This is not the first time anti-abortion activists have repurposed Victorian-era law post-Dobbs as part of their effort to further criminalize abortion. Reviving old laws is all the rage for the post-Roe anti-abortion movement in their efforts to squash further access. Attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian Nationalist law project, have turned to the Comstock Act of 1873 in their attempts to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used to self-administer abortion. The return of the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material by mail (among other prohibitions) and was named after the notorious anti-abortion crusader Anthony Comstock, was bad enough. But it is something else to see the Mann Act now join the ranks.
The Mann Act came out of an adjacent social purity movement to Comstock’s crusade: aligning anti-vice reformers against what they called “white slavery,” or prostitution. In 1910, after a few decades of political agitation, the movement scored a major victory after Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act. As Jessica Pliley, author of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI and professor of the history of women, genders, and sexualities at Texas State University explained by phone this week, the Mann Act was intended to prosecute people profiting off of commercial sex—but in the hands of enforcers, it expanded into a tool to police nonmarital sex more broadly if the couple involved crossed state, district, or territory lines.
While the Mann Act’s implementation began with interstate prostitution enforcement, Pliley told me, in the 1920s, the object of protection was primarily conceived of as those “who were very, very young and virginal,” and, in some cases, included victims of “interstate kidnapping and rape,” Far from being confined to cops and courts, the Mann Act was a presence in popular culture, with its enforcers valorized in wildly popular films and cheap magazines. “It’s all about tracking down traffickers,” Pliley said of such media at this time. “It’s incredibly sensational, it’s incredibly dramatic.” And you could find it at your neighborhood theater and newsstand.