorities cracked down hard by increasing removals, increasing the powers they could use against disorderly elements, and ultimately forming a more centralized city government with more robust police powers. However, while the respectable citizens of Providence bemoaned the condition of their town, the real blow fell on the poor women living in these neighborhoods and trying to make a living as best they could: sometimes illicitly, sometimes not, sometimes somewhere in between. However, such nuances were lost on the council, and by painting whole neighborhoods and groups as disorderly, they increased the suffering of the poor women of Providence.
In the 1780s and 1790s, the council's tried and tested tool against immorality and disorder was removal of the offenders from town. Under the same act that allowed them to warn out poor transients, Rhode Island law empowered the council to remove those considered of bad fame, even if they had "not become" or would not "then be likely to become," chargeable to the town. The designation of "bad fame" was sufficient. 113 By 1822, the council could also fine or flog people of bad fame who refused to leave, in addition to those who returned voluntarily after their removal. 114 Since "bad fame" is such a vague term, a look at other legal tools available to the council will reveal some of the specific behaviors that concerned its members.
They were clearly worried about drunkenness, and thus tried to control all "taverns, ale-houses, victualling-houses, cook-shops, oyster-shops, [and], oyster-cellars" by issuing yearly licenses. The keepers of these establishments were strictly enjoined to keep good order by not selling liquor on credit or employing African Americans. It followed, of course, that black residents were prohibited from gaining a license, thus making any such business they started automatically illegal. 115  A curious omission in the Rhode Island legal code of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is any specific reference to prostitution or disorderly women. For adultery, there was a fine of two hundred dollars or half a year in prison, but for single women, the closest prohibition against prostitution was a five-dollar fine or five-day jail sentence for fornication. 118 The Rhode Island legal code did not mention prostitution until after the incorporation of Providence as a city in 1832. The 1844 code prohibited keeping a "house of ill fame, resorted to for the purpose of prostitution or lewdness," and enticing "virtuous" women to such houses. 119 Providence was not alone in lacking explicit legal penalties for prostitution at this time. In post-Revolutionary New York and Boston, city officials used vagrancy laws similar to Rhode Island's to deal with sexually transgressive or disorderly women. Boston had a colonial-era statue against "nightwalking," but that term was as vague as "bad fame" and included everything from prostitution to peddling and playing the fiddle too loudly. By all accounts, prostitution was a minor concern in most cities, and Hobson argues that in traditionally Puritan Boston, social and religious custom paired with close family supervision had long been sufficient to police female sexuality. 120 Moreover, as urban populations along the eastern seaboard grew, theft, assault, and riots were the main worries of thinly stretched local governments. So as long as prostitution remained out of sight or confined to poor neighborhoods, respectable citizens were mostly content to ignore it. 121 Even in Philadelphia, the fledgling American Republic's largest and most cosmopolitan city, which did have statutes against prostitution, enforcement was so lax that prostitutes "flooded" the streets and vagrancy arrests far exceeded those for prostitution. 122 In practice, a 'disorderly house'-like 'bad fame'-covered a broad set of establishments and represented a perennial problem in a port town where lots of sailors spent their wages and let off steam between voyages. Many complaints came into the Providence town council from neighbors kept up at night by the racket. For example, tavern keeper Andrew Parker sold "Liquor, late at night, to persons of bad fame," while Asa Whiting kept his unlicensed victualing house "open late at night and thereby disturb[ed] the peace of the Inhabitants" of the town. 123 In some cases, the complaint had nothing to do with a business, as in the case of James Lee, a man of color whose family, aside from "entertaining persons of very bad habits," the council noted were "very quarrelsome among themselves as well as with others-and that their children are very mischievous and seem to be under no kind of government." 124 There were also a small number of disorderly houses whose sins went beyond simply disturbing the neighbors' rest by exposing the youth of Providence to 120 While colonial Rhode Island was more fractious in terms of religious doctrine and authority than Massachusetts, one historian notes that "virtually every one of the New England colonists was a puritan-with a little p that is;" see Carl Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton  prostitution and excessive drunkenness. When a group of townspeople petitioned the council in May 1800 to remove a Widow Violet, they implied that because her house, where she kept "women of abandoned character," was in a "very conspicuous part of the Main Street" it was especially detrimental "to the morals of our Youth, and to the utter subversion of all good order & decency." 125 Nearly three decades later, a petition against James Collins, who ran a popular shop on North Main Street that sold liquor, complained that "children are induced there to hear the profane and obscene language; and to see the indecent behavior of the intoxicated and jovial customers." 126 As in other northern cities, it is clear that until the War of 1812, social disorder played a relatively minor role in the Providence town council's enforcement of the poor laws. Occasionally, seemingly out of frustration at the number of transient poor who were in town, the council ordered the relevant statutes to be posted throughout town and published in the local newspapers. They often attributed the crackdown to the "considerable Expense" the town incurred from "persons not Inhabitants coming into [Providence] to dwell" or, as previously noted, the approach of winter. 127 In all these instances, town finance, not a concern with public order, was the council's main motivation.
