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Reviewed by:
  • White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917
  • Elisabeth S. Clemens
White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917 By Brian Donovan University of Illinois Press, 2006. 186 pages. $30 (cloth)

In the late 19th century, many Americans saw the city as a place of danger. The specific threats varied: pestilence, poverty and sexual predation. The last of these fueled an outcry against "white slavery" which involved the coercion – or perhaps only the temptation – of women into prostitution, sometimes with men of the same race (however race was defined), sometimes with others. But, as Brian Donovan argues in White Slave Crusades, analyses of such movements are too often infused with "a form of modernization theory whereby the expressive, creative, and ideational aspects of white slave crusades merely index something deeper and realer." (p. 133) "White slavery," from this perspective, is only one more symptom of the anxieties generated by the changes in the underlying structures of economic, political, and social orders. Instead, Donovan contends, the activism around prostitution should be understood as constructing cultural categories and boundaries, as a process of "racial formation" which is the "product of large and small 'racial projects.' " (p. 3) In making a movement around the issue of white slavery, reformers were engaged in the cultural work of aligning categories of race, gender and sexuality.

To construct his case for the agency involved in responses to social change, Donovan emphasizes variation in the diagnoses and prescriptions offered by different reformers operating in different cities. He begins, as would most [End Page 375] conventional cultural histories, by reconstructing the major narratives of white slavery as represented in the most prominent publications and cultural artifacts. Yet Donovan's point is to understand white slavery as an opportunity for varied reformers to advance distinctive understandings of the problems of their day and of the normative categories of race as well as gender. For some reformers, "white slavery" indexed threats posed by immigrants, be they French Canadian lumbermen or the alleged conspiracy of Eastern European Jews, who threatened the innocence of naïve, native-born country girls attracted to promised wages in boardinghouses or to the bright lights of the city. For others, notably Jane Addams, women's participation in prostitution was a choice made under the constraints of low wages and economic exploitation. For her fellow Chicagoan, attorney Clifford Roe, prostitution was instead a reflection of moral character; given "the right stuff," a woman would resist prostitution no matter how dire her economic circumstances. After making his reputation in Chicago, Roe was then summoned to New York City to assist a Rockefeller-supported investigation which highlighted the implication of prostitution in the world of "black and tan" establishments with their threats of miscegenation between whites and African-Americans. Meanwhile, Donaldina Cameron ran a mission in San Francisco dedicated to rescuing Chinese prostitutes and reforming them in the disciplines of Christian femininity which would be rewarded with marriage to a Christian Chinese man.

By documenting these diverse responses to white slavery, Donovan makes a compelling case for the culturally contested relationships among race, gender and sexuality. The "panics" over white slavery signaled cultural trouble and reformers were important voices that offered explanations of the sources of that trouble and recommended appropriate solutions. His theoretical ambitions, however, extend to showing "how discourse related to gender and sexuality has provided the scaffolding upon which racial distinctions rest." (p. 132) Here, however, his insistence on the singular – "the scaffolding" – raises a number of comparative questions that push beyond the scope of this study. As he explains, the trope of "white slavery" was initially linked to a defense of the wages of white workingmen who were struck by the parallels between capitalist exploitation and chattel slavery. The term then migrated into discourses around sexual exploitation, but does this imply that talk about sex became the primary locus for culturally aligning categories of race, gender and sexuality? Or were there alternatives discourses – different scaffoldings – around labor, politics, residence, and so forth that were equally if not more important contributions to the broader racial projects of the United States in the early 20th century?

Although Donovan himself...

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