Traffic in Souls: The 'new woman,' whiteness and mobile self-possession

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 485-504

  Olund, Eric ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Cinema; City; Progressive era; Race; Sexuality

Indexed keywords

MEDIA ROLE; PROSTITUTION; RACISM; SEXUALITY; SLAVERY; SOCIAL EXCLUSION; URBAN HISTORY;

NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 70350549811     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474009340088     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. George Tucker and Walter Macnamara, Screenplay for '"Traffic in Souls" or "While New York Sleeps"' (1913), New York Public Library Manuscript and Archives Division, National Board of Review of Motion Pictures records, 1907-1971 (hereafter cited as NBRMP), box 107, folder 7.
2. B. Brewster, 'Traffic in Souls: an experiment in feature-length narrative construction', Cinema journal 31 (1991), pp. 37-56. For an overview of the emergence of feature-length films,
3. Eileen Bowser, The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 (Vol. 2) (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), pp. 191-272.
4. Universal Film Manufacturing Company, Circular for Traffic in Souls (1913), NBRMP 107:7.
5. More recent scholars have been keen to historicize and complicate these dichotomies, e.g. M. Domosh, 'The "Women of New York": a fashionable moral geography', Environment and planning d: society and space 19 (2001), pp. 573-92;
6. J. Landes, 'Further thoughts on the public/private distinction', Journal of women's history 15 (2003), pp. 28-39;
7. L. Staeheli, 'Publicity, privacy, and women's political action', Environment and planning d: society and space 14 (1996), pp. 601-19;
8. M. Valverde, 'The dialectic of the familiar and the unfamiliar: "the Jungle" in early slum travel writing', Sociology 30 (1996), pp. 493-509.
9. Robert Park et al..The city: suggestions for the study of human nature in the urban environment (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1925).
10. E.g. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 264, 323.
11. On cinematic perception of this period, see G. Bruno, 'Site-seeing: architecture and the moving image', Wide angle 19 (1997), pp. 8-24;
12. D. Clarke and M. Doel, 'Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips', Journal of historical geography 31 (2005), pp. 41-60;
13. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1990);
14. T. Gunning, 'From the kaleidoscope to the x-ray: urban spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913)', Wide angle 19 (1997), pp. 25-63;
15. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: spectatorship in American silent film (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1991). For a more general overview of how geographers have taken up cinematic perception (as well as representation), see T. Cresswell and D. Dixon, eds, Engaging film: geographies of mobility and identity (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
16. Tucker and Macnamara, screenplay, p. 1.
17. Tucker and Macnamara, screenplay, p. 2.
18. The virtual (imaginative) and the actual (concrete) are both real in that they both have effects in the world. The virtual is not synonymous with the possible; as Deleuze declares, following Bergson, 'The possible has no reality.' Because the virtual is real, its occurrence as an image on the screen is not a 'mere' representation of something else in the 'real world' as conventionally understood. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York, Zone Books, 1991), p. 96;
19. see also Gilles Deleuze, Pure immanence: essays on a life (New York, Zone Books, 2001), p. 31.
20. C. Diffee, 'Sex and the city: the white slavery scare and social governance in the Progressive era', American quarterly 57 (2005), pp. 411-37.
21. Mary Jo Deegan, ed., The new woman of color: the collected writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893-1918 (DeKalb, Northern Illinois University Press, 2002);
22. M. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: reimagining the American new woman, 1895-1915 (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2005).
23. Laura Abrams, 'Guardians of virtue: the social reformers and the "girl problem", 1890-1920', Social service review 74 (2000), pp. 436-52;
24. Lauren Rabinovitz, For the love of pleasure: women, movies and culture in turn-of-the-century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1998).
25. Elizabeth Clement, Love for sale: courting treating and prostitution in New York City, 1900-1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
26. Gabbert, 'Prostitution and moral reform in the borderlands: El Paso, 1890-1920', Journal of the history of sexuality 12 (2003), pp. 575-604.
