Why should American exceptionalism end at the red-light district?  Illustration by Fanny Blanc On Christmas Day in 1872, half a dozen women broke out of the Social Evil Hospital, an isolation institution for STD-positive female sex workers on the outskirts of St. Louis, and went looking for some good times downtown. Authorities quickly tracked them down and, a few days later, the mayor explained, “We cannot get at the men, and hence we have to take charge of you.” The hospital had been discreetly established the year before, as part of an attempt to regulate sex work in the city, which had been the first city in the U.S. to legalize prostitution. In her book “Empire of Purity,” which Rebecca Mead reviews for this week’s issue, Eva Payne details this and other episodes in the history of controlling the sale of sex, both domestically and abroad. Payne argues that ideas of American exceptionalism permeated the regulation of prostitution, even as those rules were informed by overseas models of managing the sex trade. “The combined efforts of social reformers and government officials drew upon notions of sexual continence as a moral strength with which Americans were especially endowed,” Mead explains. “Americans invoked an ethic of strenuous sexual self-mastery that justified their mastery over others.” | 
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