Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI by Jessica R. Pliley (review)

Most historical accounts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) emphasize either its colorful G-Men crime fighters or its shameful role in the domestic political treatment of radical and civil-rights activists. Pliley explores a new angle on the fbi and its role in federal state making—the policing of sexuality under the 1910 Mann Act. Plumbing the fbi’s extensive white slavery files between 1910 and 1940, she shows how much the fbi’s early history was shaped by the surveillance of female mobility and sexuality and the agency’s attempts to shore up patriarchal gender relations at a time of rapid social and sexual change.

Pliley begins by tracing the emergence of the transatlantic movement against white slavery—generally understood as the sexual exploitation of young white women by swarthy foreign-born procurers and traffickers. As reformers successfully pushed for laws to exclude and expel foreign-born prostitutes through the machinery of the Immigration Bureau, an equally vigorous enforcement campaign grew out of the Mann Act, which outlawed the internal transport of women over state lines for prostitution or “any other immoral purpose.” Although conceived as a measure to protect women and girls against forced prostitution, the “immoral purpose” clause allowed the fbi to expand its purview to include cases of voluntary prostitution, bigamy, adultery, and fornication. This changing scope of enforcement had to be “puzzled out” over time—a term that Pliley borrows from Heclo—in response to growing immigration, war, depression, and changing social mores and judicial rulings.¹

Pliley skillfully demonstrates the ongoing tension between the protection and the policing of women in the fbi’s enforcement efforts. Significantly, attempts to protect women from coercive or forced sex were limited to young, white, and previously chaste women; black women—widely assumed to be promiscuous and immoral—were either ignored by the fbi or prosecuted for sex crimes. Increasingly, however, criminalization became more common for all women; by the end of World War I, the policing approach had become dominant. Pliley argues that these policing efforts dramatically expanded the personnel and geographical reach of the fbi and stimulated state-level vice prosecutions. This part of the argument, however, is not entirely persuasive given the large number of white-slavery agents who were volunteers, the multiple organizations involved in wartime anti-vice activities, and the later downsizing of the fbi in the 1920s.

After the war, the fbi used its expanded powers under the Mann Act to pursue noncommercial sex cases, responding to appeals from families to retrieve errant daughters, adulterous wives, and others who rebelled against traditional family and gender roles. Pliley draws from rich case files of the 1920s to illustrate how Mann Act investigations worked to shore up conventional gender relations at a time when modernization and sexual liberalism were challenging patriarchal values. This sexual conservatism would become a hallmark of the fbi in later years, when Director J. Edgar Hoover used his agency’s power to expose sexual behavior as a tool against political adversaries.

Policing Sexuality convincingly argues for the importance of sex and gender in understanding the history of the fbi and the pitfalls of antitrafficking efforts that elide the issue of women’s consent. In her conclusion, Pliley shows how such assumptions continue to influence anti-trafficking efforts today, penalizing the very women whom such efforts are intended to help while ignoring their male customers.