U.S. foreign policy was built on a foundation of sexual conservatism. This is Eva Payne’s bold thesis, which at first blush seems to afford an outsized role to sexual politics in global policy. Yet upon reflection, it makes perfect sense that there is an international manifestation of America’s well-documented domestic intertwining of “sexuality and statecraft.” Scholars of global law and policy have long recognized the phenomenon of “American exceptionalism,” which is the nation’s Janus-faced self-representation as a uniquely exemplary nation that need not accept international consensus or law and also a world leader with a prominent role to play in collective global affairs. Scholars of American sexuality and sexual regulation have demonstrated how U.S. authorities’ preoccupation with dangerous sexuality shaped criminal and family law, border policies, the contours of the public street, and the federal policing apparatus. Indeed, the mutually constitutive relationship between American-style sex-aversion and the American penal state is the topic of my forthcoming book The Crime of Sex. Payne, a historian, brings together these two seemingly disparate subjects of legal and historical analysis—international relations and sexual regulation—and demonstrates their interconnectedness through an eminently readable chronological tale based on painstakingly detailed historical, legal, and archival research.
The story begins roughly in the mid-nineteenth century, when the America of mostly rural sprawl began to more resemble its urban British and continental counterparts, and the cities brought with them a flourishing sexual culture. Britain and France had long wrestled with how to approach commercial sex, the least offensive term for which was “prostitution.” All three governments were particularly concerned with syphilis, which sexist state officials blamed exclusively on the “filthy” and “fallen” women. Accordingly, authorities singularly focused on controlling prostitutes as the solution to the pressing public health problem. In Europe, authorities favored the regulation model, a quite dystopian system where women bought licenses to work in commercial sex, and their funds lined the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats and paid for compulsory testing, quarantine, and painful invasive and ineffective treatments. Poor women, women of color, and victims of settler colonialism, like the Indian women under British rule, endured the worst treatment by police and public health officials.
Across the pond, America had just experienced the “second great awakening” evangelical revival. Moralistic American authorities, who had long held that the U.S. was a more puritanical and therefore more civilized nation than European (Catholic) countries and even Britain, were aghast at the idea of licensed prostitution. Prominent feminist and anti-slavery activists rejected regulation because of religious concerns over sex and humanitarian concerns about both prostitution’s negative effect on women and the regulation model’s violation of women’s liberty. The Civil War was an inflection point, as were the Spanish-American War and World War I thereafter. Civil War soldiers’ sexual demands brought a glut of prostitution, and the war led to the abolition of slavery. Having “solved” American slavery, Northern white leaders and activists turned their attention to prostitution—eventually termed “white slavery”—and “new abolitionism” was born. American new abolitionists joined with British activists and took their message international, seeking to replace regulation with abolition in Western Europe, Britain, and their colonies. Before the United States even had a fully formed national governance structure, the prostitution issue brought America on to the world stage where it could present its exceptionalist face as a leader in morality and humanity.
With the Spanish-American War, the U.S. joined the ranks of colonizer countries, and new occupations, borders, and migrations brought with them new sexual issues. Military officials became preoccupied with sexually-transmitted diseases, with some remarking that syphilis was a more pressing problem than other tropical and contagious diseases and even casualties from combat. New abolitionists who championed male continence and the banishment of brothels from military areas squared off with military leaders who believed that soldiers required sexual release and that regulation was the best way to prevent soldiers from bringing back diseases generated by “degraded” tropical women and poisoning the blood of the white nation.
As the U.S. moved into the era of social purity and white-slavery panic, the new abolitionists found a strong champion in John D. Rockefeller, Jr. With his funding, they were able to form the powerful American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) and devise a plan to eradicate prostitution abroad at home: the “American Plan,” which stood in opposition to the “French Plan” of regulation. By this time, abolitionism had lost most of its feminist and humanitarian character, and the American Plan’s means to eradicate prostitution included strict immigration control, massive surveillance, policing, and incarceration, as well as the invasive testing and treatment characteristic of regulation. In the lead up to World War I, U.S. officials imperialistically imposed the American Plan in the Caribbean and France. By the end of the war, the U.S. touted the American Plan as a primary contributor to the superiority of American military strength and as evidence the nation should take a moral leadership role in international affairs. ASHA, now fully integrated into Wilsonian international affairs, asserted a prominent place for itself in the fledgling international order. Its reports on prostitution—now called “the traffic in women” because “white slavery” and its racist connotations had fallen into disfavor—influenced the newly formed League of Nations to prioritize fighting the transnational sex trade. Fighting prostitution was Americas path to “world-wide influence, not only in relation to armies but in the social life of the nations,” as one U.S. authority stated in 1917.
There is much more to say about Empire of Purity, but hopefully this snapshot synopsis gives a sense of the richness of Payne’s historical research and analysis. It is engaging and important reading for any scholar or lawyer interested in American exceptionalism, international law and policy, sexuality and the law, and sex work/trafficking. Because America’s exceptional sex aversion has manifested as both formal legal prohibitions and informal cultural injunctions against discussing sex, academic analysis often overlooks the foundational role sex plays in U.S. law, policy, and culture. Empire of Purity fills an important knowledge gap by bringing sex exceptionalism to American exceptionalism.