27. Mara Keire glosses academic literature on the racialized nature of white slavery discourse, but argues for a more unifying 'economic discourse' in white slavery narratives and reports, a move that unnecessarily limits explanation to the search for monocausality. 'The vice trust: a reinterpretation of the white slavery scare in the United States, 1907-1917', Journal of social history 35 (2001), pp. 5-41.
28. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, race and politics: policing venereal disease in the British Empire (London, Routledge, 2003);
29. R. Phillips, 'Heterogeneous imperialism and the regulation of sexuality in British West Africa', Journal of the history of sexuality 14 (2005), pp. 291-315.
30. E. Feldman, 'Prostitution, the alien woman and the progressive imagination, 1910-1915', American quarterly 19 (1967), pp. 192-206.
31. Though in one sensationalized case from 1909 New York, the procurer was a mixed-race woman named Belle Moore, but again, she was tried for trafficking white women. B. Donovan, 'The sexual basis of racial formation: anti-vice activism and the creation of the twentieth-century "color line"', Ethnic and racial studies 26 (2003), pp. 707-27.
32. For a brief overview, see Lee Grieveson, Policing cinema: movies and censorship in early-twentieth-century America (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004), pp. 136-7.
33. The Rockefeller Foundation archives in New York document the personal attention that J.D. Rockefeller Jr. paid the foundation's activities, while social-reform journals of the period, such as The survey and The outlook, give a sense of how strong his influence was among Progressive reformers.
34. Universal, circular.
35. Collier to Advisory Committee (21 October 1913), NBRMP 107:7. The committee was national in scope and included Progressive era luminaries such as Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers and Jacob Riis, but in practice only New York-based reformers were called for in-person meetings.
36. Minutes of meeting at Universal Film Company (27 October 1913), NBRMP 107:7, pp. 6-7.
37. Traffic's narrative was also unbeholden to reel length, which meant it could not be serialized. Brewster, 'Experiment', p. 37.
38. I am borrowing here from Anne Friedburg's influential formulation of the 'mobile virtual gaze' in her Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1993);
39. see also D. Clarke and M. Doel, 'Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips', Journal of historical geography 31 (2005), pp. 41-60.
40. K. Whissel, 'Regulating mobility: technology, modernity, and feature-length narrativity in Traffic in Souls', Camera obscura 17 (2002), p. 4.
41. Tucker and Macnamara, screenplay, p. 1.
42. Tucker and Macnamara, screenplay, p. 4.
43. Traffic also depicts immigrants and rural migrants and the transnational networks which brought them to the city.
44. Whissel, 'Mobility', p. 10.
45. Whissel, 'Mobility', p. 9.
46. Nikolas Rose, Powers of freedom: reframing political thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
47. '"Recruiting stations of vice": a libel on moving picture theaters', Moving picture world 6 (12 March 1910), pp. 370-71.
48. Minutes, Universal meeting, p. 9.
49. J. Crary, Techniques; W. Schivelbusch, The railway journey: trains and travel in the 19th century (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1980).
50. Shelley Stamp argues that the recording device is Mr Barton's 'prosthetic' which 'resurrects the weak patriarchal body' and thereby reduces his daughter to an object with no final agency of her own, in Movie-struck girls: women and motion picture culture after the nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 81.
51. For a contrasting view, see Janet Staiger, Bad women: the regulation of female sexuality in early American cinema (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 140.
52. I borrow the phrase from Elizabeth Povinelli, The empire of love (Durham, MD, Duke University Press, 2006), p. 183.
53. Shannon Jackson, Lines of activity: performance, historiography, Hull-House domesticity (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 110-22.
54. The British Utilitarian John Stuart Mill's writings such as The subjection of women and principles of political economy are cases in point. For a discussion of the anxieties over this loss in a colonial context, see Uday Mehta, Liberalism and empire: a study in nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1999).
55. Theodore Bingham, The girl that disappears: the real facts about the white slave traffic (Boston, Gorham Press, 1911), p. 11.
56. John Kneeland, Commercialized prostitution in New York City (New York, The Century Co., 1913), p. x.
57. Tucker and Macnamara, screenplay, n.p.
