Readers in the early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of lurid white slavery literature - stories and tracts proclaiming that, every year, thousands of young women were being abducted and sold into forced prostitution.

Despite well-publicized findings that white slavery was a fabrication, revelations that (in the words of lawman and writer Clifford Roe) "most large cities are in fact market places where girls are sold and bought" soared to popularity in the years between 1909 and 1914, reaching a mass audience through magazines like McClure's and dozens of popular anthologies.

In Personal Property, Margit Stange analyzes white slavery literature in relation to other key American writings of the time, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Jane Addams, and Kate Chopin. These works share a view of woman as at once domestic and public, the mainstay of the home and a form of circulating property endowed with the commodity value that fuels marketing and consumption.

Personal Property explores the nativist and antibusiness anxieties of the Progressive Era, the fear that consumerism was corrupting maternal and wifely roles, the "social housekeeping" movement, and women's struggle for identity and professional stature in the U.S. marketplace economy of the early twentieth century.