The post-war call girl: Normalizing women’s sexuality
By Colin Smith, Staff Writer
Dr. Cindy Aron (right), from University of Virginia, spoke at the event.
The Women, Gender, and Sexuality department helped fund the annual American Studies lecture. After Dr. Charlene Boyer Lewis introduced her former professor University of Virginia’s graduate school, Dr. Cindy Aron illuminated the ornamental Olmstead room with her smile. After retiring from teaching, Dr. Aron has appeared on NPR speaking the notion of vacation and leisure became a middle class institution on her book Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States.
She is now working on a new book, and she shared her research and conclusions in her lecture called, “The Exotic, the Neurotic, and the Ordinary: Call Girls and the Sexual Culture of Post World War II America.” She lectured on prostitution and sexuality from 1950-1980, while providing background information before World War II when prostitutes where poor woman without education. After World War II prostitutes were, as Dr. Aron put it, “tastefully dressed and well mannered.”
Above all, these women were not confined as social outcasts, remained respectable in society, and had enough education and resources to find other jobs. However, Dr. Aron found that these call girls commercialized sex in an era of “domesticity and conservative sexuality,” that they did not in fact reflect the culture of the time. Ultimately, this normalizing of sexuality lead to the sexual revolution and helps us as scholars to understand the shift in sexuality in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Dr. Aron described the call girls as “the uncalled pioneers.” They discovered a way into the work force during a time of economic prosperity for men. Business and sex became intertwined, and as these women were going to have sex anyway, the logical thing to do was to make money out of it. As Edmund R. Murrow would write about the call girl, he exposed that the two important values of America were corrupt: family and business.
By Colin Smith
“They already realized they were in a sexualized society,” Dr. Aron declared, citing evidence from Harold Greenwald’s academic journal on prostitutes, “The Call Girl.” She referenced the neurotic, but also the exotic in a 1952 scandal where a call girl of a wealthy New Yorker was brought to trial. She then reemphasized that the majority of call girls were ordinary.
The call girl led to the sexual revolution, and Dr. Aron’s research becomes especially pertinent during the recent scandal between secret service agents and a prostitute in Colombia. During our 6th week, and the past 4th week, as student organizations such as SHAG discuss sex, we are given more context to understand contemporary sexuality through Dr. Aron’s lecture.
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