Protestant Moral Reformers and the Campaign to Suppress Prostitution during World War I

• Published in: Journal of Presbyterian history (1997) Vol. 92; no. 2; pp. 52 - 72
• Main Author: Kemeny, P. C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presbyterian Historical Society 01-10-2014; 01-12-2014
• ISSN: 1521-9216

Progressive Era anti-vice activists found in World War I an opportunity to achieve a long-sought goal: the abolition of prostitution. For several decades, muckraking journalists, feminists, and social hygienists had joined with Protestant moral reformers to combat “white slavery.” After the United States entered World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson established the Commission on Training Camp Activities, a government organization that partnered with one of the nation’s most prominent Protestant moral reform groups, the New England Watch and Ward Society, to create “vice-free zones” around New England’s military bases. These efforts helped produce “the most striking tangible alteration in American social life in the Progressive Era”: the end of segregated red-light districts. While the war enabled Protestant reformers to wage successful campaigns, it also dramatically reversed Protestant reformers’ attitudes toward prostitutes. Once considered innocent victims of male lust, the war shifted the public perception of prostitutes to “bad and diseased” women who posed a threat to, as one reformer put it, “the cleanest, most manly soldiers that the world has ever seen.”