UC San Diego

Claiming Victims explores the relationship between law and society through an examination of the Mann "White Slave" Act. In 1910, the Mann Act made it a felony to take a woman across state lines for "immoral" purposes. Although this federal law was ostensibly aimed at ending forced prostitution, it quickly became a way of regulating sexuality. Men who traveled interstate with women while engaged in consensual, noncommercial relationships were subject to arrest and, if convicted, often received significant prison sentences. Despite the consensual nature of many of these interstate affairs, the women were legally defined as "victims" of the men who transported them. This study investigates gender, class, and race in the early twentieth century through an analysis of Mann Act prosecutions in the American west, where people were charged with violations at a disproportionately high rate from 1910-1930. In the West, defendants in Mann Act cases were primarily white and native-born, despite the white slavery rhetoric that envisioned foreign-born men as the main purveyors of the trade in women. Claiming Victims argues that the Mann Act centered on the idea that women were easily victimized and needed to be protected, particularly from the men whose sexual affairs threatened to undermine the home and family. Therefore, Mann Act prosecutions reinforced a Victorian ideal of male respectability, even as late as the 1920s. The Mann Act limited the mobility of the people who seemed to pose the greatest threat to the middle-class ideal of a respectable social order: the male and female laborers who migrated in large numbers throughout the West. The use of the Mann Act to control movement and regulate sexuality was not solely an overreaching on the part of the FBI or federal government, but was demanded by the large numbers of Americans who reported potential Mann Act violations. The level of control implemented through the Mann Act was a direct result of ordinary citizens' requests for the intervention of the federal government. Therefore, the enforcement of the Mann Act during the 1910s and 1920s was part of a larger struggle over how to define and enforce moral behavior and respectable gender roles in the midst of rapid social change