Female ‘Traffickers’ and Urban Danger

2018 ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
White Slavery ◽  
Case Load ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Forced Prostitution ◽  
The City

The examination of the LVA’s case load offered here indicates that notions of respectable and disreputable womanhood were subsumed within the LVA’s nebulous discourse around white slavery. Women who were deemed by their patrollers to be a bad influence on others were cast as potential ‘traffickers’. Indeed, setting a supposedly bad moral example to other women was enough to be construed as engaging in a form of trafficking across moral boundaries. Consequently, the LVA’s references to white slavery tell us much more about the organisation’s own moral codes than they do the extent of coerced or forced prostitution in the city.

LGBTQ Rights, Moral Boundaries, and Municipal Temporality

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-218
Author(s):  
Alisa Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Equal Access ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Muslim American ◽  
Boundary Formation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Expression ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Lgbtq Rights ◽  
The City

This chapter discusses how Muslim and non-Muslim American residents in Hamtramck became embroiled in contestation over a proposed municipal ordinance involving the rights of LGBTQ residents to equal access in housing, employment, and public accommodation. The issue brought about an identity rupture between progressives and conservatives in the city, sundering interfaith relationships that had been formed earlier, while new alliances were being built. The chapter analyzes how a sense of moral urgency onboth sides contributed to a temporal sensibility shift that I call “ordinance time.” This schema entailed a loosening of civility standards in rhetorical comportment, encouraging the public expression of Islamophobia and homophobia. In attending to both the pace and tenor of social relations during this tense period, the chapter considers the essentialism attached to religious and secular moralities, while addressing how the municipal debate influenced boundary formation processes.

Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
JANET BEER ◽  
KATHERINE JOSLIN
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Charlotte Perkins Gilman ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Social Pathology ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
North Side ◽  
Hull House ◽  
The City

Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

Retrieving a Redemptive Past: Protecting Heritage and Heimat in East German Cities

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Jason James
Keyword(s):  
Historic Preservation ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
East German ◽  
German Cities ◽  
The City

In the years following unification, East German cityscapes have been subject to fierce contention because historic preservation and urban renewal have served as a local allegory of national redemption. Using conflicts over preservation and renewal in the city of Eisenach as a case study, I argue that historic cityscapes have served as the focus of many East Germans' efforts to grapple with the problem of Germanness because they address the past as a material cultural legacy to be retrieved and protected, rather than as a past to be worked through. In Eisenach's conflicts, heritage and Heimat serve as talismans of redemption not just because they symbolize an unspoiled German past, but also because they represent structures of difference that evoke a victimized Germanness—they are above all precious, vulnerable possessions threatened with disruption, pollution, or destruction by agents placed outside the moral boundaries of the hometown by its bourgeois custodians.

Narratives of Sexual Consent and Coercion: Forced Prostitution Trials in Progressive-Era New York City

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (03) ◽  
pp. 597-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Donovan ◽  
Tori Barnes-Brus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Defense Attorneys ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Forced Prostitution ◽  
The Relationship

This article analyzes testimony about forced prostitution voiced in New York City's Court of General Sessions from 1908 to 1915. During these years, the problem of coercive prostitution—commonly called “white slavery”—received an unprecedented amount of attention from journalists, politicians, and antivice activists. Drawing from verbatim transcripts of compulsory-prostitution trials, our research examines the relationship between cultural narratives and courtroom storytelling. We show how the white slavery narrative in popular culture oriented prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jurors in prostitution trials. Extending the account of social control in the sociological literature on antivice activism, our analysis shows that the prosecution of forced prostitution was not simply a top-down exercise of juridical power. Using insights from conversation analysis and cultural history, an examination of compulsory-prostitution cases reveals a quadripartite storytelling process where judges and jurors—with different orientations to the white slavery narrative—played a constitutive role in how the defense and prosecution argued their cases.

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.

