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

[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.)

[brewsternorth]

Haven't read the book, no, but now I'm wondering if there was a similar shtick to the movie "Reefer Madness".

[oursin]

The Middle East, the Far East, or South America - o dear yes there was a racial subtext.

I haven't read Dope Girls, because someone else was working on cocaine panic in the 20s and the East End Chinese community and 'Brilliant' Chang and the Freda Kempson case before Kohn, and I have completely forgotten the name of the book and who it was by (and I know it was by somebody that I am going to be kicking myself when I do remember their name), so I had the distinct impression that Kohn was reworking the same territory.

[rydra_wong]

I'd love to know the title when it comes back to you -- I was fascinated by the topic.

[oursin]

I'm pretty sure, on reflection, that I'm thinking of Virginia Berridge's work on early C20th drugs issues and policy in the UK, which wasn't published separately but as final chapters to the 1999 new edition of Opium and the People. I must have heard her give conference papers on the subject.

[legionseagle]

I loved Opium and the People and certainly Berridge was quite clear about the limits of opium dens in the East End (one woman and her sister-in-law, I think)

[badgerbag]

Add James Joyce "Eveline" to the list! Eveline was being lured to Buenos Aires...

[legionseagle]

Julie Andrews, Thoroughly Modern Millie ( if I recall correctly, first time that came out, me and my mother ended up in the film when I was < 10 because it was Julie Andrews and my mother got (not, with the benefit of hindsight, entirely unreasonably) cross about the bit when the girls were in bamboo cages labelled in Chinese characters which metamorphosed into Chinese style English saying, "To Big Nellie's Knocking Shop, Shanghai.")