Personal Property

Readers in the early 20th century witnessed an explosion of lurid white slavery literature - stories and tracts proclaiming that every year, thousands of young women were being abducted and sold into forced prostitution. Despite well-publicized findings that white slavery was a fabrication, revelations that (in the words of lawman and writer Clifford Roe) "most large cities are in fact market places where girls are sold and bought" soared to popularity in the years between 1909 and 1914, reaching a mass audience through magazines like "McClure's" and dozens of popular anthologies. In "Personal Property", Margit Stange analyzes white slavery literature in relation to other key American writings of the time by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Jane Addams and Kate Chopin. These works share a view of woman as at once domestic and public, the mainstay of the home and a form of circulating property endowed with the commodity value that fuels marketing and consumption.
The anthropological theory of the exchange of woman developed by Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and especially Thorstein Veblen - who identified woman as the original private property - is reflected and reworked, Stange shows, in literature, in journalism, and in the feminist and Progressivist reform rhetoric of the early 20th century, when social relations were rapidly transformed by capitalist expansion.