The measure promoted as England's first law against sex trafficking, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, journeyed through Parliament in 1912. Amid mounting extra-parliamentary protest over votes for women, workers' rights, and Home Rule for Ireland, the country's suffrage and socialist groups chose to engage with the somewhat ancillary Bill and the issue of trafficking (or 'white slavery' as it was popularly known) through the powerful medium of their periodicals. They did so largely because they saw the value to their wider campaigns of using trafficking -a phenomenon often cast by reformers as involving the sexual exploitation of workingclass women -to forge connections (or highlight disjunctures) between the suffragist and socialist movements. Ideas of race, national identity, and empire attached to configurations of 'slavery' were central to their rhetoric, and to the links the groups made between trafficking and the political emancipation they sought. These ideas give a valuable insight into influential representations of trafficking in 1912 and the campaign against 'white slavery' during what was a fundamental, transnational moment in the history of trafficking. They also illuminate suffragist and socialist rhetoric of the day, and the conflicting ideas of 'Englishness' therein. This article strives to unlock some of these insights.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.