Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade

Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade is a forceful Progressive Era reform volume devoted to exposing sexual exploitation, procuring, and the social conditions that made young women vulnerable in modern cities. Its style blends documentary testimony, sermon-like urgency, journalistic exposé, and legislative advocacy, placing it within the literature of moral reform and early twentieth-century anti-vice campaigns. Though shaped by the period's anxieties and rhetoric, the book remains a revealing artifact of public debate about gender, labor, migration, and urban danger. The attribution to Various reflects its collective reformist character: the volume gathers voices associated with social purity movements, law enforcement, religious activism, and civic investigation. Such contributors wrote from a milieu of settlement houses, vice commissions, courtroom campaigns, and newspaper investigations, where prostitution was understood both as individual tragedy and as a symptom of corrupt institutions, poverty, and inadequate legal protection. Readers interested in the history of trafficking discourse, women's reform activism, Progressive Era social policy, or the rhetoric of moral crusade will find this book indispensable. It should be read critically, but also attentively, as a document of reformist conviction and historical consequence.