Editing Mann Act (section)

=== Conspiracy narrative ===
According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or 'white slavery'. These white-slave tracts began to circulate around 1909."<ref name= Bell1910>{{Citation | last = Bell | first = Ernest Albert | via = Archive | url = https://archive.org/stream/fightingtraffici00bell#page/n5/mode/2up | title = The War on the White Slave Trade | place = Chicago | publisher = GS Ball | year = 1910 | format = ebook}}.</ref> Such narratives often misleadingly portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners"<ref name="PBS Mann" /> as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution.<ref name=Bell1910 />

[[File:The First Step From Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls or the war on the white slave trade.jpg|thumb|"Does her mother know the character of the place and the man she is with?"−''The War on the White Slave Trade'' by Ernest Albert Bell, 1910]]

This excerpt from ''The War on the White Slave Trade'' was written by the United States District Attorney in Chicago:
{{blockquote|One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character.<ref name=Bell1910 />}}

While prostitution was widespread, studies by local vice commissions at the time indicate that it was "overwhelmingly locally organized without any large business structure, and willingly engaged in by the prostitutes."<ref name= Langum1994>{{cite book |last=Langum |first=David J. |date=1994 |title=Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act |location=Chicago |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=0-226-46880-1}}</ref>

Some contemporaries did question the idea of abduction and foreign control of prostitution through cartels. For example, noted radical and feminist [[Emma Goldman]] observed, "Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution."<ref name="Red Emma Speaks 1972" />