The "white slavery" panic: anti-prostitution activists have been equating sex work with slavery for over a century.

• Author: McNeil, Joanne
• Position: Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul - Book review

Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul, by Karen Abbott, New York: Random House, 356 pages, $25.95

IN 1907 A GROUP of evangelicals visited Chicago's Everleigh Club brothel, where they handed out leaflets that said, "No 'white slave' need remain in slavery in this State of Abraham Lincoln who made the black slaves free" According to the Illinois poet Edgar Lee Masters, an Everleigh Club regular, "the girls laughed in their faces." In Sin in the Second City, the Atlanta-based journalist Karen Abbott recounts how Minna Everleigh, one of the club's proprietors, "explained graciously, patiently, that the Everleigh Club was free from disease, that [a doctor] examined the girls regularly, that neither she nor Ada [Everleigh, her sister and co-proprietor,] would tolerate anything approaching violence, that drugs were forbidden and drinks tossed out, that guests were never robbed nor rolled, and that there was actually a waiting list of girls, spanning the continental United States, eager to join the house. No captives here, Reverends."

The Everleigh Club was an ornate mansion. Thirty themed boudoirs ("the Japanese Parlor," "the Moorish Room," "the Egyptian Room") included absurd touches of decadence, such as hidden buttons to ring for champagne and a fountain that fired a jet of perfume. The city's finest chefs prepared the women's dinners. They read poetry by the fire with guests, who included the writers Theodore Dreiser and Ring Lardner. Sometimes Minna and Ada let swarms of butterflies fly loose throughout the house.

Some anti-prostitution activists nevertheless believed the Everleigh ladies were no different from slaves. Then as now, opponents of prostitution assumed that no woman in her right mind consensually exchanges sex for money. Abbott challenges that view in her account of Chicago's red light district at the turn of the last century. She interweaves the stories of sex workers and clientele, evangelical activists and conservative bureaucrats, explaining how the term "white slavery" was routinely applied to consenting adults. Reading her historical account, you can hear echoes of that debate in the current crusade against sex trafficking, which similarly blurs the line between coercion and consent.

The Everleigh sisters, Abbott notes, believed a sex worker was "more than an unwitting conduit for virtue. An employee in a business, she was an investment and should be treated as such, receiving nutritious meals, a thorough education, expert medical care, and generous wages. In their house, a courtesan would make a living as viable as--and more lucrative than--those earned by the thousands of young women seeking work in cities as stenographers and sweatshop seamstresses, department store clerks and domestics. The sisters wanted to uplift...