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REVIEWS
| White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917. By Brian Donovan. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
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| Everyone knows humans create structures of inequality, but how this occurs is not so clear. This book helps establish the idea that race is socially constructed through many simultaneous "racial projects." Racial projects create and reinforce racial boundaries and may appear as a hidden byproduct of what seem like non-racial activities. The author analyzes sexual vice reformers' published (and some unpublished) writings for explicit and implicit meanings, and argues that anti-vice campaigns were not moral panics based on exaggerated fears. These campaigns were not even about crime or sex; they were racial projects that helped create and reinforce persistent racial hierarchies. |
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The concise book has six short chapters, in addition to an introduction, a conclusion, and an index. The first two chapters introduce the reformers' narratives, the notion of racial projects, and the context for the four empirical cases upon which the book focuses. The remaining four chapters are each explicitly organized around analysis of how one anti-vice crusade operated as a racial project— as sponsored by the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), or by other reformers in Chicago, New York City, or San Francisco. Each chapter implicitly reproduces four main analytic themes: the organizational context that supported the reformers, how reformers defined the sexual vice problem, how they defined its causes, and how they defined its solutions. |
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