As we were writing this introduction in 2021, a historic event was taking its course. Since early 2020, the global pandemic caused by the spread of a virus called Covid-19 has limited many social activities that involve some sort of physical closeness with persons outside one’s own household. This includes sex work. Where it is legal, as in Germany, it has been explicitly restricted or prohibited with the goal of containing the pandemic. In April 2020, the news agency Reuters reported that the closure of German brothels led to “thousands of foreign sex workers”, who reportedly came predominantly from “Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine,” being stranded in Germany.1 Other news outlets reported a rush to leave the country in the face of crumbling business opportunities and the consequent financial problems many migrant sex workers faced.2 In the third decade of the twenty-first century, sex work appears as a social practice that connects European regions.
By the time this edited collection was getting closer to being published, yet another historic event took place: Russia began waging a war against Ukraine, causing millions of people, mostly women and children, to flee the country, while men were conscripted into the military. Soon, concerns about the risk of trafficking emerged and anti-trafficking NGOs, such as La Strada International and The Freedom Fund, published recommendations for the prevention of human trafficking of refugees fleeing from Ukraine.3 Sex worker organisations also responded to the crisis moment. The peer-networking project for trans sex workers, Trans*sexworks, offered peer-counselling for Ukrainian sex workers fleeing the country and seeking to support themselves in Germany.4 Since the fall of the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’ and the end of the Cold War, prostitution has attracted renewed public attention as a topic of more-or-less sensational media reports and has appeared on the agenda of many policy debates in Europe and globally. ‘Eastern Europe’ has featured prominently in these debates as one of the main regions of origin of sex workers who, with the opening of the borders, moved across the globe in search of better social and economic opportunities, along with many other migrants and migrant workers. The rising numbers of migrant sex workers who emigrated out of the former Socialist Bloc to Western Europe, but also to the United States, from the 1990s onwards was connected to both a real and perceived rise in exploitative practices in commercial sex, which are most commonly described as “human trafficking.”5 It is in this context that the discursive connection between Eastern Europe, prostitution and human trafficking arose – again.
Any mention of ‘prostitution’ and ‘Eastern Europe’ in the same sentence elicits images of poverty-driven migration, organised crime, and human trafficking of young women, as these two quotes – formulated over 100 years apart – illustrate:
I think that I have said enough now to convince anyone that a terrible number of Jewesses are prostitutes in the countries have named. How did they get there? Not at their own expense that is certain. I hardly think that a girl who has lived her life in a Russian, Romanian or Galician village would know how to reach these places alone. This fact is in itself a proof of the traffic.6
These mostly very young women from the poverty-stricken areas of Moldova or Romania, from the war and crisis zones in eastern Ukraine, from the Roma ghettos and settlements in Bulgaria, Hungary or Slovakia, cannot set out voluntarily and of their own accord to pursue prostitution in Germany.7
The first quote comes from a Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women’s meeting in 1910; the second was published in 2019 based on an interview with retired German police officer Manfred Paulus, who sees an intrinsic connection between prostitution, human trafficking, organised crime, and Eastern Europe. They are among the many sources that testify to the continuities and the tenaciousness of certain narratives of female mobility, human trafficking, and work in a geographical and social space with continuously shifting borders and boundaries. Today and in the past, anti-trafficking efforts addressing these regions have often (mistakenly) assumed their backwardness, thus contributing little to solving the problems relating to socio-economic disparity, labour exploitation and gender discrimination.8 Even in academic and historians’ circles, non-specialists often assume that analysing prostitution generally, but especially in Eastern and East-Central Europe, means analysing human trafficking and female exploitation.
