The Marital Dimensions of White Slavery: Questions about Women's Mobility, Citizenship, and Sexuality in the Global Anti-Sex Trafficking Movement

At the turn of the century activists throughout the Atlantic world expressed outrage over the rumored sexual slavery of racially white women who were imported to work in brothels far from the protections that their homes and national communities offered. As the white slavery hysteria reached a fevered pitch, it inspired these activists to host a number of international congresses to produce the first international conventions to fight the sex trafficking of women and children: the 1904 and 1910 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, the 1910 International Agreement for the Suppression of the ‘White Slave Traffic’, and the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children. Corresponding with these international agreements, were national border control projects that fought to combat trafficking within particular countries, like the United States’ 1910 White Slave Traffic Act, or Britain’s 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Aliens Act of 1905. After the First World War, the League of Nations became the institutional home of the anti-trafficking movement, providing a space for civil society actors and representatives of nation states to discuss the challenges posed by sex trafficking. Ideas about legitimate marriage, marital domesticity, and women’s reproductive labors figured prominently in these discussions about women’s global migrations. This paper explores the ways the marriage, slavery, and prostitution became triangulated in discourse about women’s migration, citizenship, and complicity.