26th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize: Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution
Dec 9 | 12pm | MSC 2300D
Eva Payne, University of Mississippi
The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University has awarded the Twenty-Sixth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize to Eva Payne, for her book Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
Public Lecture & Award Presentation
Eva Payne is associate professor of US history at the University of Mississippi. Her research and teaching examine the 19th- and 20th-century U.S. with a focus on women, gender, and sexuality and the U.S. in transnational perspective. Her first book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution was published by Princeton University Press in 2024 and has been featured in such publications as the New Yorker and BBC History.
Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world.
Eva Payne describes how American reformers successfully pushed for international anti-trafficking agreements that mirrored US laws, calling for states to criminalize prostitution and restrict migration, and harming the very women they claimed to protect. She argues that Americans’ ambitions to reshape global sexual morality and law advanced an ideology of racial hierarchy that viewed women of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities as dangerous vectors of disease. Payne tells the stories of the sex workers themselves, revealing how these women’s experiences defy the dichotomies that have shaped American cultural and legal conceptions of prostitution and trafficking, such as choice and coercion, free and unfree labor, and white sexual innocence and the assumed depravity of nonwhites.
Drawing on archives in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Empire of Purity ties the war on sexual vice to American imperial ambitions and a politicization of sexuality that continues to govern both domestic and international policy today.
Map created by the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) in the 1920s, depicting their international reach. Image courtesy of American Sexual Health Association.
The prize, first awarded in 1999, was permanently endowed in December 2000 by Melbern G. Glasscock ’59 as a gift for his wife, Susanne, for whom the prize is named. This unique prize celebrates outstanding works of original, interdisciplinary humanities scholarship that appeal to both academic and wider audiences.