Rhetorical mobilities and the city: The white slavery controversy and racialized protection of women in the U.S.

ABSTRACT

The case study of an early twentieth century controversy over “white slavery” demonstrates the importance of an explicit consideration of mobility based rhetoric to understanding space and political subjectivities within space. Through an analytical framework of mobility that considers scale, connection, time, and agency, I find that the city was constructed as a gendered and racialized space, which enabled restrictions to corporal mobility. I provide both a justification and a model for reading mobility based rhetoric in public controversy.

KEYWORDS:

• Space
• gender
• race
• immigration
• sex trafficking

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank J. David Cisneros, Lisa Flores, Christine Gardner, Megan Orcholski, Mary Stuckey, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1 George Kibbe Turner, “The City of Chicago: A Study of the Great Immoralities,” McClure's Magazine, April 1907, 575.

2 This anxiety is currently evidenced in much of the opposition to immigration, including refugees. The phrase “American carnage” in Donald Trump's Inauguration Speech is also a good example of this anxiety.

3 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 4.

4 In their introduction to Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, Parker and Wiley grapple with the connections between the material and symbolic in communication. While there can be a variety of ways to understand this relationship, communication entails both the material and symbolic. In the white slavery controversy, the material and symbolic are so closely bound up with each other that they are difficult to separate. Rather than attempt a clear separation, I bring the symbolic (words and images) to the forefront, while being mindful of the continuing significance of the material. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Introduction: The Materiality of Communication,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer, Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, and Barbie Zelizer (New York: Routledge, 2012), 7–9, 12, http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/book/10.4324/9780203181096.

5 See: Matt Bakker, “Mexican Migration, Transnationalism, and the Re-scaling of Citizenship in North America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 1–19, doi:10.1080/01419870.2010.482159; Monica W. Varsanyi, “Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, the ‘Right to the City,’ and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers,” Urban Geography 29, no. 1 (2008): 29–52, doi:10.2747/0272-3638.29.1.29; Piyasiri Wickramasekara, “Development, Mobility, and Human Rights: Rhetoric and Reality,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2010): 165–200.

6 Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (August 2011): 259–260, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.585167. Also see: Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 23; Rachel Martin Harlow, “Souvenir Battlefields: How Presidents Use Rhetoric of Place to Shape the American Ethos,” American Communication Journal 18, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 47.

7 Allison M. Prasch, “Reagan at Pointe Du Hoc: Deictic Epideictic and the Persuasive Power of ‘Bringing Before the Eyes’,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 253; Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters,” 265. Also see: Joshua P. Ewalt, “Mapping Injustice: The World Is Witness, Place-Framing, and the Politics of Viewing on Google Earth,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 4 (December 2011): 336, doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2011.01109.x; Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, “Introduction,” 24; Eun Young Lee, “Looking Forward: Decentering and Reorienting Communication Studies in the Spatial Turn,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 133, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1176811.

8 Roxanne Mountford, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2001): 42.

9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 26. Lefebvre explains space as a “conceptual triad” consisting of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces (33). Also see: Joan Faber McAlister, “Figural Materialism: Renovating Marriage through the American Family Home,” Southern Communication Journal 76, no. 4 (September 1, 2011): 291, doi:10.1080/10417941003797314.

10 See: Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014); Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (December 2003): 362–87; Jan Nespor, “Discursive Geographies,” Journal of Language & Politics 13, no. 3 (July 2014): 491, doi:10.1075/jlp.13.3.06nes; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders : Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Brenda Parker, “Material Matters: Gender and the City,” Geography Compass 5, no. 6 (June 1, 2011): 433, doi:10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00424.x.

11 Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 120.

12 Raka Shome, “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space,” Communication Theory 13, no. 1 (February 1, 2003): 40, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2003.tb00281.x. Also see: Timothy Barney, “‘‘Gulag’–Slavery, Inc.’: The Power of Place and the Rhetorical Life of a Cold War Map,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 322–323; Lee, “Looking Forward,” 133.

13 Isaac West, “PISSAR's Critically Queer and Disabled Politics,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (June 2010): 160, doi:10.1080/14791421003759174.

14 Daniel C. Brouwer, “From San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the Aids Quilts Search for a Homeland,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 701–21.

