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

Abstract

Early twentieth-century Americans seemed obsessed with white slavery crusades, efforts to extirpate prostitution that launched dozens of urban vice investigations, a spate of state legislation, and ultimately, passage of the federal Mann Act (or the White Slave Traffic Act) in 1910, criminalizing the interstate transportation of women for “immoral purposes.” That preoccupation was not merely the result of an urban panic but reflected as well Americans' efforts to negotiate a rapidly changing gender and racial order. In this well-researched and nuanced study of anti-vice efforts in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, Brian Donovan explores the “reactions of native-born whites to new immigrant groups in Chicago; to African Americans in New York City; and to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco,” deftly revealing the commonalities and differences among anti-vice crusaders in these distinct urban settings (p. 4). While Donovan supports the notion that the white slavery crusades served “as a project of social control” and agrees that they allowed white males to sustain their hegemony, he notes that most scholars who support that interpretation ignore the often multivalent nature of the crusaders and their response to shifting racial and gender boundaries (p. 130). The Chicago anti-vice crusader Clifford Roe and the New York City district attorney James Bronson Reynolds viewed women engaged in the white slave trade as passive victims of male treachery; exhibited a clear nativist hostility to immigrants; and focused on the moral responsibility of white men and women to protect themselves from vice and to police racial boundaries. However, the social settlement leader Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago and the missionary Donaldina Cameron at the San Francisco Mission Home adopted a far more pluralist racial ideology, viewing immigrant acculturation not as an eradication of inferior cultures but rather “as a gradual process of urban adaptation” (p. 130). While Donovan rightly notes that Addams and Cameron took a more humane approach to the problem of prostitution—they viewed immigrant women as being victimized by the sexual coercion of the modern city—as reformers they still helped reinforce racial categories by emphasizing the distinctions among ethnic groups and by continuing to uphold the color line.