Houses of ill fame and disorder also remained low on the Providence town council's list of concerns. There were two major spikes in disorderly house complaints between the end of the Revolutionary  The following month, a similar warning of general disorder in town told of "sundry houses" that were "appropriated to the purpose of harbouring and maintaining numbers of lewd Women." 140 These complaints set off a flurry of activity from the council. Tenement owners Greene and Packard were ordered to "clear their tenants of the black people who at present occupy them" and to not rent to disorderly-read black-people in the future. 141 The council also removed many of the African American tenants on its own initiative, and conducted thirteen examinations in the days after they received the 136  Haskell then exhorted the council to use their "Power to employ any or all of the Constables for commanding peace and good order," and reminded them that "the perpetual existence of vice" was no more valid an excuse for inaction than "the same certainty with respect to disease is a reason against exercising the art of medicine." 156 In the aftermath of the 1831 riot, the town newspapers further amplified complaints of the council's inability to deal with disorder. One paper, while it admitted "The Town Council use every exertion…to quell the riots," still wished for "some plan…to stop them altogether!" 157 Another paper, while calling for order, issued a subtle rebuke by noting, "the removing of improper inhabitants belonged to the Town Council and not the mob" and that some rioters had come from Newport, New Bedford, and Warren "to protect the town from houses of ill fame"-implying that the council had failed to "disorderly or suspicious Person" on the streets at night. 159 Around the same time, the council also set aside money to establish streetlights to help the night watch on their rounds. 160 In a bid for more tools of enforcement, the council also supported an 1825 petition to the Rhode Island General Assembly to raise the fines against tavern or boarding house keepers who failed to report potentially chargeable or disorderly transients to the council. 161 The fine had previously been seven dollars, but in September the following year, the council threatened Samuel Staples, Jr., a Providence house carpenter who rented out the buildings he owned in Olney's Lane, with a fine of fifty dollars if he did not evict Sally Andrews and the five women living with her, possibly in an informal brothel. 162 A month later, the council used the same threat to get Staples to evict Betsey Taylor. 163 The council also enforced laws previously on the books more rigorously, as we have already seen in the cases of Betsy Herendeen and Phebe Potter, who faced an early version of the crackdown in the 1810s. 164 They also brushed off the laws against "Disorderly Houses run by Free Negroes and Mulattoes." There were almost no examples in the previous decades of this law being 159 PTC 11:79-84; the fire also occasioned another of the council's periodic requests that Providence residents "make the strictest enquiries into the character of the persons in their employ, and Strangers who may appear to be in town without any known employment," probably in search of a culprit for the fire; quote from ibid., 79; see Chudacoff and Hirt, "Social Turmoil," 22-23 on the relative ineffectiveness of the town watch. 160  used, but in the 1820s, three men of color were bound out for keeping disorderly houses in Providence. 165 As we have seen, none of these new enforcement efforts were satisfactory.
After the riot in 1831, concern for public disorder led to a major turning point in In response to these constant concerns, the council gradually built up institutions and practices to more effectively mitigate disease. The first major milestone was a reaction to the arrival of yellow fever in the summer and autumn of 1797, when the council instituted regular committees to inspect the town for nuisances-piles of garbage, fetid standing water, or overflowing vaults of privies, for example. 180 In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, they also regularized regulations for quarantining and cleaning ships with sick crews or passengers, as well as the policies governing the town hospital. 181 As the port grew in the early nineteenth century, so did the risk of disease, and in 1816, the General Assembly allowed Providence to establish its own board of health to replace the old state-appointed health officers. 182 By the early 1820s, the board operated more or less independently, keeping its own records and merely notifying the council when they promulgated quarantine regulations. 183  While these local events-threats of invasion, economic depression, and epidemics-were likely fuel for anxieties about public order, even more important were far-reaching cultural changes in the meanings of gender and race at the regional and national level. As we have seen, the rise of wage labor after the Revolution generated new gender ideals, which had major impacts on women's economic lives by depressing wages and restricting available jobs. At around this same time, Cott has argued, an idea of female "passionlessness" also arose, resulting in part from late eighteenth century evangelical sermons that urged women to serve as moral guides for men and touted chastity as one of their greatest virtues. 187 Thus, in a part of the country with strong religious traditions of sexual selfdenial and self-control, the assumption arose that women naturally had a lower sexdrive than men.
These twin assumptions-of female passionlessness and the cult of  188 As such, their use by incautious historians threatens to "impose a static model on dynamic relationships;" see Kerber, "Separate Spheres," 38; furthermore, it is important to make the distinction between the historic ideal and historic reality of how these ideals played out in peoples' actual lives; see, for example Carl N. Degler, "What Ought To Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century," The American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (1974): 1467-1490. 189 One historian argues that it has only been economically possible for a majority of Americans to enact this ideal since the 1950s; see Coontz,Marriage,[8][9] See Ulrich,Good Wives,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]cf. Norling,"Sorrow and Heartpangs,[425][426][427][428][429] for colonial women's participation in legal actions, see Sara T. Damiano, "Agents at Home: Wives, Lawyers, and Financial Competence in Eighteenth-Century New England Port Cities," Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2015): 808-835. 191 Gamber, "Tarnished Labor," 202. Gamber's focus is primarily on middle class boarding houses as opposed to the tenements occupied by the lower classes. The latter were the primary target of the Providence town council in the 1810s and 1820s and were viewed as even more depraved and disorderly. If Providence's tenements were anything like those described by Stansell in New York, they preserved little of the middle class divide between public and private life, as their living quarters were too small. Instead, the working poor conducted much of their domestic life in public spaces, such as hallways and streets. Thus, those living in the tenements could not enact the middle class conception of the home as "an incubator of morals and family affections;" see Stansell,City of Women,41. houses, where the same domestic labor was done for paying strangers. 192 The negative view of paying for "women's work" also helps explain the common contemporary conflation of boarding houses and brothels and women in public with public women. 193 Another study similarly notes that female industrial laborers in early nineteenth century New York were sometimes assumed to be prostitutes merely because they were out in public at night. 194 A perusal of the Providence Directory reveals that the men who governed the town during the period of acute concern over public disorder were firmly entrenched in the middle and upper classes and thus fully invested in these new ideals of female  Gamber,"Tarnished Labor," 180. 193 Ibid.,[194][195][196]  Revolution's promise of a republic free of slaves and slavery had been recast as a republic free of black people. 199 In Providence, this change in racial categories and the subsequent attempt to exclude free blacks from post-Revolutionary society manifested itself in several ways.