15 Alyssa A. Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American Women on the Move’ in the 1977 International Women's Year Torch Relay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, May 2, 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PdDgxzb2hPEyzyErSmdk/full; Armond R. Towns, “Geographies of Pain: #SayHerName and the Fear of Black Women's Mobility,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 122–26, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1176807; Robert Topinka, “Resisting the Fixity of Suburban Space: The Walker as Rhetorician,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2012): 65–84.

The study of mobility has also begun to emerge as a significant area of focused concern in some other areas of scholarship, especially as the twenty-first century has brought increasing large scale movement of people and ideas. In their development of the “new mobilities paradigm,” Anthony Elliott and John Urry outline an area of empirical research considering five types of mobilities: corporeal mobility, mobility of objects, imaginative travel, virtual travel, and communicative travel. See: R. Law, “Beyond ‘Women and Transport’: Towards New Geographies of Gender and Daily Mobility,” Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 4 (December 1999): 574, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913299666161864; Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings,” Mobilities 1, no. 1 (March 2006): 1, doi:10.1080/17450100500489189; Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, Daniel M. Sutko, and Tabita Moreno Becerra, “Assembling Social Space,” Communication Review 13, no. 4 (October 2010): 342, doi:10.1080/10714421.2010.525482; Catherine J. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray, “LGBT Neighbourhoods and ‘New Mobilities’: Towards Understanding Transformations in Sexual and Gendered Urban Landscapes,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (May 1, 2014): 763, doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12104. Anthony Elliott and John Urry, Mobile Lives (New York: Routledge, 2010), 15–16.

16 See: Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders”; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 107–32, doi:10.1080/00335630.2016.1154185; Sara VanderHaagen and Angela G. Ray, “A Pilgrim-Critic at Places of Public Memory: Anna Dickinson's Southern Tour of 1875,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 3 (2014): 348–74; Alessandra Von Burg, “Mobility: The New Blue,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (May 2014): 241–57, doi:10.1080/00335630.2014.939703; Alessandra Beasley Von Burg, “Stochastic Citizenship: Toward a Rhetoric of Mobility,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, no. 4 (November 7, 2012): 351–75.

17 Timothy Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4.

18 Cresswell, On the Move, 25; Carly S. Woods, “(Im)mobile Metaphors: Toward an Intersectional Rhetorical History,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, ed. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 78–96.

19 Eleonore Kofman, “Feminist Political Geographies,” in A Companion to Feminist Geography, ed. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 528.

20 Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster, “Introduction: Scale and Geographic Inquiry,” in Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 15.

21 Nespor, “Discursive Geographies,” 492–493.

22 See: Ronald Walter Greene and Kevin Douglas Kusa, “From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2012): 271–88, doi:10.1080/02773945.2012.682846; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, “Editorial,” 12; Wiley, Sutko, and Moreno Becerra, “Assembling Social Space,” 342–344.

23 See: Jeremy Packer and Kathleen F. Oswald, “From Windscreen to Widescreen: Screening Technologies and Mobile Communication,” Communication Review 13, no. 4 (October 2010): 309–39, doi:10.1080/10714421.2010.525478; Mimi Sheller, “Air Mobilities on the U.S.-Caribbean Border: Open Skies and Closed Gates,” Communication Review 13, no. 4 (October 2010): 269–88, doi:10.1080/10714421.2010.525469; John M. Sloop and Joshua Gunn, “Status Control: An Admonition Concerning the Publicized Privacy of Social Networking,” Communication Review 13, no. 4 (October 2010): 289–308, doi:10.1080/10714421.2010.525476; Stephen B. Crofts Wiley and Jeremy Packer, “Rethinking Communication After the Mobilities Turn,” Communication Review 13, no. 4 (October 2010): 263–68, doi:10.1080/10714421.2010.525458.

24 Cresswell, On the Move, 4.

25 Doreen Massey, “Imagining Globalisation: Power-Geometries of Time-Space,” in Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time, ed. Michael Hoyler, Hettner-Lectures 2 (Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg, 1999), 22.

26 Doreen Massey, “Imagining Globalisation,”13–14.

27 Joan Faber McAlister, “Ten Propositions for Communication Scholars Studying Space and Place,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 115, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1176785.

28 E. Cram argues that “emotional landscapes” mediate relationships to space. E. Cram, “Feeling Cartography,” Women's Studies in Communication 39, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 141, doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1176814.

29 Joanne Sharp, “Feminisms,” in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 71, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470996515.ch6/summary.

