Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: Trafficking, Sexual Labor, and Maritime Travel

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives about trafficking typically begin with the seduction and inveiglement of young women by rapacious men, in rapidly modernizing urban centers. This presentation shifts our focus to the centrality of sexual danger—and also sexual opportunity—in narratives about the sea. I examine female migrants’ letters, shipping company archives, and the League of Nations investigation on the traffic in women (1927) to explore the gendered and sexual meanings attached to maritime travel for women. My subjects include female stowaways, women who sold sex aboard steamships, and captains lamenting the eroding morals of passengers. If social reformers associated ocean travel with migrants’ vulnerability, it meant something different to ostensibly trafficked women, whose letters often expressed a sense of wonder and adventure about their journey.

Trafficking narratives shaped urban cartographies of desire and danger, in accordance with gendered notions of sexual respectability. This paper seeks to incorporate the liminal space of the sea into a broader historical reflection on the regulation of sex and space.