As early as the 1790s, Providence officials had associated African Americans with disorder caused by disease, singling them out for removal during the yellow fever epidemics of 1797 and 1800 because they "lived in areas where officials suspected that fever was breeding or spreading." 200 Whites' concerns also reflected a real increase in instances of freed slaves publicly and privately gathering to drink, dance, and enjoy themselves without fear of a master's disapproval or punishment. 201 As discussed above, many of the town council's early nineteenth-century crackdowns on disorder can be read as expressions of white anxiety over black freedom and as efforts to re-impose white control over former slaves who were perceived as "unmanaged The intersection of racial anxieties with rising ideals of female domesticity and passionlessness made black women especial targets for the authorities' crusade against disorder. White concern over black female sexuality had its had roots in the colonial period, when sex and childbearing were some of the few aspects of an enslaved woman's life at least partially outside her master's control. Likewise, black women's bodies were potential sites of racial "amalgamation," a subject of increasing concern as the distinction between white, ideal republican citizens and unfit, servile African American non-citizens rose in importance after the Revolution. 207 As a result, in early nineteenth-century cases of white men raping black women, Sweet roots the tendency of white judicial officials to blame and punish the victims-rather than the perpetrators-in the growing cultural association between black women and sexual depravity. 208  voting, like property qualifications, while sending a clear message that women were to "get off the streets, stay in the home." 212 Sullivan notes the similarity of the working class and artisan participants and the instigating incident of the Olney's Lane Riot to these "brothel" riots, while Clark-Pujara argues the riots also demonstrated "white resentment at black freedom" and belief that "black emancipation had demoted all whites, especially those whites who had never owned slaves. Their whiteness, in and of itself, was no longer a clear marker of freedom if black people were also free." 213 An unintended consequence of the focus on disorder in Providence's black community was that, since they were a minority, many white residents who lived in the same neighborhoods were caught up as well. For example, the 1808 curfew against African Americans was eventually expanded to include "any disorderly or suspicious Person," thus including the white population as well. 214 The same phenomenon occurred in the wake of the multiple complaints about black-run disorderly houses in the latter part of the 1810s and the conviction of John L. Jones for keeping a disorderly house-probably a dance hall or brothel-in 1822. 215 When seven indictments for running disorderly houses were subsequently handed down the following year, the defendants were predominantly white, with only one black woman included. Finally, the riots, while they targeted sections of town predominantly 212  The effects of broadening definitions of disorder can also be seen in the change over time of how the council determined an examinant was "of bad fame and reputation and an unsuitable person to become an inhabitant to the town." 217 In early examinations, like that of Deborah Barney in 1801, this phrase appeared at the end of the proceedings as a justification for her removal "as soon as may be." 218 There is also enough information in Barney's examination to hint at why the council thought she was "of bad fame:" she was an unmarried woman of color with a young son and had lived for a time with a tavern-keeper, Silas Pike, and later with Sarah Gibbs. Gibbs, another woman of color and a sailor's wife, took in boarders and had a bad reputation in the council's eyes as well. 219 Thus, it is reasonable to guess the council suspected Barney of drunkenness and possibly sexual impropriety, especially if they assumed that Gibbs's boarding house doubled as a brothel. 220 Over time, however, the council applied this phrase, "of bad fame," with a much broader brush and to larger groups of people and ten women-on July 12, 1824. In this case, the initial summons contained the accusation that all were "of bad fame and reputation." 221 At the same time, the examinations were too short to ascertain why exactly these people were "unsuitable" to remain in town. The combination of perfunctory examinations with blanket accusations of "bad fame" was also in evidence in the examinations, as previously described, that took place after the 1831 riot. 222 It appears, then, that over time the council associated disorder less with individual actions and more with membership in a group: a race, a social class, a gender, or residence in a particular neighborhood.
Such broad assumptions were plausibly the result of the council's attempt to cope with rising numbers of examinations by falling back on their middle class assumptions about African Americans and white women who failed to conform to contemporary ideals of domesticity, rather than examining each case individually.