30 Cresswell, On the Move, 161.

31 Cresswell, On the Move, 159.

32 Cresswell, On the Move, 197; Sarah Hallenbeck, Claiming the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), xvii; Catherine J. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray, “LGBT Neighbourhoods and ‘New Mobilities’: Towards Understanding Transformations in Sexual and Gendered Urban Landscapes,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (May 1, 2014): 762, doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12104; Mary E. Stuckey, “The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Western Expansion,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs,14, no. 2 (2011): 248–250.

33 Sharp, “Feminisms,” 71; Towns, “Geographies of Pain,” 123.

34 Cresswell, On the Move, 159.

35 For research arguing that white slavery was a moral panic argument see: David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago, Ill.; Bristol: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990). Rosen counters the moral panic argument with historical evidence that white slavery did actually exist; cf. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 118.

36 “The Cross Confronting the Night,” 1913, p. 4, Ernest A. Bell Collection 6–13, Chicago History Museum. Also, “The daily papers and the church papers, and then the magazines, gave publicity to the terrible facts. At least 50,000,000 pages owe their inspiration to the crusade then inaugurated.” “The Midnight Mission,” 1910, p. 13, Ernest A. Bell Collection 6–13, Chicago History Museum.

37 Jean Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls (Chicago: Chicago Rescue Mission [?], 1911); Edward O. Janney, The White Slavery Traffic in America (New York City: National Vigilance Committee, 1911).

38 See: Wendy Lucas Castro, “Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 1 (March 24, 2008): 104–36, doi:10.1353/eam.2008.0003; Greg Goodale and Jeremy Engels, “Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2010): 70–89, doi:10.1080/14791420903511255; Susan M. Griffin, “Awful Disclosures: Women's Evidence in the Escaped Nun's Tale,” PMLA 111, no. 1 (1996): 93–107, doi:10.2307/463136; Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Audra Simpson, “From White into Red: Captivity Narratives as Alchemies of Race and Citizenship,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (June 13, 2008): 251–57, doi:10.1353/aq.0.0003.

39 George Kibbe Turner, “The City of Chicago,” 575.

40 Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 103.

41 Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917, 110. Ernest Bell did not specifically name the Turner article, but in a pamphlet he labels 1907 as the year that a crusade began. “The Cross Confronting the Night,” 4.

42 “Midnight Mission Letterhead,” n.d., Ernest A. Bell Collection 4–7, Chicago History Museum. The Midnight Mission also aided the Chicago Vice Commission. “The Midnight Mission. President's Report January 31st, 1911,” p. 5, Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-1, Chicago History Museum; The Vice Commission of Chicago, The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions with Recommendations (Chicago: City of Chicago, 1911), 9.

43 The Midnight Mission would often call for volunteers specifying that they needed middle aged or “mature” adults for missionary work. M.P. Boynton, “Letter to Dear Friend,” December 19, 1908, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4-7, Chicago History Museum; Rev. M. P. Boynton, “Letter to: My Dear Brother,” June 17, 1910, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4-7, Chicago History Museum.

44 “A Prophet with Honor,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 8, 1913, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4-8, Chicago History Museum; “Midnight Mission Letterhead.” Also see, Ernest A. Bell, “Letter to Board of Directors,” January 28, 1910, 2, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4-7, Chicago History Museum.

45 “The Midnight Mission,” 18; “The Cross Confronting the Night,” 5.

46 “Midnight Mission Letterhead.” The Midnight Mission also aided the Chicago Vice Commission. “The Midnight Mission. President's Report January 31st, 1911,” 5; The Vice Commission of Chicago, Social Evil in Chicago, 9.

47 “White Slave Traffic,” The Union Signal, January 4, 1912, 15.

48 Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 17.

49 Walter Nugent, “Demography: Chicago as a Modern World City,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 235.

50 Robert G. Spinney, City of Big Shoulders: A History of Chicago (DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2000), 123.

51 Turner, “The City of Chicago,” 579.

52 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 5 and 147. Also see: Towns, “Geographies of Pain,” 123.

53 Karma R. Chávez, “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourse,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (June 2010): 138, doi:10.1080/14791421003763291. Underhill explains that Progressive Era activists often constructed immigrant neighborhoods as emblematic of that perceived threat. Stephen M. Underhill, “Urban Jungle, Ferguson: Rhetorical Homology and Institutional Critique,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 4 (2016): 405, doi:10.1080/00335630.2016.1213413.