While human trafficking is a phenomenon affecting many labour sectors, public debates about human trafficking often adopt a narrow view and focus only on prostitution and prostitution policy, thus restricting the perspectives on both human trafficking and prostitution. Contemporary debates mostly focus on the question of which policy models states should adopt, but also about the general meaning and desirability of paid sex in modern societies. Both the goals and the normative judgements of paid sex elicit strong disagreements. Activists across the political spectrum, including feminists, faith-based organisations, and researchers, often fight fierce battles over whether paid sex can ever be voluntary, a choice that (wo)men can make, or whether it can only be the paradigmatic expression of gender inequality. Others debate more practical questions about whether and how consensual paid sexual interactions among adults should be legal; about whether prostitution should be decriminalised, regulated (and if yes, how), or prohibited in order to abolish it in a utopian future not yet in sight. Empirical and theoretical arguments about the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking are disputed, with some arguing for the prohibition of paid sex as a strategy against trafficking. Others see prohibitionist approaches as part of the problem of exploitation in the global political economy and see the solution in human and labour rights as well as social policy approaches. The different meanings of words, such as ‘forced prostitution’ or ‘trafficking’, but also ‘choice’, ‘agency’, ‘coercion’, and ‘prostitute’, ‘sex worker’, ‘trafficked’, ‘enslaved,’ or ‘prostituted’ woman (rarely men) are themselves debated and reflect the broad range of political standpoints.9
While some see prostitution as the main or only locus for human trafficking, others approach sex workers’ mobility as a form of labour migration akin to the migration of men into multiple industries, such as agriculture, construction, and the food industries.10 Among them, Petra Follmar-Otto has stressed how the mechanisms of exploitation are similar across these sectors and are therefore not specific to sex work.11 Most scholars of anti-trafficking stress the discrepancy between public discourses and representations of trafficking and a much more complex social reality.12 In fact, the focus on prostitution stands in stark contrast to a growing awareness that human trafficking as a form of criminal exploitation of someone’s labour is a phenomenon affecting many labour sectors and is being driven by a combination of socio-economic factors and state policies creating rightlessness and vulnerability through, for example, restrictive migration policies, as well broader patterns of discriminations based on race, class, and gender.13 Historians have long been critically engaged with anti-trafficking efforts and, most recently, Philippa Hetherington and Julia Laite have explicitly questioned the usefulness of “human trafficking” as a category of analysis because the term is highly normative and malleable with “little useful explanatory value.”14 Most importantly, Laite and Hetherington call upon historians of trafficking to “engage fully with the Classique critique of seeking voices (Gayatri Spivak), of essentialising agency (Walter Johnson), and reifying the evidence of experience (Joan Scott).”15
This edited collection is not primarily about human trafficking or migration. However, for many students and researchers, contemporary debates on prostitution and trafficking of the 2010s and 2020s often represent the starting point for their interest in the history of prostitution. These debates are therefore relevant insofar as they reflect what sociologists have termed “everyday knowledge” about prostitution rather than deeper analytical insights into the complex social reality of paid sex.16 They often shape the first impulse to researching paid sex in the past, limit what questions one asks, and what one can and cannot see. The categories (human trafficking, prostitution, sex worker etc.), dichotomies (choice/coercion, trafficking/sex work etc.) and fault lines of these debates appear as self-evident rather than the product of complex processes of social construction with their own history.17
Situated in this discursive context, historians of prostitution are caught between the competing demands: firstly, for knowledge grounded in the present debate about human trafficking; secondly, for a broad, though not general, lack of deeper interest for a topic often deemed comparatively irrelevant; thirdly, for an archival trail of records that often does not answer the questions posed from our present. At non-specialist conferences, historians of prostitution are often confronted with questions inspired by contemporary debates and media reports on trafficking and prostitution, by “spectacular representations of women as passive and naïve victims lured or tricked into sex work,” but also by the activism of the sex workers’ rights movements.18 The non-specialist public often asks either for the victim or the politicised activist, for coercion and exploitation, or agency. Sometimes, prostitution is reduced to its sexualised dimension and dismissed as a “subject worthy of study,” as Alain Corbin once put it.19 Whether historians of prostitution want it or not, there is no escaping the present debate or pretending we are in any way researching outside of it.
