“In human government, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain evils be incurred… ‘If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.’”
So wrote Thomas Aquinas, quoting Augustine of Hippo, in the Summa Theologiae, some 750 years ago. Since the thirteenth century, however, quite a bit has changed. Governments can do much more now than they could in the Middle Ages. We’ve learned a great deal about the causes of various social ills. We’ve also reconsidered—in many cases for the better—which evils we find tolerable. Are we really comfortable with maintaining a class of people who exist to satiate the lusts of another group of people? Do we owe more to “harlots” than that?
Even with the capacity of a modern nation-state, however, using law and policy to address issues of public morality is hard. Well-meaning people often prefer different approaches, even if all agree on the ultimate goal. What’s more, the nation-state always has other goals, some of which may conflict with moral causes, and some may seek to co-opt them for other purposes.
Nowhere are these difficulties clearer than in the now century-long history of Americans’ attempts to eradicate prostitution and human trafficking. Historian Eva Payne tells the tale of this campaign’s early days in her new book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution. Payne reveals that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, moral reformers’ concern over public virtue and vice coincided with a rapid expansion in the bureaucratic capacity and global influence of the American state. Politicians and generals who sought imperial expansionism found in anti-prostitution activism a tool to advance their goals, adopting a maximalist stance against prostitution that ultimately affirmed and even encouraged the conditions for its spread.
This history—and its echoes in the present day—ought to remind anyone concerned with matters of public virtue to choose their bedfellows wisely. As advanced as our society may be, ancient warnings about unintended consequences remain relevant.
Three Approaches to Prostitution
Prostitution, and moral campaigns against it, have existed in the United States from its earliest days. But beginning in 1820s and ‘30s, as urbanization and the social churn of a developing market economy brought women to cities, prostitution became more visible. Countless women migrated—sometimes alone, but often with families—from the countryside to cities to find domestic or factory work. When they arrived, they often found that formal employment alone did not pay enough to support themselves or their families. Meanwhile, new moral reform movements emerged from the Second Great Awakening, the anti-slavery movement, and early feminism. They turned their eye to public vice and started asking the government to step in.
Toward the end of the century, anti-prostitution activists found supporters at the federal level, gaining national and even international influence. But not everyone saw prostitution, or the government’s potential role in controlling it, the same way. Empire of Purity tells the story of three distinct approaches to prostitution that were pursued by American activists and policymakers.
Abolitionism
The first of these was abolitionism. Activists themselves adopted this name, tying themselves to the anti-slavery movement, and for good reason. Prominent anti-slavery activists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, also campaigned against prostitution.
Abolitionism also had significant overlap with the early suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for instance, were involved with both. As a result, Payne writes, the movement began with “a distinctly feminist bent” that attempted to draw attention to prostitution’s root causes, be they moral, social, or economic. Activists identified, in Payne’s words, a “double standard of morality that tacitly condoned extramarital sex for men, while punishing women for any appearance of sexual impropriety,” as well as “widespread social and economic problems that drove many women to prostitution.” The practice, feminist abolitionists argued, would never be abolished without addressing broader social disparities.
However, whether out of political expediency or in hopes of appealing to a more mainstream audience, abolitionists began mixing in other rhetorical strategies that framed the problem in terms of American exceptionalism, civilizational struggles, or racial supremacy. Elizabeth Blackwell declared that legal prostitution would “destroy the characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race”; others promised that, by fighting prostitution, Americans would be able to more effectively “civilize” other peoples.
This nationalist framing, and an attendant desire for political expediency, obscured the root problems feminists sought to combat, even as abolitionism gained political influence. After the Civil War, for instance, abolitionists began referring to prostitution as “white slavery,” in part to emphasize their continuity with America’s antislavery conscience. The term conjured up a vivid image—one of white women being kidnapped and forced into prostitution—that did not reflect most prostitutes’ actual experience. It also ignored the Black women caught up in the system (or portrayed them as villains who assisted pimps on the prowl for innocent white women).
