Anthropologist Phillippe Bourgois, in an ethnography of the crack market in Spanish Harlem, states that the presence of women on the streets and in the crack market illustrates their emancipation from household labor and childcare. They are free to participate in street life. According to Natasha Du Rose, Wilson (1993) makes the argument that women's crime and drug use are rising to match men's because of women's emancipation. Du Rose quotes Fagan as saying that women's positions in the drug economy are high-status enough that prostitution plays a “relatively insignificant” part in generating income for these women.