However, the women who actually inhabited the neighborhoods where the council and the rest of Providence's respectable citizens saw so much disorder did not always live up to their assumptions. While the poor neighborhoods of northern Providence were, without a doubt, sites of prostitution, drunkenness, and crime, middle-class perceptions of black inferiority and female domesticity-or lack thereof-sometimes led respectable white residents astray when identifying specific culprits. Given the one-sided nature of the evidence in the town records, we can never be sure how often council members or disgruntled neighbors inflated or misapplied an 221 PTC 11:229; the eleven people were divided into four separate complaints-each prefaced by the accusation of bad fame-from the Overseer of the Poor. Two were for a single person: the one man, Thomas Sensiblee, and Eliza Granger, who was accused of running a disorderly house. The other two complaints are divided based on whether the women had illegally returned to Providence or were facing their first examination; cf. similar mass complaints against those of "bad fame;" ibid., 10:540, 11:181. 222  Unless she ran a mixed boarding house with some rooms given over to individual prostitutes and others to families, it is hard to see Jones as a brothel keeper. 247 In addition to the shaky evidence for Jones as a brothel keeper, the records also reveal a woman who was deeply embedded in the commercial and, to an extent, civil fabric of Providence, in a way that Susan Gardner was not. For example, Gardner only appears in the court records once, in 1823. Jones, on the other hand, was involved in nine different civil cases between 1824 and 1834. While the cases demonstrate that she was probably not popular with her creditors, the mere fact that business owners, many of whom probably knew Jones personally or lived near her, still agreed to lend her money implies a degree of trust. 248 Some of her debts may also reveal an attempt at respectability and a sort of civic-mindedness, since she was a frequent buyer of lottery tickets. Aside from a desire to win big, participating in lotteries was a way to be seen contributing money toward public schools or infrastructure projects. 249 Thus, rather than engendering complaints from her neighbors like Susan Gardner, Jones made an effort to cultivate business relationships with hers and to be-or at least act the part of-an upright citizen.
Despite the evidence pointing to Susan Gardner as a greater source of disorder than Rosanna Jones, the reaction of respectable white Providence residents to the two women was the diametric opposite of what might be expected. Gardner faced almost no pushback from town authorities for operating a brothel under their noses: her sisters eventually avoided removal despite the 1821 complaint, and while the council questioned her about Henritt Washburn in 1830, she apparently suffered no consequences for procuring and exploiting a young woman. 250 The council also did nothing when she continued her activities after pleading guilty to the charge of 248 For a fuller discussion of Jones's civil cases, see Chapter 4; it is possible that Gardner, whose property was valued higher than Jones's, was wealthier, and thus did not need to buy on credit. However, given that Jones was still buying up property in 1829-she paid $100 for a newly platted parcel just off the turnpike going north to Pawtucket-she was certainly not poor; see Deeds Jones with disorder, and in that case there is no evidence they held her responsible for her tenant's behavior. Since she seems to have been on good terms with most of her neighbors, the council received no complaints about her, and thus probably did not spend much of their limited time thinking about her. That leaves the mob of artisans and working class laborers who rioted in Olney's Lane. Few of them probably knew her as well as her immediate neighbors or the men she did business with, and so they viewed her through the lenses of racial and gendered prejudice and the stereotypical associations of Olney's Lane: as a symbol of black sexual deviance and the fallen womanhood of a brothel. For those that did know more about her, it is also possible she was targeted as a successful black business owner and property holder. Like those free blacks who amassed property and prompted Rhode Island to bar them from voting, like the black sailors who defended themselves in Olney's Lane and fired on a white man, Jones had disrupted the social order in which blacks were assumed to be naturally inferior and servile to whites.
In the early decades of the republic, questions had arisen about the implications of its egalitarian ideology, particularly for blacks and women, and led to such policies as gradual emancipation in northern states like Rhode Island. However, spurred on by local economic instability, riots, and a surge in population, the Providence authorities acted in the 1820s to re-impose order and stability on what they saw as an increasingly disorderly town. They were not alone in these efforts, as local governments and populist mobs all along America's Atlantic coast imposed a major realignment of racial and gender ideals that sought to relegate women to the home and African Americans to the margins of civic life. In Providence, with the establishment of a strong city government in 1832, hierarchy and stability had been at least symbolically restored. 257 However, in their rush to eliminate disorder in their town, the council damaged the lives of many women trying to eke out a living and stay out of their way.
The efforts to restore public order were also sometimes blinded by the rigid racial and gendered categories they sought to impose, and thus a single black woman who tried to blend into her community lost her livelihood, while a white brothel owner next door was untouched. However, such women were not entirely powerless against the forces arrayed against them. 257 The characterization of Post-Revolutionary American as an Enlightenment-inspired, egalitarian society that gradually transitioned toward a re-imposition of hierarchies and stability is common in studies of the Early Republic; on intertwined gender and class hierarchies, see, for example, Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 1-4; for a description of changes in maritime labor in the 1830s as a move toward "Jim Crow at Sea," see Bolster, Black Jacks, 215-232. There is also the-admittedly conspiratorial-possibility that some of the men were her customers, and the multiple lines of credit from their businesses were to prevent exposure or blackmail. However, there is no supporting evidence for that scenario in any of the complaints about Providence brothels. Most referred only to resident African Americans or people from out of town as sources of disorder, not white citizens of Providence. Most of the contemporary descriptions imply that sailors and other lower-An analysis of a second group of Rosanna Jones's creditors reinforces the impression that she was well connected in Providence. As previously discussed, she liked to buy lottery tickets, often on credit, and sometimes purchased well over one hundred dollars worth. Based on the Providence Directory, three of the lottery companies that sued her in the 1820s and 1830s maintained offices near each other on the Market Square during that time. 295 One of them, Paine, Burgess, and Company also shared an address with a fourth plaintiff, Asa Pierce and Company. There also may have been a family connection between John Paine, of the former company, and

CONVERGING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN RICH AND POOR
Walter Paine, Jr. of the latter. 296 Thus, despite the likelihood of information passing between them and the knowledge that Jones had failed to repay their peers on time, each of these brokers still extended her credit. These brokers, like the shopkeepers Around the same time the council ordered him to evict Betsey Taylor and her family, they also threatened Staples with a fifty-dollar fine if he did not evict six women from his "House or possessions," probably on suspicion of running an informal brothel. 313 The council's fears may have been well founded, since Sally B.
