"The Traffic in Women" is an essay written by anarchist writer Emma Goldman in 1910. It has been published in various ways, including within Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (1911), published by Mother Earth, and as the named, leading essay of a collection of Emma Goldman essays: The Traffic in Women, and Other Essays on Feminism (1970, Times Change Press, 1971 paperback). Mother Earth was a monthly anarchist magazine founded by Goldman, Max Baginski, and others in 1906. The essay is one of more than 20 articles that Goldman wrote during 1906 to 1940.
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Content
The essay was written in response to the actions of contemporary social reformers campaigning against white slavery, whose legislative campaign Goldman claimed would only serve to create "fat political jobs" for "parasites."
In the essay she argues that the major cause of white slavery, that has been ignored by these reformers, is capitalist exploitation. Goldman criticizes the role which Christian churches have played in historically encouraging and maintaining prostitution.
Goldman presents marriage as on the same continuum as prostitution arguing that in both cases women are sold and circulated, and is critical of "moralists" who condemn prostitution, but not marriage for monetary considerations. Goldman claims that double standards surrounding male and female sexuality, pressure women who engage in sexual activity outside marriage into a life of prostitution, thereby "society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of."
Reception and legacy
American radical feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman strongly endorsed the essay, reading the entirety of it into the record of a legislative hearing on prostitution in New York. She argues that Goldman's sympathy for prostitutes was due to identifying with them, "because of their class and because they defied the sexual hypocrisy of Puritanism."
The essay served as an inspiration for anthropologist Gayle Rubin's 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." While Rubin follows Goldman in arguing that prostitution is part of the same spectrum as marriage, she also builds off of the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud, to describe a "sex/gender system" through which such transactions can occur.