Related was the term “trafficking,” which abolitionists initially adopted to more easily lobby Congress, which could not ban prostitution in the states but could regulate the movement of people across state and national borders. “Trafficking” quickly came to be used as a euphemism for prostitution itself. However, frequent elision between “traffic” and “prostitution” also implied that stricter immigration control could offer a panacea for social ills, as if prostitution were a foreign contagion and not a result of late nineteenth-century America’s own internal inequities.
Regulationism
The second approach to prostitution policy—abolitionism’s bête noire—was regulationism. This approach, borrowed from European countries (especially France), assumed men’s rapacious sexual appetites to be inevitable and therefore resigned itself to prostitution as a fact of life. The best that could be done, regulationists argued, was to prevent venereal disease by keeping prostitution legal but constantly surveilled. Regulationist policies required prostitutes to register with local authorities and submit to frequent medical examination (a requirement abolitionists, with good reason, described as invasive and even “surgical rape”).
Regulationism was the consistent policy of the United States military, in particular, at the end of the nineteenth century. Officers arranged for organization of red-light districts outside of bases on the theory that their men needed outlets for sexual release. After the Spanish-American War, the U.S. military occupied the Philippines, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and other former Spanish colonies, supposedly to “civilize” their inhabitants until they were “ready” to rule themselves. Officials brought regulated prostitution with them to these societies and sought to tightly control and monitor it. The army handed out materials that depicted local women as disease-ridden seductresses, and officers imported lighter-skinned prostitutes from Japan and even from the U.S. in the name of reducing disease and ensuring that the “right” kind of women were available for soldiers’ sexual use.
Prohibitionism
During the First World War, U.S. policy changed as a third approach to prostitution emerged. This approach—which we might call prohibitionism—superficially resembles abolitionism: both aimed for an end to prostitution. But they differed in their preferred means of combatting the practice, reflecting fundamentally different views of the people involved and the nature of the problem.
Prohibition, unlike abolition, fought prostitution by punishing women suspected (not always proved) to be prostitutes. Tens of thousands of women inside the U.S., and tens of thousands more in overseas countries where the American military had a strong presence, were jailed on suspicion of being prostitutes. To prohibitionists, these women were not victims of social double standards or economic pressure, but villains and disease vectors. The goal was “social hygiene”: cleansing society of contagions, both medical and moral.
Why did prohibitionism replace regulationism as official U.S. policy? It helped that a very wealthy individual—John D. Rockefeller, Jr., heir to the immense Rockefeller oil fortune—poured money into prohibitionist groups that lobbied the U.S. government and kept sympathetic medical experts on its payroll. The most influential of these was the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA). Rockefeller also provided the bulk of funding for the League of Nations’ investigations into prostitution and “the traffic in women.”
Meanwhile, the number of U.S. troops stationed around the world increased drastically. They weren’t exactly the paragons of Anglo-Saxon civilization and continence portrayed by domestic propaganda. According to the army’s own surveys during World War One, 71 percent of U.S. soldiers deployed to France were sexually active—an astounding figure. Even as the military attempted to implement regulated prostitution, demand for prostitution near military bases from France to Panama surged beyond officers’ capacity to regulate, and rates of disease spiked.
Furthermore, as it acquired overseas imperial holdings after the Spanish-American War—in the Philippines, Cuba, Panama, and elsewhere—American politicians aimed to set this new empire apart. The United States would show the world a “different” kind of empire, not just one great power cynically vying for influence among others.
Rockefeller and ASHA stepped in, promising a solution. They pitched prostitution bans as a technocratic tool to further the military’s goals: keeping soldiers disease-free and therefore able to spread “civilization” and “make the world safe for democracy.” ASHA argued that prohibitionism did a better job keeping venereal disease rates down. Of course, regulationists argued the opposite, and each camp offered sets of statistics to back its position. Unfortunately, Empire of Purity does not attempt to uncover the answer or definitively judge between these dueling claims.
In any case, it seems that official army policy (whether regulationist or prohibitionist) made less of a difference than local conditions and troop levels. American troops remained sexually promiscuous regardless of policy; after implementation of prohibition, the army received numerous complaints that soldiers had sexually assaulted French civilians, and clandestine prostitution continued.
The Root Causes of Prostitution
Prohibitionism failed because it was missing something: abolitionists’ curiosity about why women became prostitutes in the first place.
