White Slave Traffic, The.
On Prostitution
Goldman, Emma. The White Slave Traffic. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association [1910].
12mo.; brown printed wrappers. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Goldman’s manifesto, in which she argues for the abolition of prostitution as a manifestation of industrial slavery. This pamphlet was expanded from the notorious January 1910 Mother Earth article of the same title that caused the issue to be banned by US Postal authorities. Candace Falk explains:
It was probably Emma’s effort to link a critique of the state and capitalism with the taboo subjects of sex and sex education that led government censors to halt mail distribution of Emma’s article. Emma had planned to deliver that lecture on this tour and was determined not to let the laws about what was permissible to send through the mails stop her from speaking. Her lecture was a response to the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines or bring them into the United States for immoral purposes...Emma’s essay, which took the blame for prostitution away from women (who, she noted, were ‘not merely white women, but yellow and black women as well’), was considered an outrage against the state. She pinpointed the reasons women became prostitutes: “Exploitation, of course; the merciless Moloch of capitalism that fattens on unpaid labor, thus driving thousands of women and girls into prostitution. With [George Bernard Shaw’s] Mrs. Warren, these girls feel, Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in scullery, eighteen hours a day?” (Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984, pp. 123-4)
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