54 Aaron Powell, “The President's Opening Address,” in The National Purity Congress: Its Papers, Addresses, Portraits, ed. Aaron Powell (New York: The American Purity Alliance, 1896), 2. Also see: Janney, The White Slavery Traffic in America, 106.

55 There are many examples. See: Rose Woodallen Chapman, “The Traffic in Women,” The Union Signal, May 5, 1910, 5; Ernest A. Bell, “Progress Against the White Slave Trade,” The Union Signal, August 4, 1910, 3; Owen O. Wiard, “Will You Help Me Out of Here?,” The Union Signal, May 2, 1912, 4; Margaret Dye Ellis, “Our Washington Letter,” The Union Signal, August 28, 1913, 5; Jack Lloyd, “Sidewalk Lizards,” in The Light (La Crosse, WI: World's Purity Federation, September-October 1919), p. 15, Frances Willard Historical Society Archives, Evanston, IL; James Asa White, “Conservation of Moral Resources,” in The Light (La Crosse, WI: World's Purity Federation, July–August 1918), p. 24, Frances Willard Historical Society Archives, Evanston, IL.

56 Ernest A. Bell, White Slavery Up to Date [White Slavery Today], 1917, image 4; Edwin W. Sims, “Menace of the White Slave Trade,” in Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls: Or War on the White Slave Trade, ed. Ernest A. Bell, 1910 [?], 72.

57 Lloyd, “Behind the Scenes in a ‘Coffee House’,” in The Light (La Crosse, WI: World's Purity Federation, July–August 1919), p. 9, Frances Willard Historical Society Archives, Evanston, IL.

58 Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, 8–9.

59 “The Hunters Hunted,” The Union Signal, July 2, 1908, 9.

60 Turner, “The City of Chicago,” 581.

61 See: “Civilization's Crowning Infamy: The Liquor Traffic's Foul Consort, the White Slave Trade, in Full Glare of Investigation,” The National Prohibitionist, December 16, 1909, 2, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4–7, Chicago History Museum; Edwin W. Sims, “The White Slave Trade of Today,” in Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls: Or War on the White Slave Trade, ed. Ernest A. Bell, 1910 [?], 47–60; Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, 6.

62 Rev. M. P. Boynton, “Letter to: My Dear Brother.” The slippage between literal darkness and metaphorical darkness was common. For example, “American, Bohemian, Italian, Lithuanian, Swede, Arab, Hindoo and Japanese have knelt with us in our house of prayer, in the black and dark night; and some of these, we know, have been redeemed from the blacker, darker night of their own sin.” Ernest A. Bell, “The Midnight Mission. Superintendent's Report for 1910,” p. 1, Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-1, Chicago History Museum.

63 Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, 40, 42. This image was also published in “The Midnight Mission,” 13.

64 Other authors also referenced “underground passages and dungeons.” “What Shall We Do About It?,” The Union Signal, August 6, 1914, 8.

65 Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Lords of the Levee: The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinkydink (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943); Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Chicago Confidential (New York: Crown Publishers, 1950), 21–31.

66 “Address of Ernest A. Bell,” Friends’ Intelligencer Supplement, October 10, 1908, 73, Ernest A. Bell Collection 6–7, Chicago History Museum; Sims, “The White Slave Trade of Today”; “The Vigil” (The Illinois Vigilance Association, No 11), 2, Ernest A. Bell Collection 6–12, Chicago History Museum; Ernest A. Bell, “The Twin Destroyers of Our Young People–Liquor and Vice,” The Union Signal, April 24, 1913, 4; White, “Conservation of Moral Resources,” 24.

67 Helen Dare, “Girls Blame Nickel Dance Halls for Their Downfall: White Slave Cases Arouse Even Callous Police Court Habitues,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 1910, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4-7, Chicago History Museum.

68 Some editions of the book had the images all in the beginning, creating what seemed to be a pictorial journey that ended in the brothel. Other editions had the images scattered throughout the book, but the journey language remained. Also see: T. A. Faulkner, From the Ballroom to Hell (Chicago: R. F. Henry, 1892).

69 Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, 27.

70 Lurenda B. Smith, “The War Against the Social Evil,” The Union Signal, March 27, 1913, 11.

71 Bell, White Slavery Up to Date [White Slavery Today], 96.

72 Robin E. Jensen, Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 18; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 205.