Andrews, a white woman from Coventry who had pleaded guilty to running a disorderly house in 1823, appeared to be in charge. The other women included Maria Innman, who was in her early twenties and had "exhibit[ed]" herself in Thankful Sharpe's brothel or dance hall the previous year, and Rebecca Rockwell, a sixteenyear-old who had first been examined at twelve or thirteen and had already spent time in the Bridewell for disobeying a removal order. 314 The other member of the group for whom we have information was Sarah Wanton, a woman of color in her thirties with three children born out of wedlock-a clear source of the council's disapproval. 315 In addition to their individual bad reputations, these women living together represented the specter of race mixing, a particular cause of anxiety at the time, as we have seen.
Samuel Staples, Jr. also went well beyond tolerating disorder in his rental properties, and, like Ezekiel Burr and George W. Bowen, actively aided disorderly women, especially Susan Parr Gardner. As early 1820, he helped her purchase property, as when he witnessed a sale from Gardner to Sally Andrews-who, as we 313 Ibid., 12:5; on Sally Andrews, see below. 314 Ibid.,11:159,[284][285][404][405] Rebecca sometimes went by the last name Corp, her mother's maiden name. 315 The other two were Mary D. Mason and a person named Hawkins, for whom there is little or no information in the records. Instead of Sarah Wanton, the record actually says "Sarah Watson," but this may be a clerk's misprint, since Sarah Wanton had previously lived in one of Staples's house on Olney's Lane; see ibid., 398, 504.
have seen, later became one of Staples's tenants as well. 316 The next year, when the council suspended action against Gardner's sister Phebe Davis-despite having branded her "of bad fame" and twice trying to remove her-it was because she showed that her husband had earlier purchased property from Staples. 317 It is very likely Gardner had set up the sale between him and her future brother-in-law. While in most cases Staples helped Gardner, sometimes the tables were reversed, as when he mortgaged a house on Benefit Street to her in 1825. 318 There is also evidence they jointly managed some properties, a collaboration that sets their relationship apart from the more skewed power dynamics between Mary Of course, such accusations against the good name and reputation of respectable citizens of Providence stem not just from the cynicism of a modern perspective, but were also widespread among contemporaries. In the aftermath of the Olney's Lane Riot in particular, the local papers cast dark hints about the complicity of white landlords in the violence. In the midst of the riot, the Rhode Island American and Gazette vaguely noted that renting cheap rooms in "sinks of iniquity" to the "wretches" of the neighborhood was "a profitable, but not very honorable mode of investing surplus funds." 323 A few days later, though acknowledging "the blacks of this town have been unusually bold for the last few weeks," the paper expanded on the share of blame greedy landlords bore for the general disorder in Olney's Lane: If these huts and brothels which have caused the town so much expense and trouble, were not let out in the manner they are, the number of disorderly blacks would be reduced and their characters generally improved…A man, to be sure, has a right to invest his money as he chooses, but it is well for him occasionally to consult the morals and peace of the community of which he is a member. 324 The paper never named names, but enough people were aware of Ezekiel Burr's connection to the site of the riot's beginning that rumors spread alleging he had provided his tenants with the guns that killed George Erickson. Obviously fearing a backlash, he had a notice published claiming "there is not one word of truth in those slightly above them on the social ladder, and thus tried to achieve success via business practices that flouted the policies of the council, may be worth further research. 323 "Riot and Murder," Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 23, 1831. 324 "Another Riot," Rhode Island American and Gazette, September 27, 1831. reports, for there is no person who laments more than I do the melancholy occurrence of that evening." 325 In the 1820s, the council also realized they needed to lean on landlords if they wanted to successfully remove large groups from disorderly and poor boarding houses. They likely understood that landlords were reluctant to evict their sources of income, even if such a selfish view abetted disturbers of the public peace. As early as the summer of 1805, the council publicly displayed the sections of the poor laws prohibiting tavern keepers from harboring transients or knowingly bringing paupers into town in an effort to prevent the "great damage and expense in consequence of frequent While landlords certainly felt the heavy hand of the council more than they had been used to after 1825, they still did not suffer as much as their tenants, even taking into account the destruction of the riots. Men like Ezekiel Burr, Samuel Staples, Jr., and Nicholas Brown never faced prosecution and removal. However, though these men faced almost no consequences and probably outwardly disapproved of the disorderly houses in Olney's Lane and Snowtown, many of them were complicit in their operation and success. They had no qualms about dealing with those the council considered disorderly or immoral if it was to their financial advantage. If they had to lend a hand legally or financially to keep a reliable tenant or, most egregiously, help entice a young woman into a brothel to support a business partner, so be it. Of course, women like Rosanna Jones, Mahala Greene, Susan Gardner, and Elizabeth Grainger clearly benefited from the relationship as well when these respectable and wealthy men ignored removal orders against them, covered for them in court, helped them acquire property, and advocated for them in front of the town council. Thus, paradoxically, in their struggle to avoid removal, disorderly women in nineteenth- 329 Ibid.,428,443. 330 Ibid.,12:132. century Providence found one of the most useful weapons to be relationships with the very elite men who were trying to remove them.

