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This Chapter examines the challenges that historians face when researching illicit labour and the shadow economy – in this case, prostitution and sex trafficking. It argues that generating reliable data about the extent of prostitution and sex trafficking continues to be an insurmountable challenge for historians, just as it was for the historical subjects historians study. It notes that like today’s debates about what practices actually constitute forced labour, the parameters of the term ‘white slavery’ were similarly contested. And it suggests that political forces produced the quantifiable data about white slavery, but the very archives that house the sources historians use are themselves political spaces and function to legitimize state power, reformers’ values, and narratives where the ‘victim’ was rendered silent.

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In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists sought to construct a new position for women inspectors in the Immigration Bureau. These activists asserted that immigrant girls traveling without a family patriarch deserved the U.S. government's paternal protection, yet they argued that women would be best suited to provide this protection because of women's purported maternal abilities to perceive feminine distress. By wielding paternal government authority—marked by a badge, the ability to detain, and presumably the power to punish—these women could most effectively protect the nation's moral boundaries from immoral prostitutes while also protecting innocent immigrant girls from the dangers posed by solitary travel. In 1903 the Immigration Bureau launched an experiment of placing women among the boarding teams at the port of New York. The experiment, however, was short-lived, as opponents of the placement of women in such visible positions campaigned against them. This episode reminds us that the ability to represent and exercise federal authority in the early twentieth century was profoundly gendered; and women's increased participation in government positions during the Progressive Era was deeply contested.