The other women's rights movement: ‘Streetwalkers’, habeas corpus and anticarceral activism in New York City, 1830–1860

Abstract This article reconstructs the earliest known movement for sex workers' rights in US history. It interprets collective assertions of due process as a strategy to overturn vagrancy laws, which permitted municipal officials to summarily commit ‘common prostitutes’ to the penitentiary for months. Mass arrests sparked an anticarceral movement of ‘streetwalkers’ who refused to be contained. Unlike the middle‐class Woman's Rights Movement, which sought equal rights for their own sake, streetwalkers acted to build a world in which they could control their own labour, have sex without punishment and move freely through their city.