The Petticoat Inspectors: Women Boarding Inspectors and the Gendered Exercise of Federal Authority

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Pliley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Port Of New York ◽  
Government Authority ◽  
The U.S

In the early twentieth century, anti-white-slavery activists sought to construct a new position for women inspectors in the Immigration Bureau. These activists asserted that immigrant girls traveling without a family patriarch deserved the U.S. government's paternal protection, yet they argued that women would be best suited to provide this protection because of women's purported maternal abilities to perceive feminine distress. By wielding paternal government authority—marked by a badge, the ability to detain, and presumably the power to punish—these women could most effectively protect the nation's moral boundaries from immoral prostitutes while also protecting innocent immigrant girls from the dangers posed by solitary travel. In 1903 the Immigration Bureau launched an experiment of placing women among the boarding teams at the port of New York. The experiment, however, was short-lived, as opponents of the placement of women in such visible positions campaigned against them. This episode reminds us that the ability to represent and exercise federal authority in the early twentieth century was profoundly gendered; and women's increased participation in government positions during the Progressive Era was deeply contested.

scholarly journals The Dirt on "White Slavery": The Construction of Prostitution Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century American Newspapers

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Gallagher-Cohoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century America

The paper "The Dirt on 'White Slavery': The Construction of Prostitution Narratives in Early Twentieth-Century America" analyses the development of white slavery discourses in Progressive Era newspapers, reform books and trial records. White slavery involved both gendered and racialized fears of coercive prostitution. These prostitution narratives are used to uncover early twentieth-century American  perceptions of appropriate femininity, inherent female weakness, and the sexual threat of racial and ethnic minorities. 

scholarly journals Plainclothes Policewomen on the Trail: NYPD Undercover Investigations of Abortionists and Queer Women, 1913–1926

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Evens
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Queer Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Immigrant ◽  
Marginalized Women ◽  
Intimate Encounters

In early twentieth-century New York City, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. These early female entrants to the New York Police Department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with Progressive Era vice reform; they tended to be working class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. The NYPD instrumentalized policewomen's bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. But plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. Their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood.

Authenticity and Ethnicity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Ray Herzogenrath
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Young Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Settlement House ◽  
Settlement Houses ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Settlement Movement

During the Progressive Era, settlement workers attempted to regulate dance both within and outside settlement house walls as a method to instill proper “American” body behaviors, particularly in immigrant bodies. This essay examines the paradoxes of folk dance as encouraged by settlement workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago and New York. Settlement workers aimed to assimilate immigrants to American ideals of health, refinement, and respectability through the body; in folk dance they found a satisfying mode of nonsexualized dance, which also acted out a romanticized desire for simplicity in the midst of rapid modernization. The evidence reveals that folk dance in settlement houses traveled two paths: ethnic clubs devoted to the practice of immigrant traditions and structured classes offered to girls and young women. These developments fulfilled the project of Americanization prescribed by the settlement movement and provided a means for immigrants to continue folk practices from their home countries.

Progress

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
James C. Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Laissez Faire

Chapter two explains the shutdown of racing in New York following the passage of a series of anti-gambling laws pushed by governor Charles Evans Hughes amid a national wave of Progressive Era reform. With racing banned in all but a few American jurisdictions in the early twentieth century, leading owners sent their stock to Europe. Jockeys and trainers followed. The glut of American horses flooding Great Britain sewed animosity between horsemen of the two nations. With the onset of World War I, American equestrians began a mass exodus back to the states, though resentments remained. Upon the war's conclusion, American racing would enjoy a period of rebirth as the political pendulum moved away from the Progressive spirit that had dominated American politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century and back toward a laissez-faire ethos.

scholarly journals Monitoring the Movies: The Fight Over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America by Meridith Broussard

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Clay Waters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Special Effect ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
National Board ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban America ◽  
Film Content ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Twentieth Century America

The chapters are arranged chronologically, retracing the national fight over film content, as various taboo subjects like abortion, white slavery, and racial intermarriage were addressed (or exploited) within the emerging medium. Similar ground was covered by Lee Grieveson in Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (2004), the subject of a lengthy note in Monitoring the Movies. But Fronc’s work is bolstered by voluminous correspondence from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, and the 40 pages of notes (in addition to an appendix, bibliography, and index) signal a comprehensive appraisal of this facet of the Progressive era. Along the way, there are a few light anecdotes, including one involving a melodramatic film about a railroad strike that featured a scene of a burning trestle, a special effect that meant the film’s costs ran into “many hundreds of dollars” (40).

Shaping Jazz

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damon J. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Long Run

There are over a million jazz recordings, but only a few hundred tunes have been recorded repeatedly. Why did a minority of songs become jazz standards? Why do some songs—and not others—get re-recorded by many musicians? This book answers this question and more, exploring the underappreciated yet crucial roles played by initial production and markets—in particular, organizations and geography—in the development of early twentieth-century jazz. The book considers why places like New York played more important roles as engines of diffusion than as the sources of standards. It demonstrates why and when certain geographical references in tune and group titles were considered more desirable. It also explains why a place like Berlin, which produced jazz abundantly from the 1920s to early 1930s, is now on jazz's historical sidelines. The book shows the key influences of firms in the recording industry, including how record labels and their executives affected what music was recorded, and why major companies would re-release recordings under artistic pseudonyms. It indicates how a recording's appeal was related to the narrative around its creation, and how the identities of its firm and musicians influenced the tune's long-run popularity. Applying fascinating ideas about market emergence to a music's commercialization, the book offers a unique look at the origins of a groundbreaking art form.

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