"With very few jobs available to women, most who had no independent means or family to return to were forced into the sex trade. They were reviled by New York’s politicos but visited by many of the same men who decried them in the newspapers and pulpits."
"Cushman stayed in Five Points for several days, and when she emerged she had traded her clothes with a dying prostitute. These rags became her costume for Nancy. On the night of her first performance, she hid in her dressing room and emerged fully transformed. But it was what she did next that amazed everyone."