DISORDERLY HOUSES AS REFUGES
While aid from the upper ranks of Providence helped some disorderly women acquire property or run businesses, the majority could not rely on such benefactors.
Luckily, even without the help of the wealthy, women in disorderly houses could rely on each other for protection from poverty and removal. If women lacked access to male wages because of death, abandonment, or long sea voyages, the most important thing a disorderly house could do was provide an income. Some houses were so successful that a female house keeper could in turn offer economic support in cases where a husband was unemployed or suffered from illness or injury. Boarding house keepers could pass on their success by finding work-licit or not-for other women, arranging for delayed payment of rent, or helping with childcare. Others clearly felt it worthwhile to pass on the skills needed for running a disorderly house to other members of their family. Those skills were based in an understanding of the closeknit networks within the poor neighborhoods of northern Providence. To remain lucrative, dance halls relied on unlicensed food and drink stands to provide refreshments and all relied on the brothels and boarding houses to provide customers.
When complaints arose about disorder in a particular house, there were apparently arrangements that allowed residents to lay low and avoid the constables when they came to deliver a summons or removal order. The networks between women in disorderly houses were an essential institution for preventing poverty and avoiding the attention of the authorities.
One of the most common ways for women to make money in the Colonial and If the female proprietors of disorderly houses found it somewhat easier to keep poverty at bay, so too could their female tenants or employees. In an era when the industrial or domestic work available to women offered long hours for little money, and when a husband's absence spelled economic ruin, the pull of the illicit economy was strong. In her groundbreaking work on the Progressive Era, Ruth Rosen calculates that in an evening of prostitution, a woman could earn the equivalent of a week's work in a factory or domestic service. The dangers of sex work-abuse, venereal disease, pregnancy-were present in the form of demands for sexual favors from male employers in respectable jobs too, but without the added financial benefit. 337 Further work has shown that prostitutes in the early nineteenth century made similar calculations to those in the early twentieth century. 338 Rockman calls prostitution a "dangerous but lucrative" option for poor women in Early Republic Baltimore, and Lyons asserts that at roughly the same time in Philadelphia, some viewed it positively as "a symbol of independent womanhood." 339 Prostitution was so lucrative that in some cases it allowed women to rapidly climb the social ladder. The most outstanding nineteenth century example of this trajectory was Eliza Bowen Jumel, whom Gilfoyle calls "the leading prostitute in post- 336 Rockman,"Women's Labor,[185][186][187] Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918  kept had allowed her and her three children the freedom to keep living in Providence for the five years her husband had been gone in Pawtucket. 370 The same year, the council also accused Rachel Smith and Juda Maxwell of running a disorderly house.
The two women, at least one of whom was recently divorced, appear to have been friends pooling their resources to maintain a household and raise their children independent of male wages. 371 Of course, such independence and flouting of middleclass norms of marriage and domesticity came with the danger of attracting the disapproval of neighbors and the council. However, though such behavior was risky, at least these women had the mutual support of those they lived with.
Many other women had independence thrust upon them and turned to running a disorderly house after the loss of a husband. The best example is Eliza Granger, who turned to selling liquor after the death of her husband Bildad. Rosanna Jones may have also been married at one point to a man named James Jones, but he either died or they separated. 372 Court documents refer to her variously as a "single woman," "spinster," or a "widow." 373 Finally, as might be expected given the long absences and dangers of life aboard ship, many disorderly house keepers were the wives of sailors. Emeline Bliss, though she was single when she lived with Susan Gardner, eventually married a sailor named William "Billings" Burch. That she and not he was charged with running a 370 PTC 11:11-12. 371 Ibid., 10:564-565; of course, there is also the possibility that Maxwell and Smith were in a romantic or sexual relationship. There is no evidence they were running a disorderly establishment, so the nature of their relationship or simply the unorthodox composition of their household may have been the sole reason for the complaint. 372  when they were first living together. In addition, Potts also likely preferred to board someone she already knew to be reliable. 416 Connections like that between Eliza Potts and Sally Taylor made disorderly houses informal institutions that potentially offered aid to men and women as they navigated a harsh urban environment. Maritime historians have long known that boarding houses and brothels offered fringe benefits to sailors in port. 417 As early as the seventeenth century, one historian has found the English Royal Navy relied on female boarding house keepers "to provide medical care for…sick and injured [sailors]." 418 Victorian sailors returning to the British ports of Southampton and Plymouth also stayed repeatedly with the same women who, in addition to sex, provided services such as "housing them, holding their money, and protecting them from being skinned by unscrupulous lodging-house keepers and thief-prostitutes." 419 In Providence, William Jordan, who had been living on and off with Mahala Greene for five years, trusted her to store some of his property-a set of pistols-in her room at Ezekiel Burr's brothel. 420 The Providence records reveal that sailors were not the only recipients of the aid boarding houses offered. Many women-some of them sailors' wives-also used them to keep from falling into poverty and to avoid unwanted attention from the authorities. In several cases, boarding house keepers simply hid tenants who might draw the ire of the council, like whoever "secreted" the "bad women" living with the complaint had occurred well over a month before the constable apprehended her, suggesting that she may have utilized the same networks as Taylor to hide in town. 429 Furthermore, when constable Edward Harwood tried to fine Innman after she still refused to leave town, he had to inform the council that she had eluded him again. 430 Wherever Innman had hidden, she eventually scraped together the seven dollars she needed for the fine-possibly from performances similar to the one she gave at the Sharpes' house. 431 In April, the council tried to remove her yet again, but in September she was found still living in town with Sally Andrews. 432 Perhaps she had been hiding with Andrews all along, or maybe, like Taylor, she had kept changing her residence to elude Harwood. Though she was ultimately caught, Innman had evaded permanent removal for almost a year using the network of boarding houses as a refuge.
