White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917

by Brian Donovan

White slavery narratives reflected the social and historical conditions of their production.

thesis/theme??

The poetics of white slavery storytelling created a powerful voice for expressing concern over the pace and direction of social transformation. As

fear of rapid socioeconomic transformation

dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality converge in anti-vice activism and the production of white slavery stories.

Likewise, the crusades against white slavery used dominant ideas about gender and sexuality to construct durable racial hierarchies. Michael

white slavery constructed to deal with changing gendes, class and racial roles

study compares anti-vice efforts in three U.S. cities: Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. I compare reform efforts within each city as well as across them in order to explore the historical and regional contours of racial formation. This approach represents the “illustrative type” of comparative/historical research, juxtaposing similar historical events, processes, and actors to contribute to theoretical explanations of social life.14 Although anti-vice reformers in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco shared overlapping goals, I focus on distinct racial projects in each locale. Specifically,

methadology

Race should not be thought of as representing natural or biological characteristics of people; it is an ideological system that organizes people into groups based on perceived moral, cultural, and/or bodily distinctions. Mara

race important definition

For Theodore Allen, the expansion and contraction of racial categories in the nineteenth century reveals a deliberate divide-and-conquer strategy by capitalists.25 Allen argues that American capitalists, in essence, invented the white race in the beginning of the nineteenth century to gain economic and political control

invention of white race

two genres of American literature: captivity narratives and seduction narratives. A long-standing tradition of American captivity narratives

based on captivity narrative and seduction narrative

States. F. G. Tyrrell’s 1908 Shame of the Human Race declared, “At the present time it is next to impossible to compute the number of white slaves in this country. It is safe to say there are thousands.”11

compare with now

White slavery narratives often singled out eastern European Jews for creating white slave markets in American cities.55 In Chicago and Its Cess-Pools of Infamy, Samuel Paynter Wilson described his excursion into Chicago’s

jews targeted as white slavers

Wilson, Chicago’s immigrant population threatened to erode spatial boundaries between natives and the foreign-born. Vice districts created spaces for social and sexual

fear of immigrants

moral entrepreneur

The following chapters analyze how reformers used white slavery narratives for different projects centered on race, gender, and sexuality. Tracing the crusades against white slavery in Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco will

Stead’s article had an explicit critique of class inequality. He described depraved aristocrats who preyed on helpless working-class girls from the East End of London. One and a half

class conflict

WCTU’s Department of Social Purity. Bushnell began her lifelong