However, “the serious historical study of prostitution has gained significant ground in the past thirty years,”20 and, as Nancy Wingfield and Keely Stauter-Halsted have pointed out, sexual questions, including those relating to prostitution, are positioned at the intersection of many fields of historical inquiry.21 While prostitution may be described as the quintessential form of bare sex, the historical analysis of prostitution goes beyond the narrower practice of paid sex. It offers insights not just into the history of gender and sexuality, but also histories of the state, the police, its administrative apparatus, social and crime policy, labour, medical history, and the history of a broad range of civil society actors in their national, local, and transnational dimensions. Furthermore, the historical analysis of prostitution is also an analysis of the “politics of prostitution,” which includes laws and legal practices, various movements and organizations who aimed to influence the reality of paid sex, and a broad range of cultural repertoires that shaped the representations of paid sex in each and every society.22 Insofar as paid sex is a social phenomenon like many others, it is a lens through which to study societies of the past.
Crime, Sex, or Labour? Historising Prostitution
Throughout European history, prostitution as a practice was condemned and marked those who practiced it or were connected to it as outsiders. From the Middle Ages onwards it was considered sexual and moral offence; it was often explicitly treated as a crime.23 In this view, the ‘prostitute’ was a perpetrator, a danger to society and its social and moral order. Prostitution was a crime gendered female because it disrupted the gendered social order, according to which legitimate women’s sexual activity was to take place within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage. Male prostitution did not conceptually exist for a long time and, if paid sex among men took place, it was subsumed under categories used to refer to homosexuality, such as sodomy, as Judit Takács shows in this volume regarding Hungary at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.24
Histories of prostitution are not just histories of paid sex, but also histories of women’s sexuality. While today the term ‘prostitution’ usually refers to paid and remunerated sexual encounters and thus is based on a distinction between monetary and non-monetary sexual interactions, historically any non- and extra-marital sexual activity by a woman could be seen as ‘prostitution.’ As Ruth M. Karras pointed out, during the Middle Ages any sexually active, i.e. “lustftul,” heterosexual woman could be seen as a “prostitute.”25 Non-marital paid sex was one form of female ‘promiscuity,’ i.e. of sex considered to be illegitimate and immoral, for which only women were condemned and often punished for. It is for this reason that historians and critical criminologists saw in the laws and social and cultural attitudes addressing prostitution an instrument of social control, of sexual and moral regulation, and as a means to establish a patriarchal gendered order in which female sexuality was confined to marriage and the privacy of the home.26 The politics of sexuality inherent in the close association of promiscuity with illegitimate female sex behaviour and, in particular, prostitution must always be kept in mind and represents a common theme to most histories of prostitution.27
It goes without saying that the historically specific modes of the legal regulation of prostitution, including through penal law and local ordinances, vary across time and space and depend on the specific historical circumstances, especially political, economic, cultural, and institutional structures that go far beyond the strict domain of paid sex. For example, the act of paid sex may not always have been penalised directly by criminal law but most acts surrounding prostitution were, such as renting rooms to sex workers or acting as an intermediary between clients and sex workers. At other times, prostitution was both strictly regulated, but criminalised if practiced outside the narrow boundaries of so-called “state-regulated prostitution.” Sometimes women (suspected of) selling sex were penalised through other laws, especially local ordinances aimed at establishing public order in cities.28 The criminalisation of prostitution and of mobility often intersected in laws and ordinances targeting “vagrancy.”29 Religion often influenced the approach that the state and authorities took to paid sex and, especially in the case of Protestantism, historically justified the full penalisation of prostitution.30 Prostitution and the various degrees of its criminalisation thus represent one of the paradigmatic cases of the intersection of history of women, gender, sexuality, the history of crime and policing, and also the history of labour. The chapters by Stefan Wünsch, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, and Christiane Brenner all explore this intersection in Weimar Germany, postwar Berlin, and Czechoslovakia respectively.
