26. White Slave Narratives

The white slaves of England : being true pictures of certain social conditions in the kingdom of England in the year 1897 / by Robert Harborough Sherard ; illustrated by Harold Piffard. (London : James Bowden, 1897)

The white slave market / by Mrs. Archibald Mackirdy (Olive Christian Malvery) and W. N. Willis ; with a frontispiece in half-tone. 2nd ed. (London : Stanley Paul, [190-?])

The white slaves of London / by W.N. Willis. (London : Anglo-Eastern Publishing, 1932)

White slavery / James Holledge. (London ; Melbourne : Horwitz, 1964)

This collection of books forms part of a large genre of ‘white slave narratives’. With one exception, the books included here refer to a form of ‘white slavery’ that involved the enforced sexual exploitation of young, white women. (The one exception is The White Slaves of England, which refers to an older but ongoing usage of ‘white slavery’ to refer to industrial workers). These narratives of sexual enslavement came to prominence in the late nineteenth century, particularly after the sensational exposés of the English publicist, W.T. Stead, in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. Stead reported his successful attempt to ‘buy’ an English virgin for the Continental sex industry, fuelling a concerted campaign in the UK and abroad against the trafficking in girls and women for prostitution. Narratives documenting alleged cases of abduction, seduction or deception of innocent young white women – usually by ‘foreigners’ of various origins – became a standard part of the propaganda of organizations like the National Vigilance Association and the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. As a reading of the texts will confirm, these narratives were intended to shock, with a view to inspiring action. In their quest for the sensational, however, they also bordered on the pornographic, embellishing their tales of abduction and captivity with the details of the bondage, sexual subjugation and humiliation of the victim. The relationship between moral crusade and sensational publishing is clearly evident in the book co-authored by Anglo-Indian social investigator, Mrs Archibald Mackirdy (Olive Christian Malvery) and the colourful and idiosyncratic Australian, William Nicholas Willis. A former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Willis was co-founder of the scurrilous Truth newspaper. The genre certainly succeeded as a publishing venture, as the number of reprints attest.

It is common to regard white slave narratives as little more than the sensational outpourings of the over-active imaginations of their authors. Their main value for historians in recent years has been as texts wherein we can discern the elaboration of gendered and racialised categories. However, my own research into the international sex industry at this time shows that the stories related were usually based on actual cases, albeit the details were often greatly exaggerated or distorted. The case referred to on pages 97-101 of The White Slave Market is just one example. It is based on the conviction of two Italian procurers who brought young women to the gold fields of Western Australia in the early years of the twentieth century. This episode, and the reference to it in The White Slave Market, is discussed in my recent book, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution, University of New South Wales Press, 2007, chapter 11.

The genre was at its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but, as James Holledge’s 1964 volume, White Slavery: A startling report on today’s white slavers, shows, examples continued to appear well after this time.