Personal property

Readers in the early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of lurid white slavery literature - stories and tracts proclaiming that, every year, thousands of young women were being abducted and sold into forced prostitution. Despite well-publicized findings that white slavery was a fabrication, revelations that (in the words of lawman and writer Clifford Roe) "most large cities are in fact market places where girls are sold and bought" soared to popularity in the years between 1909 and 1914, reaching a mass audience through magazines like McClure's and dozens of popular anthologies. In…