Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity

Leslie J. Harris is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her research focuses on rhetoric and public culture, especially at the intersections of gender, race, and class. She has received numerous awards, including a major grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council, for her public humanities work on Voices of Gun Violence, a living archive of stories about gun violence in the Milwaukee area. Harris is a past president for the Organization for Research on Women and Communication and has served as an officer for the Rhetoric Society of America.

Harris’s thoroughly researched and carefully argued case studies present a cohesive and compelling argument about how rhetorics of race, gender, and mobility have been deployed to shore up a white supremacist version of US national identity. This important research lends insight not only into historical discourses about womanhood and sexual exploitation; the book also outlines troubling themes and strategies that often are present in contemporary anti-trafficking rhetoric. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how gendered exploitation is strategically and cynically used to perpetuate oppressive power structures.—Karrin Vasby Anderson, professor of communication studies, Colorado State University, and coauthor of Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture

• Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. Slavery Up North: White Women’s Displacement in the Wisconsin Northwoods, 1887–1889 Chapter 2. Mobility and the Danger of the City: Moral Reform in Chicago, 1907–1914 Chapter 3. The Science of Social Mobility: John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Science of Reform, 1910–1917 Chapter 4. A National Solution: Protecting Whiteness Through the 1910 Mann Act Chapter 5. White Slavery and Yellow Peril: Immigration and Transnational Threat Chapter 6. White Slavery and Transnational Flow: International Sex Trafficking Activism before World War I Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index