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White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917, by Brian Donovan. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 186 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN: 0252030257.
Bryan Donovan's White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-vice Activism, 1887-1917 grounds itself in the argument that the simultaneous occurrence of anti-vice campaigns targeting forced prostitution facilitated the creation of racial hierarchies in the United States. While some may take issue with the notion that the construction of racial categories began in the U.S. as late as the early nineteen hundreds, Donovan spotlights this moment in time for its cultural production of white slavery narratives. He positions white slavery narratives as social and political reactions to co-occurring changes in immigration patterns and notions of Victorian femininity during this time period.
Throughout the book Donovan argues that racial boundaries were both constructed and maintained via the social and political control of sexual intimacy as mixed-race individuals challenged the very existence of color lines. Lynchings in the Jim Crow South are highlighted in chapter 1 as a primary example of such policing. At the heart of Donovan's argument rests the notion that sex is the variable that links race, gender, and sexuality.
In chapter 2, Donovan attributes the varying accounts (2,000-65,000) of forced prostitution to the existence of multiple definitions (presented in the chapter) of white slavery. While each definition pivots on the question of women's sexual agency, the narratives ultimately served the purpose of demonizing prostitutes, new immigrants, urbanization, poor parenting, and...