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Moral Divide

Name: Moral Divide
Brand: UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
SKU: 9781496244826
Price: 162.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESSISBN: 9781496244826

Mujeres Publicas and the Formation of the U.S.-Mexico Border

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$162.00

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By Catherine Christensen Gwin
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Release Date: November 30, 2026
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
Weight:
Pages: 318

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The United States-Mexico border has been a contested space and a political and ideological apparatus since the early twentieth century. While today we think of the border as a method to exclude people from the United States, the earliest curfews at the line between the two countries were designed to keep Americans within their territorial boundaries and reinforce the moral geography of the United States.

In Moral Divide Catherine Christensen Gwin sheds new light on a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, when it was a place of agency among Euro-American clubwomen reformers and sex workers. White women in Californias Progressive movement sowed panic over prostitution, pushing American sex workers into the vice districts of Mexico, where American pleasure seekers followed. In response, clubwomen initiated a crusade to control U.S. citizens and their pursuit of illicit leisure in Mexico. These ideals of morality were used to enforce border restrictions and developed stereotypes of Mexicans as rapists and traffickers. Christensen Gwin brings the Mexican perspective on vice tourism to the fore, showing how Mexican officials responded to the sex trade, while also discussing the invention and juxtaposition of the white human trafficking victim and the criminal drug trafficking woman. The "moral divide" that resulted from these gendered and racialized politics of national purification set the stage for the exclusionary border regime we live with today.

Catherine Christensen Gwin is an associate professor of history at Palomar College.

"A brilliant new history of the U.S.-Mexico border rooted in the gender politics of the Progressive Era. Catherine Christensen Gwin details how white California clubwomen compelled the U.S. federal government to build border fences at Tijuana and Mexicali in the 1920s to halt the transmigration of white American sex workers and their white American patrons. Yet in their determination to police morality and eradicate urban vice districts, the clubwomen overlooked the agency of public women who used Mexicos proximity to build cross-border, cross-racial leisure cultures that sustained their livelihoods, fueled the Mexican economy, and satisfied male sexual desire. From the establishment of punitive reformatories for wayward girls to the federal legislation for border walls, Moral Divide artfully traces both the clubwomens efforts and the sex workers ingenuity as they negotiated what it meant to be independent, activist women in twentieth-century North America."-Laura K. Munoz, author of Desert Dreams: Mexican Arizona and the Politics of Educational Equality

"Moral Divide is a significant study of the sexual politics that surrounded the creation of an enforceable border between the United States and Mexico in the Progressive Era. The triangulation of three sets of archival sources-organizational records of the clubwomen, the U.S. federal government, and fascinating records from Mexico-makes this book exciting. This study will be of interest to womens historians, borderlands scholars, and historians of California."-Jessica Pliley, author of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI

"Tremendously important given the U.S.-Mexico borders social, political, and cultural significance in American history and our contemporary moment. Moral Divide offers compelling narratives of clubwomens persistence around border enforcement and sex workers defiance that generate new insights into the gendered and racial dynamics of border-making."-Natalie Lira, author of Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s

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