The Traffic in Souls

In film The Traffic in Souls, it demonstrated numerous issues dating back to the Progressive Era. Issues of social reforms, immigration, prosperity, and the most important of all in accordance of the film was gender issue during that period. Eric Foner said in chapter 18 that “it was a period that people witnessed the flowering of understandings of freedom based on individual fulfillment and personal self-determination—the ability to participate fully in the ever-expanding consumer marketplace and, especially for women, to enjoy economic and sexual freedoms long considered province of men” (639). It was certainly a time of changes was being made, for the better and worse. While freedom was expanding through door to door, women were enjoying freedom that they never had before, but they were also facing treatment of inequality, many people treated them as a money making machine, a commodity, that can be exchanged for money.

In the film we learned that it was a time people were searching for the true meaning of freedom, they were facing a brand new culture through social reforming as they had never faced before. Even though time was changing, but there was one rule that never changed, and that was wealth determined the freedom that one could enjoy. There is a distinctive difference between the rich and the poor, the former were always being treated as high class, as men with power, and on one would give a tiny bit of sympathy to those poor as they did not exist.

In the film we saw that women were also trying to find its identity in this brand new society, as they were trying to enjoy this freedom to fulfill them same as men as well. They were not just someone’s housewife or reproduction machine anymore. But it also gave the chance to those opportunists that wanted to make off money them, in a sense that people still treated women as second class citizen, nothing more than a tool. The film also showed that even during a time where our society was full of scum, but justice still existed. Justice always prevails at the end.

There were some key sequences in the film that directly related to what Foner talked about in his book. One being social justice, the other one being inequality in gender. I believe no matter in what time period we are in, those two issues will exist as long as we are alive. With that being said, there are always improvements that can be made. One can start doing that by examining himself as what freedom and equality are.