id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
concept-252	none	Alien Animals and American Angels: The Commodification and Commercialization of the Progressive-Era White Slave	2004	38	.pdf	application/pdf	14309	553	54	One reporter on the San Francisco Bulletin stated that “the public love of the exaggerated and the sensational and its care-free avoidance of facts and cruel truths…is responsible in part for this slavery,” wisely disconnecting the white slave archetype as portrayed in popular culture from the harsh realities (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, venereal disease, poverty, and physical abuse, just to name a few) experienced by prostitutes in the 1910’s.65 Indeed, in creating the archetype the social purists had done their job too well; one correspondent in the New York World claimed that after his wife attended a lecture on white slavery, “she is… of the opinion that there is an organization as formidable as the Steel Trust working day and night in the interest of vice,” and that it was a formidable task for him to convince her that more than half the male population of the United States was not engaged in the white slave trade.66 The public was disappointed as well; one letter to the editor of the New York Times disappointedly asked, “Are they the only kind of white slaves we have?”67 However, he further notes that “tales of forced sexual exploitation obscured the larger reality of a prostitute’s life,” and cites both personal statements and statistical studies which indicate that most prostitutes entered the profession on their own accord for various reasons, primarily inter- familial conflict or economic concerns.3 The slippery nature of the evidence precludes the claim that there existed no forced prostitution in America throughout the nineteenth century, but it may be safe to state that there was no organized traffic in white, Anglo-Saxon women, either domestically or foreign born, into the United States, as was claimed by Progressive reformers; therefore, it is likely that the production of social purists existed to primarily emphasize the evils of openly tolerated red-light districts and, perhaps, to explain why there seemed to be so many prostitutes when speeches on public morality resonated with a largely female audience.4 There is additional, tertiary evidence indicating that there existed little traffic in white women for the purposes of prostitution in the latter half of the nineteenth century; in her biting indictment of the sex trade industry in 3 Gilfoyle, Timothy J., City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790- 1920.	cache/concept-252.pdf	txt/concept-252.txt