The historical record is spotty when it comes to women’s actual perspectives on prostitution. Unfortunately, Payne can only offer scattered individual stories, filtered through the reports of contemporary investigators who harbored one agenda or another. But it’s very clear throughout Empire of Purity that the overwhelming cause of prostitution, even if the politicians, officers, doctors, and ASHA-backed investigators ignored it, was inequality.
This inequality came in many forms. The most common was economic. Both in the United States and in its occupied territories, women made far more money selling sex than from the jobs available to them. In the U.S. around the turn of the century, white women in domestic or industrial work typically earned around $7.50 a week; in New York City, prostitutes working in saloons or on the street could make $30-$50 per night. Reformers frequently assured the public that these women only needed better moral education or job training, but many who worked as prostitutes already held day jobs, only selling sex to supplement their sub-poverty wages. One such woman, Payne reports, “told an investigator [that] she would happily lead an ‘honest’ life if her employer raised her salary from $6 a week to $15”—still far less than the going rate for selling sex.
Empire of Purity also contains many references to women having to support a family or experiencing pressure from a family to earn more money. Payne never draws attention to this point, but it’s clear that many turn-of-the-century prostitutes were not isolated, entrepreneurial (much less liberated) individuals making choices for themselves alone. Their choices were often extensions of their lower-class families’ impossible predicaments.
The inequalities, and the risks, were compounded for nonwhite women. Black women were simply excluded even from low-paying industrial jobs. As prostitutes they could only charge a fraction of what their white counterparts did, but it still paid far better than the formal employment available.
Black women also faced greater physical danger. The most shocking line in Payne’s book comes from a soldier stationed at a military base in the South, speaking to an investigator about Black prostitutes: “a white Jane is all right on pay day, but dark meat is all we can get for [25 cents]. Many of these [racial slur] gals never get the quarter either. After we **** if she aint just nice, hit her a bust in the mouth and let her lay for dead in the alley.” This soldier’s casual attitude toward racial and gender-based violence reveals another form of inequality that lay behind prostitution: the power imbalance between soldiers who received a steady paycheck and impunity to commit acts of violence, and the civilian populations around them. Both in poverty-stricken areas of the U.S. and in colonized societies overseas, the presence of U.S. soldiers contributed to all kinds of social ills, including prostitution.
Indeed, there was no bigger sex trafficker at the turn of the twentieth century than the U.S. military. Anywhere it established colonial outposts, the army effectively imported prostitutes. In the Philippines, Payne writes, “the presence of tens of thousands of American soldiers with money to spend led women from across Asia, Europe, and the Americas to migrate to cities in the Philippines with an American troop presence.” And as noted above, officers intentionally brought in prostitutes as well, setting up red light districts and excusing acts of sexual violence by their troops even after prohibitonism became official policy.
American abolitionists never quite identified these problems in full. They identified the problem of prostitution in British-occupied India, for example, as one specific to the British, expecting that American soldiers would conduct themselves better and never attributing the problem to the inherent social imbalances of imperial occupation per se. They flattered their American audiences with assurances that theirs would be the more moral empire, only for American soldiers to prove themselves to be just as prone to sexual promiscuity and violence as British ones. Idolization of American soldiers as champions of Western civilization and good Victorian, Protestant morals precluded strong criticism of their behavior.
Abolitionists’ appeals to the exceptionalism of Anglo-Saxon morality, the white race, or America itself left their movement vulnerable to co-optation by people (like Rockefeller) who weren’t interested in addressing the real causes of prostitution, but who were very interested in expanding America’s presence abroad. They mixed their campaign for public morality with the nationalism fashionable at the time, and that nationalism overtook their movement completely.
The Modern Fight Against “Human Trafficking”
Aside from a few scant remarks in the conclusion, Payne ends her account before the Second World War. But the story has developed quite a bit over the last century, and the issue is just as politically muddled today as it was in the nineteenth century.
