Eva Payne's "Empire of Purity"

Eva Payne is assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi. Her writing has appeared in publications, such as the Journal of Women’s History and Radical History Review.

Payne applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution, and reported the following:

A curious reader browsing Empire of Purity would be lucky to land on page ninety-nine! The page illustrates one of the book’s central arguments: US anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution efforts were a crucial means of extending US imperial power under the guise of protecting women. The page appears in the final section of chapter 3, which details the development of laws criminalizing “white slavery” in the early twentieth century. Anti-white slavery laws were paradoxical, designed both to protect “innocent” white American women from being kidnapped into prostitution, and to exclude and deport foreign prostitutes, whom officials painted as a danger to the nation. In addition to the domestic implementation of these laws, my book is interested in how they operated outside of the US mainland.

As the following passage demonstrates, US officials used white slavery laws to expand their authority in US territories like the Panama Canal Zone, as well as sovereign states like the Republic of Panama:

Preventing white slavery justified increasing US control over immigration to the Republic of Panama as well as the Canal Zone. The US government appointed an officer to work with US quarantine officials, as well as the Panamanian government, to forbid “undesirables” from entering the Republic, even though Panamanian officials licensed prostitution. Through his efforts, the officer reported, “a number of white-slave dealers and notorious prostitutes were thereby turned back and not permitted to debark and yet others were deterred from attempting to come into the Republic.” (99)

Through their war on white slavery, US officials on the isthmus of Panama took charge of crucial state functions, including policing immigration and prostitution.

In addition to presenting my argument about US empire, the page’s first sentences show how US officials used white slavery laws to police racial boundaries and maintain white supremacy. And the end of the page introduces evidence that despite US officials’ claims that they were rescuing victims of forced sex trafficking, many women migrated and sold sex because it was the best economic option available to them. What’s missing on the page, however, are the perspectives of women who sold sex, which are centered throughout the book. While the Page 99 Test doesn’t capture the full geographic scope of the book, which has chapters about Europe and Asia as well as the Americas, nor the extent of my source base, it gives the reader a surprisingly accurate sense of the book’s key interventions.

Visit Eva Payne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue