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

Historians have not been kind to the 1910 Mann Act, which made it a federal crime to transport women across state lines for prostitution “or any other immoral purpose.” They have viewed it as an embarrassing remnant of Progressive-era sexual conservatism and nativism, a tool for the harassment of those holding radical political views, and a case study of the dangers of legislating morality. In Policing Sexuality, Jessica Pliley takes a more nuanced view of the Mann Act, the nation’s first anti-sex trafficking law. Her beautifully written study brilliantly revises our understanding of its creation in the midst of social anxiety about immigration and new social freedoms for women; its implementation across decades of dramatically shifting sexual norms; and its uneven effects on women, including disobedient daughters, adulterous wives, professional sex workers, and victims of incest, rape, sexual assault, and sexual trafficking.

Pliley begins by contextualizing the 1907 “white slavery” craze, which encompassed both sexual and racial hysteria and outrage over real incidents of captivity and sexual abuse of women. She traces white slavery fears to a nexus of British and American narratives about the sexual trafficking of Anglo women. She also details the relationship between state and federal regulation of prostitution and turn-of-the-century imperial projects. The late nineteenth-century Social Purity movement was outraged by state and military regulation of prostitution, and publicized the suffering of victimized women. Pliley explains the shifting meaning of white slavery terminology, from the “white slave” as a foreign-born prostitute who must be quarantined, to a later understanding of the white slave as a white woman trafficked within the United States by foreign men. She details the investigative commissions that further formed the nation’s white slavery narrative. These movements culminated in the passage of the Mann Act. Pliley explains the Act’s constitutional ambiguities, the legal challenges that expanded its reach, and the ways that its investigations extended the manpower and purview of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation or fbi).

What most distinguishes Pliley’s work, however, is her sophisticated understanding of female sexual autonomy within a culture still bound by patriarchal legal structures derived from coverture. Drawing on classic works such as Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract and more recent studies on marriage, citizenship and the state, Pliley analyzes the fbi’s implementation of the Mann Act in light of the marriage contract — the idea that in return for economic support, men received exclusive rights to their wives’ sexual services and reproductive labour. True to the patriarchal sexual contract, the Bureau viewed women as either the wives, mothers, or daughters of reputable men and therefore deserving of protection, or as sexually immoral women who must be prevented from disrupting marriages, spreading venereal disease, or bearing uncontrolled, racially suspect offspring. It therefore undertook Mann Act investigations based not on the brutality of sexual assaults or sexual trafficking it uncovered, but on the characteristics of the victim — ideally young, reputable, supported by an upstanding father or husband, and most of all, white, since in the Bureau’s racist worldview, African American women did not have an inherent chastity to uphold. In selectively enforcing the Act — and in viewing the wife and prostitute as opposites, while accepting husbands’ rights to move between the two as an anonymous “John” — the Bureau upheld the double moral standard during a period of major transformations in sexual standards.

Pliley shows the surprising usefulness of the Mann Act as a tool to get convictions for rape and sexual assault during a period when both were extremely difficult to achieve. She also describes the early twentieth-century world of commercialized sexuality and the women who navigated it. Pliley explains the exploitative aspects of prostitution as it shifted from the 1910s brothel system to the 1930s system in which prostitutes paid “bookies” to get them hired for...