Vice, Panic, and Policing Desire

Disgust vs. Fear as Reform Motivators

Disgust (Lecture 1): Responses to contaminated food, unsafe working conditions, unsanitary conditions in cities. Led to protective regulation like the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Fear (This lecture): Anxieties about sexuality, women's independence, immigration, and social disorder. Led to surveillance, policing, and criminalization.

Key difference: Disgust focused on protecting consumers from tangible threats. Fear focused on controlling behavior and enforcing moral norms.

Structural Changes in American Society

Structural changes are large-scale shifts in how society is organized—changes in the economy, family structure, where people live, how they work.

Why this matters: These weren't just individual moral choices. The entire social organization of American life was transforming:

• Economic: More wage work, less family production
• Demographic: Cities growing rapidly, immigration surging
• Cultural: New forms of entertainment and socializing
• Gender: Women gaining independence from family supervision

These changes made traditional forms of moral regulation (family, church, community) less effective.

Governance vs. Moral Judgment

Moral judgment: "This behavior is sinful" → handled by churches, families

Governance: "This behavior threatens public welfare" → handled by government, law, institutions

Why the shift matters: Once sex was framed as a public threat rather than a private sin, it became appropriate for state intervention. The government claimed authority over intimate life.

Modern parallel: Think about debates over whether drug use is a moral failing (requiring punishment) or a public health issue (requiring treatment). The frame determines the response.

The "White Slavery" Narrative

The story reformers told: Innocent young white women were being kidnapped or tricked by predatory men (often portrayed as foreign or non-white) and forced into prostitution.

The reality: While coerced prostitution existed, most women entered sex work due to economic necessity, not kidnapping. The panic vastly exaggerated the scale of "trafficking."

Why the name "white slavery": By invoking slavery, reformers suggested something as horrific as chattel slavery was happening to white women. This racialized language was intentional—it played on fears about racial boundaries and white women's purity.

What the panic revealed: More about Progressive anxieties than about actual patterns of prostitution.

Immigration Anxiety

The white-slave panic often portrayed "foreign men" as predators, reflecting broader anxieties about massive immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia.

Common stereotypes: Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and other immigrant men were portrayed as sexually dangerous to white American women.

What this reveals: The panic was partly about controlling immigrant communities and justifying restrictions on immigration.

Class Mobility and Anxiety

Young working-class women were moving to cities, working for wages, and living independently—often in boarding houses without family supervision.

Middle-class fear: These women might mix with "dangerous" men across class and ethnic lines.

Result: Reformers focused on controlling working-class women's behavior while claiming to protect them.

Female Independence

The panic emerged exactly when women were gaining new freedoms: working for wages, living independently, socializing in public, delaying marriage.

The contradiction: Reformers wanted women to be economically independent but sexually controlled. They celebrated women's work but feared women's autonomy.

Result: "Protection" often meant surveillance and restriction of women's freedom to move, work, and socialize.

Racial Mixing

The panic specifically focused on WHITE women, revealing its racial logic. The term "white slavery" deliberately invoked comparisons to Black slavery.

The racial subtext: Fears about interracial relationships were central. Many reformers worried that urban anonymity would lead to relationships across racial boundaries.

Who was ignored: Black, Asian, Latina, and Indigenous women facing sexual exploitation were largely excluded from reformers' concern.

"Immoral Purposes" - Deliberately Vague

The Mann Act never defined what "immoral purposes" meant. This was intentional.

What it could include:

• Prostitution (the stated purpose)
• Adultery
• Premarital sex
• Interracial relationships
• Any relationship authorities deemed "immoral"

Why vagueness was powerful: It allowed prosecutors to target anyone they wanted, and let juries apply their own moral standards. This made the law a tool for enforcing prevailing social norms rather than preventing actual trafficking.

Mann Act and Interracial Relationships

One of the most common uses of the Mann Act was to prosecute interracial relationships, especially Black men with white partners.

Famous cases:

• Jack Johnson (1913): The first Black heavyweight boxing champion was prosecuted under the Mann Act for traveling with his white girlfriend (who he later married)
• Many other Black men were prosecuted for consensual relationships with white women

Why this matters: The law was supposedly about preventing forced prostitution, but it was actually used as a tool for enforcing racial segregation and punishing interracial intimacy.

The racial logic: White women in relationships with Black men were assumed to be victims who needed "saving," even when the relationships were consensual and loving.

New Techniques of Governance

Vice commissions: Investigative bodies that studied prostitution, documented "vice districts," and recommended policies. They gathered detailed information about people's private lives.

Undercover policing: Police posed as customers or workers to gather evidence. This was a new form of surveillance.

Moral courts: Special courts to handle prostitution and "sexual immorality" cases, often with lower standards of evidence.

Social workers as investigators: Social workers gathered detailed case files on families, including intimate information about sexual behavior.

Recordkeeping: For the first time, government agencies kept detailed records of people's sexual behavior, creating files that could be used against them.