Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI

The White-Slave Traffic Act, commonly known as the Mann Act, was passed in the United States in 1910 and made it a felony to transport any "woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose" across state lines. It was designed to fight a perceived growth of prostitution, especially the trafficking in of women from Europe to America. Pliley (women's history, Univ. of Texas), drawing largely from the records of the Bureau of Immigration, Bureau of Investigation, and then Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), examines the way these agencies used the expansion of their powers less to protect women and more to control sexuality according to their own conservative culture. Using case files, Pliley shows how ideas about women's sexuality and the vagueness of the phrase "any immoral purpose" were used to police sexual and moral boundaries. She illustrates how the law was more often employed by the FBI before World War II to prosecute unapproved premarital, extramarital, and interracial sexual relationships, than to prosecute human trafficking.