Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti Catholic Narratives, 1830 1860
In august 1849 new York city police arrested Maria Monk for picking the pockets of her paramour. Newspapers in both Boston and New York reported that the arrest occurred near her "den," a euphemism for a brothel, in the Five Points district of New York.1 In the minds and eyes of cultured middle class men and women the Five Points was a despicable area of poor brothels, detestable crime, vermin, and disease best avoided by all respectable women. No virtuous family could survive within this "veritable sink of iniquitous pleasures."2 The degraded reputation of the area also permeated the popular literature of the day. Upon arriving in the Five Points, Peter Precise, the fictional hero in Ned Buntline's 1848 novel, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, exclaimed: "Oh God! Can this be a Christian city?"3 The arrest of a prostitute in the Five Points district, therefore, did not typically arouse much interest or surprise. Maria Monk, however, was a special case.4 Monk had captured the minds and imaginations of Americans in 1836, when, with the aid of Protestant ministers in New York, she published her autobiography, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery} In her book Monk shocked the country by disclosing the terrible ordeals she had suffered among the nuns and priests in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal,
Journal of the history of sexuality