While I wait for the ibuprofen to kick in for my headache so that I can actually edit my capstone, how about a thread on women's menstruation in early "white slavery"/human trafficking convention negotiations?

So much of the white slavery scare/human trafficking (THB) regime was informed by social anxieties around movement, changing social and moral mores, venereal disease, and - of course - interracial relationships (miscegenation). This was great news for states: social approval for

imperial ambitions! The idea of whiteness as civilizing was a great impetus for justifying colonial expansion. & who is front & center re: creating whiteness? white women, of course! So, everyone agreed that women's movement (& therefore, sexual encounters) needed controlling.

Great! But then you bump into this pesky issue of the age of consent. This is around the time suffragist/feminist movements were picking up steam, & it was anathema to many that adult women's liberties were being curtailed. (Black, brown, yellow women tho? No issues)

So how to construe white slavery/traffic in a way that made everyone happy? Age of majority! Easy enough. If you're an adult, *under intl law* you can engage in sex work abroad so long as it's not coerced (in theory - in practice, not so cut and dry, state discretion, etc).

But as a child? No consent for engaging in "immoral acts." This is true today for under 18s in intl law.

Only, what *was* the age of majority? 20 - later INCREASED to 21. Not exactly a child. And this was a *minimum*. States were welcome to have a higher age of majority.

So in practice, this meant grown women would be monitored during their travels, surveilled, sometimes closely accompanied by a old matron who would keep her from falling wantonly into the arms of any old sailor that looked at her askance and losing her maidenhood. (Really!)

Gross, right? Gets grosser. This is all well and good for European white women, but again, these are colonial times. Where there is colonialism, there is colonial difference.

At the 1921 League of Nations Conference for the suppression of trafficking in women and children, the question was raised: to what extent would white slavery/THB intl law govern the colonies?

The Dutch believed it was an imperative; that while Europeans could otherwise tolerate

the lower moral standards of colonized peoples, what was the point of being civilized if you didn't spread civilization? That meant bringing EVERYONE into the fold of the regime.

(note: at this point the term white slavery was officially passé - but not really in practice)

But don't worry, all! The representative of the Dominion of India is here to save the colonized people from being subject to blanket stipulations that don't *checks notes* clash with their use of prostitution as worship & *checks notes* contradict climatic effects on womanhood.

Yep. Don't forget! We have pulled into Eugenics Central Station. Science is all the rage, and the science is all BAD & exists to justify white imperialism/supremacy. The climate was a huge part of this. Scientists were fascinated by how the weather affected biological make up.

They were especially fascinsted by the effects of climate on when people first menstruated. (Which I found out yesterday is called "menarcheal age".)

This was important. Menstruation = womanhood = marriage = reproduction AND/OR regulated sex work = venereal disease = :( syphilis

Very reductive, but you get it. The latter was extremely important because while empire PREFERRED their soldiers occupy themselves with white sex workers/sex workers from home, if they had to, colonized women were ~fine. But they needed regulating if so because VD =/= good army.

(as an aside, white woman COULD NOT service native men. Why, if native men found out they could have sex with women that looked like their doctors' wives [literally an example given], what's next? MARRIAGE? THINK OF THE EMPIRE.)

So. Climate. What does it do? Well, everyone knows women menstruate younger in hotter climates! So you can't impose European climatic standards of womanhood onto a land where young girls are considered eligible for marriage and sexual activity much younger than our white girls!

Now this pissed me off because incidentally, I come from what used to be the Dominion of India ("tropical colonies") and I cannot imagine white women menstruated at TWENTY YEARS OF AGE even in the 1920s. So i did some digging to see if statistics of the time lent some credence.

And of course, given the time, allow for some margin of error/low n studies/racist assumptions/the whole thing. Most people I grew up with had a menarcheal age of about ~11-13.

The UK in the early 20th C? 13.5
India in the early 20th C? 13.6.

SO THEN TELL ME ABOUT THE CLIMATE.

Ultimately, (to quote a drag queen) mama, this is garbage. Just admit you think white girlhood is more fragile and therefore worth preserving longer for the sake of empire and go. Affording an extra 7-8 years of minority past the avg menarcheal age for white girlhood but implying

that girlhood for colonized folks ends with menarcheal age is just a transparent attempt at upholding white supremacy and the imperial project using (white) womanhood as your bulwark.

Ultimately, it didn't matter whether or not the age of majority applied to the colonies.

Imperial powers didn't really care about the traffic in native women. Not enough to have researchers learn the local language, not enough to keep them from white men. Traffic was only about white women and empire. The science was in service of this. & menarcheal age? Arbitrary.

SOURCES:
Liat Kozma - Global Women, Colonial Ports
Ashwini Tambe - Climate, Race Science & the Age of Consent in the League of Nations
Records of the 1921 LoN trafficking conference
Jean Allain - White Slave Traffic in International Law
Jo Doezema - Sex Slaves, Discourse Masters

Oh! Sources for menarcheal age. Happy to be proven wrong. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51199039_Secular_trends_in_age_at_menarche_in_women_in_the_UK_born_1908-93_results_from_the_Breakthrough_Generations_Study in the UK

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/comparison-of-menarcheal-status-of-adolescent-girls-2376-127X-1000299.php?aid=85501 in India

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/comparison-of-menarcheal-status-of-adolescent-girls-2376-127X-1000299.php?aid=85501 (re: trends in India - lots of regional difference because CLIMATE MATTERS LITTLE)