BOOK REVIEW : Club Ladies Versus Ladies of the Night : STORYVILLE by Lois Battle ; Viking $22; 434 pages

For about 20 years at the beginning of this century, the author reminds us, the Storyville section of New Orleans was the only place in America where prostitution was legal.

This novel gives us a description of life in “The District” and provides as contrast a few glimpses of proper existence and what that meant for respectable ladies of the day.

This is a woman’s novel but is feminist in tone, which is a risky literary trick, since the readership of “Storyville” will doubtless include many women of just the sort the author skewers and lampoons.

Julia Randsome is a New Orleans wife in 1898, but she’s an outsider, a Bostonian who has been raised austerely and who believes firmly in women’s rights. Down here in New Orleans, the wives of the wealthy couldn’t care less about any of that. They love fashion and clothes and entertaining and flirting.

When it comes to Julia’s attention that the city fathers are going to legalize the red-light district, Julia is outraged and takes a petition against that legalization to her own local woman’s club.

The twittery ladies--except for a very few--are scandalized. Their whole position in life is not to know about such things, because only by cultivated ignorance can they survive, both financially and emotionally.

Julia shares at least one opinion with these beruffled nitwits. She can’t understand how a woman can give herself to a man for money. It’s beyond her comprehension.

For her benefit and for ours, the author creates another character, plucky young Kate, who’s only 14 but who has been lured away from her poverty-stricken farm by a fast-talking cad. The cad takes her to a hotel, seduces and then abandons her.

Only through the kindly ministrations of a hotel clerk does Kate find a position, first with an unscrupulous milliner, then with a bad madame, then with a far kinder one--Queen Mollie Q. At Mollie’s, Kate finds shelter, kindness, good food, the companionship of other girls.

For numberless females, the author suggests, the only viable way to exist was (and perhaps is) as a prostitute. Kate’s sections of the novel, well-researched and compassionate, make up the best part of the narrative.

Meanwhile, back on the respectable side of town, Julia’s conniving mother-in-law has revealed that the Randsome family owns extensive properties in the District, and Julia is mightily disgusted at the lot of them.

Not only that, everybody’s getting ready to go off to the Spanish-American War, including the Randsomes’ idealistic son, Lawrence, who’s given a night on the town by his friends, and . . . .

You know who he’s going to end up with.

The plot churns on like this, but it’s not terribly important, especially by the end of the book. The real structure here is based on four women’s meetings: The first, that twittery disaster in which New Orleans matrons claim, more or less successfully, to know nothing at all about their fallen sisters and little about anything else.

The second meeting, in stark contrast, focuses on all the madames of the District--a decidedly more intelligent bunch.

Then, due to vagaries of the plot, we journey to Boston where we get cameos of famous feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Then, 40 years later, after everybody’s fates have been decided, we go back to New Orleans again, to see what--if any--improvements in the “lot” of women have been made, and (this seems quite strange to me) to see if the daughters of the nitwits from 1898 are any smarter at all than their brainless mothers.

Here’s what disturbs me about this book. Lois Battle puts a great deal of the responsibility for their own “oppression” on well-brought-up respectable women.

Her least appealing characters here are women (Julia’s monster mother-in-law and her whining, spoiled daughter). It seems, both in fictional and real-life terms, Battle doesn’t give these wives a fair shake. If prostitutes are individual victims of a larger system, doesn’t the same thing hold true for wives, both then and now?

The publishers have ordered up many copies of this novel, but I can’t shake an uneasy feeling that the author is way too tough on the exact kind of women who are going to plunk down their money and buy this book.