Following Magaly Rodríguez García, one fruitful approach to the history of prostitution integrates the history of crime and the history of labour, i.e. the multiple ways that actors involved in paid sex were marginalised and disciplined as criminals and deviants. At the same time, paid sex was often a form of labour that served to secure their livelihoods in the short or long term.31 While prostitution was barely ever considered legitimate work, the fact that it was often one of the few ways by which women could provide for themselves outside of patriarchal family structures warrants an analytical lens centring on labour. Among other things, a labour perspective helps illuminate the gendered structural constraints on the options for work, the discursive construction of what is legitimate and non-legitimate work, and the social reality of sexual labour in the context of the “economies of makeshift.”32 A labour perspective may offer insights into everyday life and the workaday, as well as the working conditions of people who sold sex. Labour histories of paid sex are, however, still rare.33
Law plays a central role in the regulation of prostitution not just as “positive law” and background context, but also as a social practice and “mode in which modern societies imagine their own existence.”34 Law creates possibilities for action at the same as it restricts what historical actors could do and imagine. People who sold sex, their clients, as well as the police, law makers, and the many social movement activists who advocated for legal change made recourse – in one way or another – to the law. Law is thus best approached as a means for propagating and consolidating social moral values.35 Law is powerful in that it “rules or governs everyday life, because its expectations and ways of organising affairs are habitual and uncontested.”36 Furthermore, “the background conditions that constitute options available to individuals and determine the degree of economic pressure operating in any situation are pervasively shaped by law.”37
Law, however, does not tell us what the social reality of prostitution was, since its intended effects and compliance with the law are nothing more than a “secular utopia.”38 Insofar as some scholars and the public debate declare a ‘failure’ of prostitution laws to ensure, for example, the disappearance of prostitution or sex work free from exploitation, this claim is based on a flawed line of thought, namely the idea of the so-called ‘gap-problem,’ “understood as the disparity between law’s intentions and its actual impact on social conditions.” In research on prostitution, the gap problem has often come in narratives of the failures of certain laws and legal projects to reduce prostitution or human trafficking, thus inciting new movements for legal reform. However, as Reza Banakar argues, the ‘gap’ is “part of the reality of modern law – part of its definition.” The existence of such a ‘gap’ is a constitutive characteristic of the law.39 The manifestation of the discrepancy between law and social reality and practice is, however, historically specific and requires empirical analysis.
Furthermore, law is caught up between its repressive character oriented towards social control and its emancipatory potential towards rights, equality, and liberation.40 Specifically, laws against prostitution have historically aimed at disciplining women and stabilising the gendered social order rather than securing their sexual self-determination (the latter concept representing an anachronism for most of the historical past). Historical research shows that the tension between repression and emancipation in laws regulating prostitution has hardly ever been solved to the advantage of the ‘prostitute.’ Most prostitution regimes have found more-or-less direct ways to marginalise those who sold sex, whether by regulating, prohibiting, or ignoring prostitution. However, law and legal strategies have also been used to reclaim rights and in the past century many actors have demanded legal reform with the aim of reducing repression.41 All of the papers in this collection address the law and the way in which it created different conditions for selling sex and paying for sexual services, but also the ways in which various actors appealed to the law to address issues of public health and public order, as well as coercion and exploitation.
Last but not least, it is because of the centrality of the law that the history of prostitution cannot be written without the police, the institution that implemented prostitution laws and the instance that produced the bulk of archival documents available to the historian. In a sense, then, the history of prostitution is also a history of the police and policing practices and, especially, their gendered aspect.
Regional Specificities of the Politics of Prostitution in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, prostitution existed, persisted, and reflected changing legal, political, cultural, and socio-economic circumstances. The mobility and labour migration – not just of sex workers – in and around a geographic area that we may loosely refer to as ‘Central,’ ‘East-Central’ and ‘South-East Europe,’ as well as intense public debates on exploitation, are well-known social phenomena in both the past and present.42 For a broader part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the flow of people, ideas, and representations created a social space transcending imperial and state borders; only to be halted by the erection of the boundaries of the Iron Curtain, which heavily, though not completely, restricted movement and interaction between East and West.