While Maria Innman, like a significant proportion of women in disorderly houses, was likely procuring her income by prostitution or other illicit behavior, boarding houses were also sources of more respectable employment. Susan Gardener employed Betsey Sheffield, a thirty-year-old woman of color who, in addition to taking in washing, told the council she had "been at service" at Gardner's house in August 1821. 433 In addition to direct employment, the records also indicate that boarding house keepers helped transient women find work elsewhere in Providence.
In 1802, a young white woman named Polly Weeden told the council that Margaret Simons, the black woman with whom she had been living for the past week, had "found no Business for her." In response, the council issued Weeden a removal order since she was "of bad fame" and sent Simons to the Bridewell for running a disorderly house. However, it is likely that the council's main concern was over a black and a Other women received help from boarding house keepers with childcare or in cases of illness. In 1810, Rebekah Jones, a woman of color from Maryland, had been "sick about a fortnight of an inflammation of her Eyes" and was staying with another woman of color, Mary Edwards. Since she was about to become chargeable to the town, Jones was probably not working, and Edwards may have been giving her room and board for free or on credit, if not also providing some medical care. 439 Polly Booth also received help from wives in the community during and after a pregnancy.
Booth was likely a domestic servant working and living with a Dr. Mason, whose house she "quitted" in mid-February 1803. She had likely been fired when her employer discovered she was pregnant, and found refuge in the house of a Mrs. La 438 PTC 8:224; the association of the Lockwoods with Warwick and their identity as people of color comes from later examinations of their daughter and son-in-law; see ibid., 9A:457; 11:324-325. 439 Ibid.,9A:338; while Jones was not legally settled in Providence, the council did not order her removal, possibly indicating the believed she would soon recover and find work. If so, she may have arranged to pay her landlady back once she recovered. These networks between disorderly houses helped many women stave off the worst when crushing poverty and the town council threatened to disrupt their lives.
By providing rudimentary services like temporary childcare or a little credit towards rent, many boarding house keepers kept their tenants from hitting rock bottom. Most tenants, however, wanted to improve their lives, and saw in disorderly houses a good chance to make money more quickly than in the other jobs available to women in the early nineteenth century. As Susan Gardner and Rosanna Jones demonstrate, the potential profits in catering to sailors and other travelers in search of a night on the town were large. So is the amount of evidence that disorderly house keepers 440 It seems unlikely that Booth willingly quit her job in the middle of winter. Given that she had had her child by June, she was probably trying to conceal the pregnancy and was fired when Dr. Mason finally noticed. 441 PTC 8:264. 442 Ibid., 9B:301; it is possible the child was acting as a servant of some sort to pay her way, though since she was four, she may not have been that much help.

CONCLUSION
As we have seen, poor women in early nineteenth century Providence often relied on informal networks with their neighbors, both respectable and disorderly, to combat the increasing pressures exerted by economic forces and the town council's concurrent efforts to stamp out disorder. Clearly, for some women, reliance on these networks eventually paid off. Susan Gardner avoided the destruction of her property in the Olney's Lane Riot and continued to live and prosper in Providence for years. air of respectability, allies who might intercede on their behalf with the council, or legal aid. With the exception of Jones, they were also white, and thus, while they did not conform exactly to the new ideal of female domesticity that coalesced in the early nineteenth century, they did not carry the added stigma of black women and their associations with sexual disorder. Most women were not fortunate enough to have all these benefits, and by their nature, the town council records highlight the failure of many women to avoid removal.
Included with those removed were women who relied heavily on informal networks to shield them from the council. The last mention of Sally Andrews, after her numerous attempts to set up a brothel or boarding house of her own, is a notation council is a notation from June 1830 that she and another woman were in "contempt of [an] order" to leave Providence, and, since they were "poor destitute Idle Vagrants," and could not pay the fine imposed on them, they were instead to be removed after a week spent in the new Dexter Asylum. 449 These, of course, are but a handful of the many poor women removed or thrown in the workhouse in Providence in the American Republic's first half century.