White Slavery and Social Purists’ Authority

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-124
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Forced Prostitution ◽  
Case Work ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This chapter unpacks social purists’ commitment to the notion of ‘white slavery’ during the inter- and post-war years. Focusing on the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA), the chapter argues that this organisation used white slavery to construct their patrolling and moral surveillance of women as necessary to the maintenance of urban social order. By working with only a vague notion of white slavery, the LVA were able to imprecisely apply this term to their case work. Young women from marginalised communities, particularly Irish and working-class women, were presented by the organisation as being vulnerable to white slavery. Despite their records showing little engagement with women involved in forced prostitution, the LVA’s continual allusions to white slavery enabled their patrollers to further their image as experts in the moral protection of women and the organisation’s references to white slavery were used to try to generate donations from LVA supporters.

The Visual Pedagogy of Reform: Picturing White Slavery in America

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 854-888
Author(s):  
Amy Lippert
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Rural Families ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
True Crime ◽  
The City

The Progressive-Era movement to end enforced prostitution—hyperbolically termed “white slavery”—achieved substantial and enduring legislative and political victories by the onset of World War I. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, images provided a potent but heretofore overlooked vehicle for the most prominent white slavery activists, a means of picturing the city with all its dangers and temptations, and an effective means of competing with the spectacles of modern society. The visual propaganda of white slavery demonstrates the extent to which prominent members of this reform movement—and several impostors masquerading as earnest reformers—engaged in controversial, explicit tactics in the vein of contemporary true-crime stories. Whether these methods were in the service of arming rural families with valuable knowledge or simply generating attention and profit, they reveal the internal contradictions that threatened to undermine or even undo the reformist message.

scholarly journals Re-imaging the Moral Order of Urban Space: Religion and Photography in Winnipeg, 1900-1914

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-93
Author(s):  
James Opp
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Environmental Problem ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
Visual Technology ◽  
Social Documentary ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
The City

Abstract The arrival of the Reverend J.S. Woodsworth as the Superintendent of Winnipeg's All Peoples' Mission in 1907 coincided with a strategic shift in the visual representation of urban space in many Canadian Methodist publications. Traditional photographs of churches and ministers were soon accompanied by images of crowded tenements, impoverished conditions, and unsupervised children on the street. This paper examines the introduction of a social documentary style of photography and analyses how these images functioned within the context of the emerging social gospel and widespread middle-class anxieties over the “problem” of the city. This visual technology appealed to the new social reform emphasis on “surveying” conditions, but photography's inherent claim to represent an objective reality was overlaid with gendered moral boundaries, particularly in the space that surrounded the bodies of children. The re-imaging of urban space was part of a broader narrative that positioned the religious response to the city as both a moral and an environmental problem.

“To me, you are not a Serb”: Ethnicity, ambiguity, and anxiety in post-war Sarajevo

Ethnicities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-563
Author(s):  
Jelena Golubović
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Empirical Methods ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Post War ◽  
One Year ◽  
Republika Srpska ◽  
The City

The siege of Sarajevo has altered the experience of ethnicity, reconfiguring ethnic categories into moral boundaries. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by the Army of Republika Srpska, and many Sarajevan Serbs still grapple today with the feeling that others view them as aggressors. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Serb women of the pre-war generations, I describe how they intentionally make small alterations in gesture and body language in order to perform ethnic ambiguity, and avoid being read by others as Serb. While anthropological accounts have tended to use performativity to emphasize the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity, here I focus on the anxiety that drives Serb women’s performances in order to capture the inherent and inescapable feeling of ethnicity in a post-war space. I also discuss the difficulty of capturing this anxiety through empirical methods, navigating the discrepancy between Serb women’s narrative accounts of ethnic stigmatization compared to the apparently unproblematic flow of everyday social life. Through this discrepancy, I demonstrate how the embodied and ever-accumulating feeling of ethnic anxiety can conjure threats where there may be none, and how it can charge even the most (seemingly) mundane encounters.

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