A glance at the maps of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows how fragile and unstable the territories in Central, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe were – at least politically. Throughout modern history, state borders emerged, disappeared, and shifted many times. In the late eighteenth century, Poland was partitioned between Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Soon after, the Napoleonic Wars brought significant changes on the political maps. The unifications of Italy and Germany respectively in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in the creation of two big and powerful states. Following the First World War at least seven new states emerged, all of them between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Second World War and the subsequent Cold War resulted in further changes, shifts, and upheavals of state borders, which shifted yet again in the early 1990s. In the atlases of history, the countries eastwards of the Rhine look like a colourful and continually transforming patchwork and, indeed, Karl Schlögel argues thus that Mitteleuropa consists mainly of borderlands.43
While the issue of the changing state borders has been discussed many times in the context of collective identities and national tensions, it had, of course, consequences for the daily lives of Central, East-Central, and South-Eastern Europeans. For them, it was quite common that one was born in one state, grew up in another, and died in yet another without ever changing the place of living. Not only did many of these people live in multilingual and multicultural environments, but they were also regularly forced to adapt to the new legal frameworks. Prostitution was no exception in this regard, especially when it came to the mechanisms of punishment and control.
The contributions to this volume refer therefore to the history of prostitution in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. How did the prostitutes and their clients, as well as the police and health administrations, implement the constantly changing regulations regarding the bans, limitations, and legalisations of prostitution and brothels? Did the multicultural environment influence prostitution? Were the representatives of ethnic minorities, for example Jewish prostitutes in Poland, doubly discriminated? How were prostitutes treated in totalitarian states, under Nazism and Communism, which aimed at controlling the most private spheres of people’s lives? The history of prostitution in Central, East-Central, and South-Eastern Europe thus contributes to understanding not just the politics of prostitution and paid sex as a social practice, but also opens up new perspectives for studying the social, cultural, and economic consequences of political changes.
The politics of prostitution is not just about the law, but about how “different constituencies have altered and recast the social meanings and constructions of prostitution.”44 The politics of prostitution describes the ways in which prostitution entered the political arena under various historical circumstances, the public debates it generated, the movements it motivated, “reform strategies and policy instruments”, and the diverse legal instruments that were generated at the local, national, and also transnational levels. Insofar as prostitution is about “conflicts centred around gender, race, and class inequalities,” it offers an entry point to the analysis of multi-layered mechanisms of exclusion and marginalisation that, in the most recent decades, have been described as “intersectional.”45
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the period covered by the papers of this collection – the legal and political approaches and its cultural representations shifted from what is known as a ‘regulationist’ to an ‘abolitionist’ approach to prostitution. Broadly speaking, the nineteenth century was marked by the introduction of so-called ‘state-regulated prostitution’ inspired by the ‘French model’ across Europe and, later, various European empires. State-regulated prostitution was a historically specific approach to prostitution, which, far from considering prostitution as a legitimate profession, treated it as a necessary evil. While the French model did indeed ‘regulate’ prostitution, it did not consider prostitution as work, let alone legitimate work; nor was prostitution legal in the sense of being decriminalised. Instead, it created a system of police and healthcare provisions aimed at tightly controlling and surveilling the prostitute and her body.46
Much of the historiography understands ‘state-regulated prostitution’ as a specific regulatory approach to prostitution that, depending on the context, combined penal and administrative law and local policing ordinances, as was the case in Imperial Germany. The goals of state-regulated prostitution addressed the fields of public health, sexuality, and public order and can be summarised in the following way. The first goal concerned public health, specifically the prevention and control of venereal diseases. Over the course of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, “prostitutes” were considered the sole source of venereal diseases. Even though historical evidence suggests that these measures did not actually work, state-regulation required regular gynaecological exams of all prostitutes (or suspected prostitutes); these examinations could be, and often were, coerced. Kim Breitmoser contributes to existing research by studying a very rare source that sheds new light on the intersection between war, sexuality, and public health: the diary of a sex work client in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