73 The Vice Commission of Chicago, Social Evil in Chicago, 25.

74 The association between character and illness has a long history. See: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 46.

75 Ernest A. Bell, “Midnight Evangelism Among the Red Lights,” 1906, 3, Ernest A. Bell Collection 4-7, Chicago History Museum; William Burgess, “Race Decadence: An Open Letter to Theodore Roosevelt,” The Vigil, n.d., Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-2, Chicago History Museum.

76 See: “What the Judge and the Doctors Say” (Midnight Mission, n.d.), Ernest A. Bell Collection 6–14, Chicago History Museum; Mabel L. Conklin, “Our Work for Purity,” The Union Signal, November 15, 1900, 5.

77 “The Midnight Mission. President's Report January 31st, 1911,” 5; Bell, “Midnight Evangelism Among the Red Lights,” 4; “Vice Situation in Chicago,” The Union Signal, February 3, 1910, 8.

78 Estrela Manley, “To the Board of Directors,” September 1914, Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-5, Chicago History Museum; Bell, White Slavery Up to Date [White Slavery Today], 28.

79 Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).

80 Cresswell, On the Move, 159.

81 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” Environment and Planning A 38, no. 2 (2006): 241, doi:10.1068/a37268.

82 On some occasions railroads attempted to protect women by providing separate cars or guards. “Railroads Aid in Fight on Traffic in Women,” The Union Signal, May 9, 1912, 8. Also, "The carelessness and lack of common sense shown by multitudes of parents in the oversight of their girls is almost beyond belief. Young girls are often dressed in such a manner as to attract notice and comment, and are then allowed to frequent railroad stations and other public places unattended, or with silly companions." Janney, The White Slavery Traffic in America, 85.

83 For example, "When a young girl has once been induced to enter a house of prostitution or any of the feeders to such a place she is seldom allowed to leave until too broken in spirit to try to escape, or until she is thrown out, diseased and unfit for business. The end of these girls is most pitiful, and many of them commit suicide." Agnes M. Rex, “The White Slave Traffic and Public Vice,” in The Light (La Crosse, WI: World's Purity Federation, 1918), 43.

84 Ernest A. Bell, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls: Or War on the White Slave Trade, 1910 [?], 98.

85 Catherine H. Palczewski, “The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 120, doi:10.1080/00335630.2016.1154185.

86 Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, 13. Also see: “Incident at the Midnight Mission. Sunday Evening, October --- 1911,” October 1911, Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-2, Chicago History Museum; “Incident at the Midnight Mission. Saturday Night, November 4th 1911,” November 4, 1911, Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-2, Chicago History Museum; Bell, White Slavery Up to Date [White Slavery Today], 38; Lurenda B. Smith, “Superintendents, Department of Rescue Work,” The Union Signal, January 17, 1907, 10.

87 Turner-Zimmermann, Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls, 13.

88 Edwin W. Sims, “The White Slave Trade of Today.” Also see: Clifford G. Roe, “Exterminating the White Slave Traffic,” The Union Signal, August 13, 1908, 2, 12, 16; Lurenda B. Smith, “Superintendents, Department of Rescue Work”; Chapman, “The Traffic in Women. III. Two Vital Lessons.”

89 Lurenda B. Smith, “Superintendents, Department of Rescue Work.”

90 “The ‘White Slave’ Traffic,” The Union Signal, July 11, 1907, 8–9; “Alcohol and the White Slave Traffic,” The Union Signal, March 28, 1912, 8.

91 William N. Gemmill, “The Terror That Walketh in Darkness,” Northwestern Christian Advocate, January 25, 1911, Ernest A. Bell Collection 5-2, Chicago History Museum.

92 Sims, “Menace of the White Slave Trade,” 70–71.

93 Sims, “The White Slave Trade of Today,” 48. Also see: Edwin W. Sims, “The White Slave Trade of Today,” Woman's World, September 1908, Ernest A. Bell Collection 6-2, Chicago History Museum; “The Illinois Vigilance Association Pamphlet,” n.d., Ernest A. Bell Collection 6–12, Chicago History Museum. Sims tells parents to not trust their daughters. They have to check on their daughters who live in the city, and he explicitly tells them to get information from someone other than the daughter. Rose Woodallen Chapman, “The Traffic in Women. III. Two Vital Lessons,” The Union Signal, May 26, 1910, 5.

94 Langum, Crossing over the Line, 181.

95 Langum, Crossing over the Line, 69.