Sex, Marriage, and State Surveillance of the Intimate in Progressive-Era America

Contributing to the growing literature on state surveillance of the intimate in U.S. history, Jessica R. Pliley and Erica J. Ryan reveal that policing women’s sexuality and protecting the sanctity of heterosexual monogamous marriage were central concerns of state officials and progressive reformers in the first half of the twentieth century. Where Pliley focuses on the Mann Act’s key role in transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into a national investigative agency, Ryan zooms in on the 1920s to examine how the First Red Scare initiated an era of gender and sexual conformity. While both books are important contributions to the fields of the Progressive Era, immigration history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of marriage and the family, Red War on the Family is a more specialized must-read for anyone interested in the First Red Scare, discursive constructions of communism and Americanism in post–Russian Revolution America, and the formation of conservative political coalitions. Likewise, Policing Sexuality will appeal to legal historians, scholars of sex trafficking and prostitution, and anyone interested in the creation of the modern police state.

Based on nearly 1,000 Mann Act cases from 1910 to 1941 and a wealth of other Bureau of Investigation files, Pliley persuasively argues that the expansion of the FBI in the early twentieth century into the nation’s premier police agency depended in large part on the passage of the Mann Act, the nation’s first anti–sex-trafficking law. The Mann Act criminalized the transport of women over state lines for prostitution or “any other immoral purposes.” Originally intended to protect white, native-born women from being seduced and sold into sexual slavery, the Mann Act’s vague “any other immoral purpose” clause paved the way for the Bureau’s surveillance of women’s sexual behavior in brothels and the intimate spaces of their own bedrooms. Yet Bureau officials excluded most African American and immigrant women from the protections of the Mann Act, feeding into popular constructions of chastity and respectability as characteristics only white women could possess. By enforcing the Mann Act along decidedly gendered lines that protected the patriarchal nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and husbands’ sole rights to their wives’ sexual services, the Bureau helped normalize heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the bulwark of American stability and values amidst feminist, anticapitalist, and modernist challenges to the status quo.

Discourses on sex trafficking emerged in the United States in the 1870s in the context of Chinese immigration and the disproportionate number of Chinese women working as prostitutes, or “yellow slaves,” in the West. Fearful of the influence “yellow slavery” might have on morals and institutions, missionaries and purity activists rescued “enslaved” Chinese prostitutes and agitated for legal reform that would bar the entry of Chinese immigrants into the country. Progressive journalist Dr. Kate C. Bushnell’s 1888 report for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) on sex-trafficking in Wisconsin lumber camps ignited panic among social-purity activists about white slavery. Uncovering evidence that foreign men working in the lumber camps were trafficking young American women, these activists packaged a “myth” of white slavery to the public, portraying sex-trafficking as a crime with specifically immigrant origins.

The anti–white slavery movement did not gain full force until 1907, when the Immigration Bureau and Dillingham Commission investigated the amorphous white slavery problem in response to rumors that Chicago was the center of the trade. Investigators articulated a vision of white slavery that located vice and criminality in the bodies of poor, foreign-born women who constituted a disproportionate number of prostitutes in Chicago. Publicity surrounding the investigation fueled nativist concerns about the moral threat immigrants posed to American values and institutions. In...