The second goal concerned sexuality, or what has historically been described as the sexual ‘double standard’. The regulation of prostitution was based on the idea that men needed a space for sexual release, but without tainting women – i.e. women who were not prostitutes. In a context where extra- and non-marital sex for women led to the loss of honour and thus had serious consequences for their social and economic prospects, regulated prostitution served the purpose of ‘protecting’ ‘honest’ women from men’s lust. Regulated prostitution singled out and, arguably, kept women in prostitution in order to protect the ‘purity’ of non-prostitute women. State-regulated prostitution, with its mechanisms of registration and spatial segregation, thus legitimised male non-marital sex, but it also institutionalised the separation of women into ‘mothers’ or ‘whores’.47
The third goal was one of public order. A limited acceptance and toleration of prostitution allowed for the authorities – in this case, so-called morals police or vice squad48 – to concentrate prostitution spatially in brothels, to surveil it, and to prevent prostitutes from entering so-called respectable spaces. Indeed prostitutes, once registered and living in a brothel, were stripped of many of their rights of movement. Their lives were confined to the brothel not so much as a result of being ‘trafficked,’ but as a direct result of the political will to restrict the freedom of women selling sex. State-regulated prostitution has thus also been a form of spatial politics of gender, which is often still visible in urban architectural features that, in Germany for instance, separate whole streets devoted to sex work from the rest of the city.49 In her chapter, Alexandra Skedzuhn-Safir explores the topography of prostitution in Florence between 1860 and 1880 and the ways in which public order concerns structured commercial sex in Italy. Tobias Bruns takes a different perspective by examining public debates on prostitution in Imperial Germany through the lens of new analytical category: security culture.
Even though the historiography on the politics of prostitution and various regulatory models has focused on state-regulated prostitution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the movements to abolish it, thus reflecting what Julia Roos identified as a fascination with regulation, a shift in analytical perspective and regional focus still promises new insights.50 Because of the surveillance system that regulationism put in place, regulatory regimes have created many still-existing sources on prostitution for historians to study. It is thus no coincidence that periods of state-regulation have so far received the bulk of historians’ attention, and archives produced under regulationism are valuable resource for exploring not just prostitution, but histories of gender, sexualities, and crime. However, the many regions of Central, East-Central, and South-Eastern Europe still remain outside the purview of research on the histories of prostitution.
The chapters in this edited collection build on and expand existing historical research on the history of prostitution by approaching prostitution from multiple perspectives and by using a variety of sources. The authors work with, among other things, legal acts, police and court records, municipal acts including buildings’ plans of the brothels, medical journals, police newsletters, the daily press, posters, transcripts of radio and television programs, documentary and fiction films, and, last but not least, diaries. The visual sources appear especially interesting not only because they are rarely used in the history of prostitution but also because they enable the study of (in)visibility of prostitution in the public sphere. However, this variety of sources is very characteristic of the European history of prostitution; historians who work on similar topics on other continents have less material to work with, as Timothy Gilfoyle has rightly stated.51 We argue that the many political changes in the histories of Central, East-Central, and South-Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries generated even more documents, as each change brought new legal acts, regulations, or instructions. Consequently, most of the sources discussed in this volume were produced by representatives of the state and local administrations. Unfortunately, “these sources provide the testimony of prostitutes infrequently,”52 as Gilfoyle notes. Despite the publication of his article almost three decades ago, not much has changed in this regard and recent research testifies to the methodological challenges of writing histories of sex work that centre sex workers and their perspectives. While social historians have developed a broad range of methodological strategies to get as close as possible to the historical actors enmeshed in commercial sex, sex workers themselves have produced very few direct testimonies about themselves and their lives.53 Clients of sex workers have left even fewer traces in the archives, although diaries or other ego-documents re-surface every once in a while, thus allowing scholars like Kim Breitmoser to study their rare perspective.