Yet there is evidence that the networks that grew up in these poor neighborhoods persisted despite many individuals' misfortunes of riot and removal.
We know of some disorderly house keepers who never faced legal consequences for their activities. James Axum and his wife Hannah, who ran the sailor boarding house next to William Brown's childhood home, were never disciplined for the disorder and drunkenness described in Brown's memoir. 450 Even houses that were shut down did not always stay that way. Brown wrote that after 1831 "Olney street had fallen to rise no more as a place of resort for rum shops, sailors and lewd women," but Susan Gardner's continued presence there certainly suggests that disorderly houses were not entirely eradicated. 451 Brown himself later undercut his statement by an offhand reference to some Methodists' deliberations over whether to build a church on Gaspee Street, "where many poor people lived and some of bad reputation." 452 Gaspee Street was just off Smith Street, probably not far from Snowtown and Eliza Granger's house. 449 PTC 12:319; the Dexter Asylum for the poor and insane was founded in 1828 to supplement the workhouse or Bridewell. 450 A single notation in 1817 demands that Axum come to the next council meeting to answer a complaint from the captain of the town watch, but he either never showed up or answered the complaint in some other way, because there was no follow-up; see PTC 9B:526. 451  Though it persisted, for many women, the network of boarding houses and other disorderly establishments served only to delay the inevitable. True, the nature of the council records means we know the most about those who were eventually caught and removed. However, in the early nineteenth century, a growing number of landless migrants settled in Providence where, unlike Axum, Susan Gardner, or Rosanna Jones, the threat of removal was ever present. For many female transients, the question of whether they stayed in or left Providence depended on the chance that the council did not have the time or resources to get around to examining them and kicking them out.
The best they could hope for was to barely eke out an existence for years and lay low hoping the watch, their neighbors, or the council did not take too much notice.
Many who wanted to get out of poverty had to choose the lesser of two evils.
One of the quickest possible routes to earning enough money to avoid becoming chargeable to the town led into the neighborhoods frequented by sailors and others rowdies in search of drink and other diversions. However, while illicit trade or prostitution could-possibly-alleviate the danger of removal as a poor transient, it also invited the attention of the council for disorderly behavior. By the late 1820s, even living in Olney's Lane or Hardscrabble for the cheap rent or rudimentary social services could brand a woman as disorderly. This choice between being kicked out for disorder or for poverty was especially fraught for women of color, because they not only were stuck with the racist stigma of sexual deviancy, but also any victualing or liquor establishment they ran was automatically disorderly, even if they did not stay open too late or sell liquor on Sundays.
Unfortunately for women in Providence, the informal networks of the town's poor neighborhoods were all they had to rely on until the twentieth century, and with few exceptions the best those networks could do was keep a woman's head above water and prevent the worst from happening. While the 1820s and 1830s saw scattered efforts to organize female textile workers, including a modestly successful strike at one of Samuel Slater's mills in Pawtucket in 1824, the early labor movement had largely collapsed in the United States by the early 1840s. 454 Some improvements in social welfare did occur in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through partnerships between female reformers and local governments. However, these often produced mixed results or unintended consequences, a major example being the Progressive-era effort to eliminate prostitution that drove many desperate women into the arms of violent criminal organizations for protection from the police. 455 In Providence's black community, while a flurry of institution-building started as early as 1820 and the nineteenth century saw successful organization to desegregate 454 On the mixed success of early female labor organization in Massachusetts's Lowell mills during the 1830s and its subsequent collapse as poor Irish immigrants replaced the daughters of native Yankee farmers, see Dublin,Women at Work,[198][199][200][201][202][203][204][205][206][207] Providence's schools and re-enfranchise black men, material assistance to poorer members of the community was not always possible. Furthermore, many middle-class African American institutions tried to distance themselves from racist stereotypes of disorder by maintaining rigid moral standards that precluded any kind of disorderly behavior. 456 For example, the correspondence of Providence's earliest black mutual aid society, the Free African Union Society, was suffused with a message of Christian uplift, and members were urged to refrain from drinking, to legalize their marriages, and to avoid extravagant expense or idleness. 457 The twentieth century has seen more improvement. In place of parsimonious town poor relief, the United States since the Great Depression has implemented an expansive federal welfare program. The social movements of the latter half of the century, from the Civil Rights movement to the feminism of the 1970s, have brought sweeping changes as well, not least in implementing laws that try to close racial and gendered wage gaps. This combination of factors has enabled unprecedented numbers of women to live and work independently of marriage and a male breadwinner.
However, even these advances have left significant economic, racial, and gender inequalities, and in early twenty-first century America, as Linda Tirado points out, poor women are still struggling. In a time when the power of unions is fast declining, when deindustrialization has hollowed out many American towns, and when the social safety net is under attack, it is worth contemplating the lives of women who lived without the benefit of these institutions. As the lives of Linda Tirado and Betsey 456 Bolster, Black Jacks, 160. 457 Cottrol, Afro-Yankees, 45-47; the society started out in the late 1780s as an advocate of Afro-American re-colonization of Africa, but later shifted toward providing mutual aid for members; see also Brown, Life of Brown, 92 for a description of Thomas Reed, a middle-class man of color who maintained a good reputation for his boarding house by refusing to rent to sailors.
Taylor demonstrate, these women can and will hustle to survive. But perhaps they should not have to.