58. Committee of Fourteen, The social evil in New York City: a study in law enforcement (New York, Andrew M. Kellogg, 1910), p. xiv.
59. Committee of Fourteen, Social evil, p. xii.
60. Committee of Fourteen, Social evil, p. xv.
61. Travelers' Aid Society, Facts everyone should know (ca. 1913), NBRMP 107:7, p. 3.
62. Bingham, Disappears, p. 47.
63. Vice Commission of Chicago, The social evil in Chicago: a study of existing conditions (Chicago, IL, Gunthorp-Warren Printing Co., 1911), p. 65.
64. J.P. Coan, Detailed history of the Fifth District activities (n.d.) Minneapolis Public Library Special Collections, Fifth District Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs papers, box 1, folder 2. Women's clubs and civic clubs were gendered counterparts in the Progressive era working for generalized 'improvement' at the local level, but their memberships overlapped to some extent with mixed-gender, single-issue philanthropic groups. For a discussion of the alternately cooperative and tense relationships between these sectors, see M. Flanagan, 'Gender and urban political reform: the City Club and the Woman's City Club of Chicago in the Progressive era', The American historical review 95 (1990), pp. 1032-50.
65. 'Dance halls are blamed for evils', Minneapolis journal (12 November 1911), p. 11.
66. It is important to underscore that this was a historical process; for example, US women had not yet won the right to vote nationally.
67. Marion Shutter, Report of the Vice Commission of Minneapolis (Minneapolis, Henry M. Hall, ca. 1911), p. 115.
68. Melissa W. Wright notes a similar link between notions of waste and female labor-power in presentday Mexico, but with even more dire consequences, in 'The dialectics of still life: murder, women, and maquiladoras', Public culture 11 (1999), pp. 455-6.
69. There are moments of soaring rhetoric about the human cost of industry, but it is undercut either by a lack of analysis as to why this should be the case, or by a blaming of (unnamed) individual industrialists who are corrupt and 'exploitive.'
70. Chicago vice report, p. 41.
71. Chicago vice report, p. 38.
72. It also went so far as to implicitly criticize interracial relationships altogether in a section titled 'Family Life among the Poorer Negroes.' Louise de Koven Bowen, The colored people of Chicago: an investigation (Chicago, IL, Juvenile Protective Association, 1913), n.p.
73. Committee of Fourteen, Social evil, p. 132.
74. Elizabeth Alice Clement points out that this does not mean that black prostitutes were immune from policing - far from it - yet social reformers showed little interest. Love, pp. 186-9; for a more extended discussion of this racialized disavowal on the part of reformers, see Kevin Mumford, Interzones: black/white sex districts in Chicago and New York in the early twentieth century (New York, Columbia University Press, 1997).
75. Minutes, Universal meeting, p. 5.
76. L. Grieveson, 'The Thaw-White scandal, The Unwritten Law, and the scandal of cinema', in Adrienne McLean and David Cook, eds, Headline Hollywood: a century of film scandal (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2001).
77. R. Merritt, 'Nickelodeon theatres, 1905-1914: building an audience for the movies', in Tino Balio, ed., The American film industry (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1976).
78. J. Elshtain, ed., The Jane Addams reader (New York, Basic Books, 2002), p. 416.
79. J. Elshtain, ed., The Jane Addams reader (New York, Basic Books, 2002), p. 428.
80. Jane Addams, A new conscience and an ancient evil (New York, Macmillan, 1914), p. 216.
81. Collier to Advisory Committee (21 October 1913), NBRMP 107:7.
82. Whissel, 'Mobility', p. 9.
83. Schivelbusch, 'Railway', p. 193; quoted in ibid., p. 10.
84. Whissel, 'Mobility', p. 10.
85. J. Collier, 'Moving pictures: their function and proper regulation', Playground 4 (1910), p. 234.
86. Whissel, 'Mobility', p. 14.
87. Whissel, 'Mobility', pp. 5-6.
88. Whissel, 'Mobility', p. 9.
89. For a discussion of the shift to mutual sexual pleasure within marriage at this time, see Julian Carter, The heart of whiteness: normal sexuality and race in America, 1880-1940 (Durham, MD, Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 75-117.
90. Collier to Robinson (17 February 1914), NBRMP 105:11.
91. Collier to Robinson (17 February 1914), NBRMP 105:11
92. Collier to Robinson (17 February 1914), NBRMP 105:11, p. 5.
93. National Board to London (18 December 1913), NBRMP 105:11.
94. Universal, circular, p. 4.
95. A. Saldanha, 'Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype', Environment and planning d: society and space 24 (2006), p. 9.
96. A. Saldanha, 'Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype', Environment and planning d: society and space 24 (2006), p. 21.