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Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The American Gold Digger -- 1. The Alimony Panic -- 2. The Crusade against Heart Balm -- 3. Gold Diggers and Midcentury Domesticity -- 4. Gold Diggers of the Sexual Revolution -- 5. Material Girls -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Trials of the first sexual revolution -- Date rape and the crime of seduction -- Rape and the double bind of progressive-era femininity -- White slaves and ordinary prostitutes -- Sodomy, manhood, and consent -- Conclusion: rethinking sexual revolution -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

White slavery and the intersection of race and gender -- The new abolitionism : the cultural power of the white slavery -- Genre -- Suffrage and slavery : the racial politics of the WCTU's purity -- Campaign -- "The black traffic in white girls" : Chicago's war on vice -- John D. Rockefeller jr. and the "notorious mulatto procuress" -- "Yellow slavery" and Donaldina Cameron's San Francisco mission -- Conclusion.

Beginning in the early 1930s, US citizens made a concerted effort to ban lawsuits for breach of promise, seduction, criminal conversation, and alienation of affection. By 1940, ten states had outlawed so-called heart balm torts. Yet there is no empirical evidence that rates of heart balm lawsuits were increasing. This article analyzes 1930s media representations to show how the movement against heart balm grew from "tort tales" about allegedly outrageous lawsuits. Heart balm narratives drew from stylized representations of "gold diggers" found in popular culture, and they reflected divisions around gender and social class exacerbated by the Great Depression.

White slavery narratives - stories about white women forced into prostitution - played an important role in the construction of racial distinctions in the early twentieth century. New York City politicians launched a well-publicized anti-vice crusade in 1910 that led to the imprisonment of a mixed-race woman named Belle Moore. In this article, I analyse this event to show the importance of sexuality and gender for creating racial boundaries. Testimony in People vs. Belle Moore designated certain intimacies as violating the color line, thereby clarifying what it meant to be 'white' or 'colored'. I argue that theories of racial formation must include a more careful consideration of gender and sexuality because the ongoing maintenance of racial categories depends upon cultural narratives about sexual deviance and purity. ; This research was made possible by a 1998 Dissertation Grant from the Rockefeller Archive Center and a 2000/01 Sexuality Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. The author wishes to thank Wendy Griswold, Orville Lee, Joane Nagel, members of the Northwestern University Culture and Society Workshop, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Nicola Beisel deserves special thanks for commenting on several drafts of this article.

By the late 1920s, the belief that US men were being exploited by the so-called gold diggers seeking advantageous divorces was widespread. Organizations like the Alimony Payers' Protective Association and the Alimony Reform League were created to combat the perceived problem of gold digging ex-wives. Several states considered legislation to restrict alimony payments. Yet, the overall instances of alimony were relatively rare. This article explains the rise of anti-alimony sentiment during the late 1920s through an examination of the gold digger trope. Anti-alimony agitation represented a response to the changes in women's roles and sexual norms in the 1920s.

This study examines the sources of strength and mobilizing impetus in the Anti‐Saloon League (ASL) and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the early twentieth century. Both the ASL and the WCTU played essential roles in the establishment of national prohibition. The quick demise of the ASL after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 and the endurance of the WCTU cannot be explained only by the structural conditions that confronted the two movements, as suggested by the resource mobilization approach. Using Snow and Benford's "collective action frame" concept, it is argued that a consideration of meanings constructed by the movements'leaders and their translation into strategic action provides a better account of the temporal viability of the WCTU and ASL. The critical distinction between the WCTU and ASL was in how they framed the "alcohol question." Both the relative success of the WCTU and the failure of the ASL were contingent upon their ability to adapt their rhetoric and corresponding strategies to rapid shifts in the cultural and economic climate of the late twenties and early thirties.