City limits: Reputation and the sexual cartography of women's mobility in mid-twentieth-century San Francisco

For women in mid-twentieth century San Francisco, the politics of space was the politics of sex. This dissertation maps the urban expressions of women's sexuality in nightclubs, red light districts, and on neighborhood streets through the categories of work, entertainment, state policing, and sexual violence. By focusing on the city of San Francisco between the 1930s and the 1960s, it navigates the topography of sexuality over a specific terrain, making it possible to draw out quotidian details of sexual life. In doing so it focuses on the concept of sexual reputation---the mid-twentieth-century version of sexual respectability. Women in San Francisco carefully managed their sexual reputations in specific class- and race-influenced ways in order to successfully market themselves in the sexual economy, find sexual enjoyment, protect their respectability, keep themselves safe from sexual violence, and avoid state authorities. Concern about reputation lead to self-imposed limitations of urban mobility that combined with state regulation and sexual violence to create surprisingly resilient geographic boundaries for women. Understanding how the containment of women's mobility was built into a society's ideas about sexuality helps to explain how and why restrictions on women's movements seemed invisible and complete, providing a new lens for understanding the gendered inequality of urban spatial freedom.