Protection, Virtue, and the “Power to Detain”

Abstract

This article examines why and how anxiety about Jewish migration and settlement in New York City was expressed through exotic stories of gendered and sexualized danger. In the early twentieth century, these tales became crucial elements in the regulation of women’s urban political activism. I investigate how native-born Jewish and Gentile women used protective work with immigrants and ideas about race and sexual danger as strategies for producing female citizenship. Women could invent moral and racialized hierarchies among women because of the unequal power relations among reformers and immigrants. Their activities confirm scholarship that has analyzed the history of white and racially “in-between” identity, power struggles among women, and the regulation and citizenship of women in cities and within and between nations. Analyzing the creation of urban citizens through the diversity of participants in moral reform movements and work with immigrants moves our understanding of city- and nation-building beyond the development of traditionally conceived infrastructures, policies, and systems of governance.