Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: a plea for a “vicious turn” in global history
- PART I HEALTH AND THE BODY
- PART II DRINKS AND DRUGS
- PART III PROSTITUTION AND SEX TRAFFICKING
- 10 The FBI's White Slave Division: the creation of a national regulatory regime to police prostitutes in the United States, 1910–1918
- 11 Anti-vice lives: peopling the archives of prostitution in interwar India
- 12 China's prostitution regulation system in an international context, 1900–1937
- 13 “Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?”: venereal disease, sanitation, and geopolitics in US-occupied Japan and Korea, 1945–1948
- 14 Global anti-vice activism: a postmortem
- Index
10 - The FBI's White Slave Division: the creation of a national regulatory regime to police prostitutes in the United States, 1910–1918
from PART III - PROSTITUTION AND SEX TRAFFICKING
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: a plea for a “vicious turn” in global history
- PART I HEALTH AND THE BODY
- PART II DRINKS AND DRUGS
- PART III PROSTITUTION AND SEX TRAFFICKING
- 10 The FBI's White Slave Division: the creation of a national regulatory regime to police prostitutes in the United States, 1910–1918
- 11 Anti-vice lives: peopling the archives of prostitution in interwar India
- 12 China's prostitution regulation system in an international context, 1900–1937
- 13 “Hey, GI, want pretty flower girl?”: venereal disease, sanitation, and geopolitics in US-occupied Japan and Korea, 1945–1948
- 14 Global anti-vice activism: a postmortem
- Index
Summary
On December 11, 1911, Violet Munroe reported to the Bureau of Investigation that a new girl had arrived at her Washington, DC, brothel, located at Delaware and H Street. The Bureau, which would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1935, quickly dispatched a special agent from its White Slave Division to interview the new arrival as part of an ongoing census of sex workers the division was in the process of conducting. The twenty-one-year-old told the agent that her name was Maud Martin, though she admitted that she had been previously known by the names of Jane Wright (in Philadelphia, PA), Pearl Hearte (in Detroit, MI), and Jane Clarque (in her hometown of Lapaire, NM). When questioned about her entry into sex work, Maud told Special Agent John Grgurevich that she had started practicing prostitution in Detroit eighteen months prior and had been in DC working in a different brothel for one month. She was probably attracted to DC by its relatively open sex market. Though the city had laws outlawing street solicitation, clandestine brothel-based prostitution thrived in a city that had a constant and shifting stream of visitors. The special agent noted Maud's physical description (138 lbs, 5'4 ½”, light brown hair, blue eyes, light complexion) and her family's national origins (father a US citizen, though described as a “half-breed Indian”). The Bureau's interest in Maud's nationality reflected the White Slave Division's goal to aid the Immigration Bureau's mission to expel immigrant sex workers from the country. Of the fifty-nine sex workers interviewed by Washington DC police and special agents of the Bureau on that day of December 11, 1911, three were found to be foreign nationals and were handed over for deportation to the Immigration Bureau. But the intensive inquiry into her entry into prostitution and the demand that Maud should list all “sporting houses” she had worked in – a command that Maud resisted, speaking instead in vague terms – served the White Slave Division's primary purpose of ensuring that prostitutes in America's brothels were not white slaves. To confirm that all of America's prostitutes voluntarily engaged in sex work the Bureau's White Slave Division launched an ambitious plan in 1911 to make a “census of women engaged in the business of prostitution.”
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- Information
- Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and 'Immorality', pp. 221 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016