White Slave Fiction, So-Called

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman’s 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre’s catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

Legislating Morality in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Moral Panic and the “White Slave” Case That Changed America

“…She insisted that the real victims of the white slave trade were the gullible readers whose relentless consumption of white slavery narratives "drove them into an anxious frenzy." 16 Scholar Laura Fisher confirms, "Many Americans were already questioning the veracity of white slavery by the time Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910, and scholars now agree that no such crisis truly existed, at least not in the sensational form writers imagined." 17 However, like many of today's moral panics, there was, as Fisher suggests, a grain of truth underlying the growing obsession.…”

“…16 Scholar Laura Fisher confirms, "Many Americans were already questioning the veracity of white slavery by the time Congress passed the Mann Act in 1910, and scholars now agree that no such crisis truly existed, at least not in the sensational form writers imagined." 17 However, like many of today's moral panics, there was, as Fisher suggests, a grain of truth underlying the growing obsession. 18 In 1982, historian Ruth Rosen compiled a number of interviews with sex workers conducted during the Progressive Era and found that 7.5 percent of the 6,309 women surveyed listed "white slavery" or "extreme coercion" as a causal factor.…”

“…Rather, it concluded that several of the stories the commission investigated "were easily recognized versions of incidents in certain books or plays." 21 The 1909 grand jury's detailed report on vice conditions in the county of New York also ultimately concluded there was little evidence of an organized traffic in women. 22 Presiding Judge Thomas O'Sullivan directed much of his ire at George Kibbe Turner, stating that the muckraker had "admitted under oath that his article was overstated and deceiving" and that "he had no evidence (not even hearsay) to support his statement."…”