Yeah, and 'white slavery' was pretty much hot air as well

[oursin]

This is not exactly left-over research, but it's certainly research I currently have going spare.

Word on the street is that a Certain Well-Known Writer of Historical Romances has compared fanfic of her works to white slavery (not in the current kerfuffle, but in an earlier debate on a posting board somewhere).

I'm not sure how it played out in other regions, but in the UK 'white slavery' became very early on a synonym for the drugging and kidnapping of perfectly innocent young girls* while they were out shopping, in cinemas, having a cup of tea in Lyons Corner House, etc.

It was pretty much entirely a sensationalist media trope, which profoundly irritated dedicated workers in moral reform and social purity organisations whenever it surfaced in the early C20th equivalent of the tabloid press. They repeatedly pointed out that in no case where it had been claimed that a girl had been abducted by brothelkeepers for their malign purposes had this ever turned out on investigation to be the case, and in most instances in which a young woman had left home and not returned, she had gone off of her own accord, usually with forethought and planning, to e.g. shack up with a boyfriend.

There is also an amusing letter written to the papers as late as the 1950s (when these myths were still flourishing) by a woman doctor pointing out that it's not really that easy to inject a fully clothed person both surreptitiously and effectively with a narcotic drug in the middle of a crowded public space, not to mention have it act with the expedition that would have been necessary if the stories were true.

The myth crops up persistently in fiction and memoirs of the early C20th (Jessica Mitford alludes to it in Hons and Rebels and in Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle Cassandra is suspicious of a hospital nurse she spots in Lyons Corner House on account of having heard these tales).

I was particularly struck by the resemblance to this trope of the stories that started cropping up later in the C20th about people who had been doped and had their kidneys removed...

*Okay, I think it can plausibly be argued that the whole thing was strongly connected to women's increasing presence in public spaces for leisure activities and without chaperonage and the fears that aroused.

Comments

[msilverstar]

Thanks for the real research. I hate that term with a blinding passion.

It says, blatantly, that enslaving brown people is one thing, but even the thought of white people (esp. women) being kidnapped and forced into prostitution (or whatever) is A SPECIAL CASE.

The next time I see someone using it non-ironically, I am so jumping on their ass.

[rydra_wong]

*Okay, I think it can plausibly be argued that the whole thing was strongly connected to women's increasing presence in public spaces for leisure activities and without chaperonage and the fears that aroused.

Not to mention the obvious racial overtones -- it was all about the threat of innocent white maidens being kidnapped and sold, and IIRC the legends often involved them disappearing into the Middle East. All of which makes it a rather strange and unfortunate choice of metaphor.

(Tangentially, have you read Marek Kohn's Dope Girls? The moral panic about drugs in the 1910s and 1920s seems to have involved some rather similar imagery about innocent white middle- or upper-class girls being drugged and debauched by people of colour.)

[holyschist]

I thought she just said "slavery"? Either way, wtf.

"White slavery" is still the plot of blockbuster movies (see that piece of shit movie with Liam Neeson...last year? Which was wrapped up in skanky stuff about virginity, too).