| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History. By Angus McLaren. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. xii, 332 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00924-X.)
Blackmail requires having a good story to tell, so it is no surprise that Angus McLaren's book is full of fascinating stories. The sheer number of blackmail stories that McLaren found, however, did surprise me. One of my favorites was the career of "Dapper Don" Collins, a professional criminal arrested thirteen times and convicted four times from 1908 to 1923. Collins employed women to lure small-town businessmen visiting New York to Atlantic City and then, posing as a U.S. marshal, threatened the men with prosecution for taking a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.	1
McLaren argues that sexual blackmail is unique to the modern period. "Blackmail stories were the product of a culture going through important transformations in attitudes toward sex and gender" (p. 8), changes that produced a growing gap between laws and sexual practices that "both the desperate and unscrupulous could exploit" (p. 4). Although the primary purpose of blackmail stories was to support the "dominant cultural order" (p. 278), they also "provided a safe way for people to acknowledge and come to terms with a range of distinctly new and troubling sexual personas and practices" (p. 62).	. . .

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