Midnight Hour. Oshiwora, or "White Chapel" of Dawson City.
The bleak reality of prostitution is brought to life in this picture of the red light district of Dawson City. It was here that women of "easy virtue" made their living, probably during the tumultuous days of the Klondike. Though the craze of the goldrush was a perfect medium for prostitution to thrive in, it was by no means confined to the backwoods of the Canadian north. C.S. Clark's Of Toronto the Good (1897, reprinted 1970) and J. Gray's Red Lights on the Prairies (1971), describe the conditions which confronted the suffragist in her role as moral uplifter at the end of the nineteenth century.
On the prairies one of the greatest incentives for the trade was the building of the national railways. Thousands of immigrant men, many of them single or cut off from their families, took advantage of prostitution as one of the few means of recreation available to them. Terrible housing conditions and a shortage of marriage able women similarly encouraged the trade. Apart from the full-time prostitutes who worked in brothels, many women with legitimate jobs simply did not make enough money to survive on. In Toronto, factory workers, needle workers, chorus girls, and domestics often had to supplement their incomes by such means. As well, a white slave trade existed which fed itself on the newly arrived immigrant women. Often, women who were promised high paying jobs as domestics in Canadian homes fell into this trap. Apart from shady dealings in that area, a frequent occurrence of the abuse of domestics, either financial or physical, resulted in more women succumbing to the "profession".
Female reformers of the day were concerned with the plight of these women and the social conditions which almost condoned such activity. However, the double standard of the patriarchal society was a huge roadblock to reform. At the turn of the century many middle- and upper-class Canadians seemed unaware that the problem of prostitution was largely due to their own narrow and moralistic views.
