The Limits of Feminism: Sex Workers’ Rights and the Reemergence of Female Sexual Slavery, 1974–85

The 1970s was a decade of multiple sexual revolutions: revolutions in media and popular culture, in feminist and queer activist communities, and in attitudes and behavior. The sexual liberalism of the period prompted a wide array of responses among feminists, with no topic provoking more debate than the place where sexual and economic liberalism intersected with ideas of female exploitation—prostitution. For some, prostitution needed to be reconceived as a form of work in the service sector and should be called “sex work.” Other feminists, noting the gendered nature of transactional sex, the vulnerability of women to violence from pimps and johns, and the questionable nature of consent argued that prostitution was a form of “female sexual slavery.”

The re-emergence of a panic about sex trafficking in the late 1970s and early 1980s—called white slavery a century earlier—spurred bitter fights between feminists associated with the sex workers’ rights movement and international anti-trafficking activists. Drawing upon the papers of Charlotte Bunch, COYOTE, and the National Organization of Women, among others, this paper explores the fraught feminist politics of sex trafficking in the late 1970s and early 1980s.