“The Press Procuress”: Brokering the “White Slave Trade” in Popular Newspapers

This paper examines how popular narratives about “white slavery” constructed French classified advertising—and women's search for well-remunerated work via this medium—as dangerous for overworked, underpaid, “honest” women. I analyze salacious newspaper articles, feminist tracts, social scientific studies, and police reports to elucidate the centrality of the press in developing the myth of the white slave trade, and also its use by traffickers to ensnare victims. I draw attention to how these narratives directly targeted the technologies women employed to take control of their economic lives, figuring them as the unwitting victims of new forms of communication and transnational exchange while also rendering any activity by women in the classifieds morally suspect.

At the turn of the twentieth century, journalists, legislators, and other social critics began to worry that the Parisian classifieds—long derided as a site for the sale of charlatanesque medical treatments—also posed a threat to the French nation’s moral health. They imagined classified advertising as a site of sexual danger, a danger that was especially potent because it ventured everywhere the newspaper did: from newspaper kiosks to cafes and even to bourgeois living rooms. Historians have noted that obscenity law was modified in this period to include ads for pornographic materials and obscene objects, in addition to its earlier focus on immoral texts and images. But the concern did not stop there. In addition to ads for “curious books” or “massage parlors,” which legislators assumed to be code for prostitution, many feminists and moralists saw danger in simple want ads offering lucrative positions for women, especially for jobs that required women to travel abroad.