To the extent abolitionism has a legacy at all, it’s the ways it unintentionally broadened and redirected the anti-prostitution cause. Most notably, the concept of “trafficking” has taken on a life of its own. “Trafficking” remains a broad umbrella term, under which lie an enormous variety of tragedies, ranging in their causes and internal dynamics. Depending on the context, “trafficking” can mean the involuntary movement of people across borders for any reason, the facilitation of either voluntary or involuntary movement, or—as in the nineteenth-century origins of the term—prostitution itself. Sometimes people move—or are moved—for work, sometimes for sex, and sometimes both. These phenomena occur throughout the world, for innumerable reasons. Framing it all within a single term—“trafficking”—makes it impossible to identify a single cause for the problem, much less one policymakers can comprehensively address.
While the issue has become broader, the scope for solutions has narrowed. Conservatives talk about trafficking more than liberals do, but they also increasingly distrust the international institutions, like UN agencies, that were supposed to be the instruments for addressing it. Republican administrations have also been reluctant to identify inequality as a contributing factor for moral problems, much less address it through government action. The “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush White House, most notably, made a point of outsourcing such problems—including the fight against trafficking—to private and faith-based nonprofits.
This privatized context has enshrined individual vigilantism as a leading strategy to fight trafficking. Some nonprofits train volunteers in “backyard abolitionism,” and the Bush-era Department of Health and Human Services created programs to encourage individual citizens to identify supposed victims of trafficking in their neighborhoods. There is of course no way for individual crime-fighters to address root causes having to do with international poverty or militarism. The only methods available to them, as individuals, are punitive ones.
The 2023 cult hit Sound of Freedom—and the methods deployed by Tim Ballard, its real-life inspiration—illustrates the ironies of today’s anti-trafficking vigilantism. In keeping with the movement’s long history of tying itself to anti-slavery activism, Ballard named his organization, founded in 2013, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR). As depicted in Sound of Freedom, Ballard and OUR orchestrated a series of sting operations to capture alleged traffickers, usually by paying people in third-world countries to traffic children, and then apprehending them.
Some of the individuals captured in these stings, however, claim they had never engaged in any human trafficking before Ballard approached them, offering money to bring children to a “party” he was organizing. The sting itself, in other words, became the cause of the trafficking. Sound of Freedom repeats the events of Empire of Purity: crusading Americans enter another country claiming to be vanguards of civilization, but their ability to throw cash around in an impoverished society becomes the occasion for the very vices they’re supposedly there to combat.
Given the nebulous nature of “trafficking” as a category and a lack of appetite to either work with international institutions or to address inequality, it becomes all too easy for cynical political figures to deploy rhetoric about human trafficking in service of other agendas. A century ago, anti-prostitution activists supported immigration restriction because it promised to keep American society pure from what they perceived as outside immorality. Today, trafficking has again become a justification to restrict immigration and cast suspicion on recent migrants. Within the last few months, the Trump administration has demolished anti-trafficking federal agencies that exist outside the aegis of immigration enforcement, and the president himself mentions trafficking only as a reason to deport migrants. Once again, the nationalist project has swallowed the moral one.
Punishment vs. Prevention
Punishment is always easier than prevention—that’s why we keep going back to it. It’s so easy, even an individual like Tim Ballard can do it. Punishment doesn’t force a society to confront difficult questions, like those Thomas Aquinas raised about balancing possible evils. Policymakers can simplify things to “there’s a bad guy out there, and I’m going to teach him a lesson.” They can maintain illusions about their country’s own “civilized” nature relative to other groups of people, and they can obscure their own complicity in the vices they seek to oppose.
Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, once said the goal of the movement was “to make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good.” People will always have the freedom to make their own decisions, but social structures and public policies can make moral choices easier or harder. This principle raises questions for anyone seeking to use law to address matters of morality. Does income inequality make it easier for people to be moral? What about racial disparities, or military occupations? Incarceration or other forms of punishment may be due in any given individual case, but do they make it easier for anyone to be good?
Judging by more than a century of American reliance on punitive strategies to address prostitution—from World War One-era mass arrests of suspected prostitutes to the vigilante-led stings of the present century—the answer to all of the above questions is “no.” Exclusively punitive strategies do not eradicate public vice. Our best hope is to rediscover some curiosity about why people make the choices they make. It turns out the feminist abolitionists were onto something, even if they allowed other influences to overtake their cause.
