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

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2007 by Timothy Kubal

White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887-1917. By Brian Donovan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Everyone knows humans create structures of inequality, but how this occurs is not so clear. This book helps establish the idea that race is socially constructed through many simultaneous "racial projects." Racial projects create and reinforce racial boundaries and may appear as a hidden byproduct of what seem like non-racial activities. The author analyzes sexual vice reformers' published (and some unpublished) writings for explicit and implicit meanings, and argues that anti-vice campaigns were not moral panics based on exaggerated fears. These campaigns were not even about crime or sex; they were racial projects that helped create and reinforce persistent racial hierarchies.

The concise book has six short chapters, in addition to an introduction, a conclusion, and an index. The first two chapters introduce the reformers' narratives, the notion of racial projects, and the context for the four empirical cases upon which the book focuses. The remaining four chapters are each explicitly organized around analysis of how one anti-vice crusade operated as a racial project--as sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), or by other reformers in Chicago, New York City, or San Francisco. Each chapter implicitly reproduces four main analytic themes: the organizational context that supported the reformers, how reformers defined the sexual vice problem, how they defined its causes, and how they defined its solutions.

Organizational contexts supported the reformers; leadership, money, and eye-catching tactics helped their anti-vice campaigns. The WCTU created a "department of social purity" to raise sexual consent laws and a "department of rescue" to save the women forced into the sex trade. They paid investigators to conduct large-scale studies of forced prostitution in Midwest lumber camps. They published a journal to spread sensational stories of forced prostitution among "innocent white girls." They caught the attention of politicians who passed new "tough on crime" legislation. In Chicago, the main conservative reformers included a journalist, a government prosecutor, and an evangelist. The evangelist transformed a brothel into a rescue mission, and preached night and day in the red light district. The strange alliance of these conservative reformers and the more progressive Jane Addams brought media attention, philanthropy, and induced new legislation to shut down Chicago's sex trade. These actions helped the prosecutor try hundreds of sex crime cases--348 in 1909 alone. New York City officials hired the successful Chicago prosecutor to help solve their sex crime problem. Philanthropists appeared again to help bankroll a crusade against vice, and this activism established the "Bureau of Social Hygiene," which sponsored decades of anti-vice campaigns in New York City. In San Francisco, a social hygienist sponsored eye-catching rescues that brought philanthropy for the "Chinese prostitutes Presbyterian Mission Home." Rescued prostitutes were "rehabilitated" by providing instruction on housekeeping duties, the Bible, and the importance of marriage (only to fellow Chinese). The mission activities brought media and political attention, and discriminatory immigration laws. In all four empirical cases (San Francisco, Chicago, New York, WCTU), the mobilization of organizational resources was essential to their anti-vice, racial projects. However, the author focuses more on the narratives of the reformers, and how they constructed the problem, its causes, and solutions.

In diagnosing the problem, the WCTU campaigns borrowed from "captivity and seduction" stories of the era to describe poor rural girls systematically lured to the big city. They also borrowed from abolitionist tracts by describing the sex trafficking of white girls as a "white slavery" more brutal than the slavery experienced by "happy black slaves." They described "good" white girls lured into depravity of prostitution by the "evil immigrant." The WCTU reformers helped sustain anti-miscegenation laws by repeatedly warning that the male customers were a "racially mixed clientele." The diagnosis was similar in the three cities; for example in New York, they described a "good white girl" forced into interracial sex, and flamed fears that the women were breeding a mulatto race. In San Francisco, reformers said the Chinese women lured into the sex trade were in a worse institution than chattel slavery, and warned of moral and genetic pollution of Whites by inferior Chinese. Reformers' construction of the problem certainly showed racial assumptions, as did their construction of the cause.

The WCTU reformers defined the cause as primarily economic--aristocrats luring peasants into sexual slavery. They also relied on fears about new social changes--new aristocrats, women's beginning liberation, five-cent theatres, and a "foreign sexual threat" of immigrants who ran brothels or acted as sex-slave procurers. In Chicago, the debate between conservative and progressive reformers was primarily over definitions of the problems' cause. The conservative bunch worked to reform an immoral sex trade they thought was caused by immigrants' (French, Italian, and Jewish) "poison" morality. In contrast, Addams believed the immigrant culture should be preserved, and that the problem with sexual vice was caused by economics, and in particular, the inequality and greed brought by the economic system. Just as there were debates over defining the cause and the problem, there were also contrasting constructions of the solution.