Reform or Remand? Race, Nativity, and the Immigrant Family in the History of Prostitution
Special Issue: Problematizing Prostitution: Critical Research and Scholarship
ISBN: 978-1-78635-040-4, eISBN: 978-1-78635-039-8
Publication date: 20 October 2016
Abstract
A central tenet of Progressive era responses to prostitution was the alleged over-representation of white, US-born daughters of foreign parentage in the prostitution population. We detail a statistical error in an influential 1913 study from the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford as an important source of this tenet. Using archival data to more accurately reconstruct the Reformatory population, we find that Black women constituted the only over-represented group, but were all but ignored by reformers. We foreground how ideas about race and immigration informed the social response to prostitution in this period, highlighting the importance of critically analyzing historical sources.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
Research for this paper was supported by grants from the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Grant-in-Aid-Program and the University of Delaware’s University Research Program. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2103 annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, Boston, MA. The authors would like to thank Aaron Kupchik and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We appreciate the gracious permission of Patterson Smith press for use of the photographs reproduced from Spaulding (1969 [1923]).
Citation
Bowler, A.E., Lilley, T.G. and Leon, C.S. (2016), "Reform or Remand? Race, Nativity, and the Immigrant Family in the History of Prostitution", Special Issue: Problematizing Prostitution: Critical Research and Scholarship (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 71), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 63-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-433720160000071004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016 Emerald Group Publishing Limited