Thread from this report on sex trafficking from 1914 in Massachusetts

"Experts" were picked to investigate the white slave traffic. It was to investigate sex work or "immoral women"

Experts included Walter E Fernald, an advocate for eugenics who sterilized & ran experiments often without consent on children with mental disabilities.

Being "feeble minded" for girls often meant deviating from your gender role, and it often meant that you were sexual.
Poverty was associated with mental illness, sex work/sexual deviance & crime. These girls were policed, institutionalized & controlled

Charles W Birtwell was head of the BCAS (an early part of the Child Protection Services/social work), & society for Sex Ed. You can that charities, prisons, philanthropy, medical field etc were all connected (as they are now) on the segregation and control of the "unfit"

Lucia L. Jaquith was superintendent of the Worcester Memorial Hospital, Head Nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

She believed sex workers bore less children then "normal women". And associated them with alcohol and mental illness.

Edwin Mulready deputy Commissioner of Probation & State Commissioner of Labor. There's a whole thing on the connection between probation and social welfare.

They worked for Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded later renamed after Walter Fernald

It was mostly poor kids often forced to labor
The BOI (FBI) told them to monitor German, Italian& Japanese-born Americans as enemy aliens
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/enemies-disabilities
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-deep-dark-secret/

To go into the report, they go on a rant about teen girls who dream of seeing the world, to go out to the theatre, moving picture shows, to Boston, New York, to go on stage, & have "a good time", having sex for no money.

The contempt for working class & immigrant women is clear

Keep in mind this was during a time when women were starting to enter the workplace & dating was starting to be invented by working class women.

The proper upper class lady would never leave the home without a male escort. Only a prostitute would venture out into the world alone

A woman unaccompanied by a male was "loitering". This is where our loitering, curfew, vagrancy, prostitution laws start to come in.

To this day, many anti trafficking orgs and advocates will insist that laws against loitering need to be maintained.

It does break my heart, this obsession to depict sex workers as completely inferior to other women.

Our honesty gets used against us.

Our sharp tongues, boldness, confidence, and our beauty is seen as a "mask"