Civil War prostitutes.

[Mike Serpa]

not necessarily - but as an assumption it makes more sense than any other so far offered. if they are wash women the behaviour of these 'gentlemen' is intollerable - we are talking the 1860s and four of the guys even stare at them from the first floor (of the white building). also none of them has a hand even near the 'laundry' which looks indeed more like some sort of a blind screen (word?) than laundry. i also doubt that you need nine (or ten) wash women for this amount of laundry.

so for the time being ...

I think they are prostitutes.

 

[Schwallanscher]

I think they are prostitutes.

i lean towards the same conclusion

 

[ikesdad]

Is it men's or women's laundry. I see a lot that look like men's drawers. I don't really see anyone staring other than at the camera. At that time whenever there was a photographer in the neighborhood, I suppose all within earshot would turn out to get in the picture.

 

[Schwallanscher]

Is it men's or women's laundry. I see a lot that look like men's drawers. I don't really see anyone staring other than at the camera. At that time whenever there was a photographer in the neighborhood, I suppose all within earshot would turn out to get in the picture.

what's those guys' business even being there if these women are proper laundresses? also, if all these people stare at the camera there must have been about a dozen and nobody actually looked at the one that took the picture. it was positioned in the first floor, obviously.

 

[ikesdad]

I count 12 men on the ground and all 5 persons in the windows looking in the direction of the camera. Partner, I'm not saying what they are or are not, I'm simply going by what the photograph appears to look like.

 

[5fish]

Here is a related thread the Nashville prostitution... experiment

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-nashville-experiment-prostitution.125069/#post-1343290

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Well, worst feature about the photo, if they are prostitutes, would be we'd be looking at women with awful stories. It was frequently a matter of this work or starve. An army can employ only so many laundresses. We'll never know how many women, North and South, were displaced by war. Husband dead, wives were evicted, or the war shattered your home, homeless, poor women had children to feed. It was a brutal era anyway, with children working in factories because their paycheck was needed.

We don't hear a lot about how ugly it could be. Female soldiers, despite what we hear of those who were discovered and just sent home, were always getting pitched into jail as prostitutes because if a female was anywhere around an army, well, of course that's what they were doing.

One more thing. When arrested, their names were printed in the newspapers- reports mentioned men were there, too, but never printed their names. Have quite a few clippings as proof.

 

[Schwallanscher]

Here is a related thread the Nashville prostitution... experiment

https://civilwartalk.com/threads/the-nashville-experiment-prostitution.125069/#post-1343290

congratualations, i consider that thread outstanding

 

[2/241]

I have my doubts about the image as there are men in the compound, 3 of the women I see in the lower part of the photo aint mulatto. None of the other women look like hookers to me. They appear to be wash women. Plus there is wash hanging everywhere. I'm going to stick my neck out and say laundry detail at the hospital.

Dear Sir if that was a laundry, it would have been the most inefective of all times. The mass of hanged out cloth is much less than a single woman could do.

It looks like a laundry labyrinth where You have to pay for searching the centre and than pay again to lend a hand to one of the washing women.

Look at the most prominent woman in the left lower sixth (?) of the pic. She is not hanging out laundry, she is hanging out something else.