Phoebe Doty (died June 9, 1849) was an American prostitute and madam. In 1821, she started her career in a

bordello A brothel, bordello, ranch, or whorehouse is a place where people engage in sexual activity with prostitutes. However, for legal or cultural reasons, establishments often describe themselves as massage parlors, bars, strip clubs, body rub par ...

in the Five Points neighborhood of

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the U ...

. Over the next three years, she accrued $600 in personal belongings.Gilfoyle 72. For the next decade or so, Doty moved from house to house, eventually settling in a brothel on Church Street. There she was valued at $800. Doty had an adopted daughter, Sal Wright, who also became a prostitute. By 1839, Doty had opened her own brothel on

Leonard Street Leonard or ''Leo'' is a common English masculine given name and a surname. The given name and surname originate from the Old High German ''Leonhard'' containing the prefix ''levon'' ("lion") from the Greek Λέων ("lion") through the Latin ' ...

. At decade's end, she was valued at $2000. During the 1840s, Doty was a prominent prostitute and madam. She held lavish balls at her brothel to attract new customers and to mingle with the upper classes. Her high profile earned her notoriety in the

penny press Penny press newspapers were cheap, tabloid-style newspapers mass-produced in the United States from the 1830s onwards. Mass production of inexpensive newspapers became possible following the shift from hand-crafted to steam-powered printing. F ...

. The ''

Libertine A libertine is a person devoid of most moral principles, a sense of responsibility, or sexual restraints, which they see as unnecessary or undesirable, and is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour o ...

'' suggested that Doty and another madam, Adeline Miller, should rent the Park Theatre and talk about their lives. It predicted that "the house would be crammed if the ''entrance'' was five dollars a ''head''. The bigger the harlot now-a-days the more money is made."Quoted in Gilfoyle 73. Emphasis in the original.

Notes

References

* Gilfoyle, Timothy J. (1992). ''City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790—1920''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Criminals from New York City American prostitutes American brothel owners and madams Year of birth missing 1849 deaths 19th-century American businesspeople 19th-century American businesswomen {{Sex-work-stub