The Second Step in Double Jeopardy: Appropriating the Labor of Female Street Hustlers

Abstract

“Topical” life histories were obtained from fourteen Milwaukee female street hustlers, aged 18 to 35, eleven of whom are members (or former members) of a “street” institution termed the “pseudo-family” (made up of a “man” and the women who work for him). A putative and potential refuge to women responding to a dearth of licit employment opportunities and to the glitter and economic potential of the street, the pseudo-family actually emerges as a heteropatriarchal mechanism whose character, organization, and context serve to depress further, rather than enhance, the life chances of its female members. Once a woman is “turned out” by the “man” and enlisted in the pseudo-family, she is enmeshed in a tangled skein of conflicting emotions and motives; “wives-in-law” vie for the coveted position of “bottom woman” and for the attentions and regard of their “man,” and the “man” schemes (in concert with other “men”) to maintain his dominance and, above all, the profitability of the union. As female hustlers age, and as their criminal records lengthen, they become marginal even to this world of last resort. Traded as chattel, often stripped entirely of property in the process of exchanging “men,” and finally disowned when competition from other more naive, more attractive, and more obedient women becomes too strong, street women find themselves doubly jeopardized by capitalistic-patriarchal structures that are pervasive in “straight” society and profound upon the street.