Central to state-regulated prostitution was the categorisation and registration of women as ‘prostitutes.’ In her analysis of the history of knowledge of the category of the prostitute, Durba Mitra stresses how the “classification, registration, and examination of women seen as prostitutes” severely restricted the ways in which women entered the colonial archive. Not every ‘prostitute’ in the archive can be historised a sex worker because the “archival category” of the prostitute was applied to a broad spectrum of social practices and “female sexual behavior seen as deviant.” This means, Mitra concludes, that “the social history of the diverse social practices and communities in the nineteenth century is limited and distorted by an archive that presents women solely through their proximity to prostitution.”54 While Mitra’s conclusions are based on an analysis of the Indian colonial archives of regulated prostitutes, the vagueness of the category of ‘prostitute’ in European regulationist systems encourages at least some reflection on the prostitution archive along similar lines.
Furthermore, histories of prostitution are often histories of biopolitics because the control of prostitution has often been often enforced by means of regulations regarding health and hygiene. Prostitution has been thus restricted and surveilled on the pretexts of combating the epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, of regulating the reproductive rights or, especially in Nazi Germany, of maintaining ‘racial purity.’ In the interwar period, the politics of prostitution were often deeply embedded on discourses on eugenics.55 In her chapter, Mirjam Schnorr analyses the ways in which prostitutes and pimps were criminalised under National Socialism and framed as outsiders to the “Volksgemeinschaft”. At the same time, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska shows how repressive health measures and controls that targeted young women persisted after the end of World War II.
From the 1880s onwards, ‘state-regulated prostitution’ increasingly came under attack. A transnational network of advocates called for the abolition of state-regulated prostitution. This ‘abolitionist’ movement was founded in Great Britain by Josephine Butler in opposition to the British Contagious Diseases Acts adopted in the 1860s.56 If in the nineteenth century state regulation crossed borders and was adopted across the globe, by the middle of the twentieth century discourses, narratives, and representations of prostitution had shifted towards regulation-abolition.57 Regulation-abolitionists opposed regulationism on moral grounds as an unjust institutionalisation of a sexual double standard, where men were granted (extra-)marital sexual freedoms, while women were punished for them, or considered (and often registered) as prostitutes. Far from advocating a freedom of sexuality outside and beyond the boundaries of marriage, regulation-abolitionists mostly subscribed to the ideal of sexual monogamy and to what they described as the ‘single moral standard.’ They opposed regulationism on legal grounds since administrative law and local police ordinances offered few to no means of legal redress. Police oversight of prostitutes, controls, and arrests were often associated with police discretion and arbitrariness and could thus be opposed as a form of civil and human rights infringement. It is for this reason that regulation-abolitionists advocated for the abolition of police oversight and registration of prostitutes, and often of any kind of registration of women selling sex. A third critique addressed the public health aspect of regulationism. Rather than assuming that prostitutes were the only vectors of venereal diseases, regulation-abolitionism advocated for a gender-neutral approach to venereal diseases that addressed the general population.58 Regulation-abolitionists often supported social policy measures to prevent prostitution and support women who sold sex. However, the degree to which coercive measures for ‘re-education’ or ‘re-socialisation’ of prostitutes were supported varied across the national and local chapters of the abolitionist movement. Often, the abolition of regulation lead to a tightening of criminal law measures against prostitutes, as Stipica Grgić illustrates in her chapter on prostitution in Croatia from 1918 to 1941 – the period after state-regulated prostitution was abolished.
The movement to abolish state-regulated prostitution created a well-connected transnational network of activists who fought long political battles in their respective countries, but also in transnational and international spaces. Britain repealed its Contagious Diseases Acts in 1885 and many other countries ‘abolished’ regulation during the first half of the twentieth century. While the campaign to abolish state-regulated prostitution was linked from the outset with debates about human trafficking, the narrative that the abolition of regulation would also bring an end to trafficking acquired international traction in the 1920 and 1930s. By the 1930s, regulation-abolitionism had become the accepted approach to prostitution and trafficking in the League of Nations anti-trafficking and social policy committees. In 1949, the regulation-abolitionist principle was firmly institutionalised in international law with the adoption of the 1949 Convention “for the suppression of the traffic in persons and the exploitation of the prostitution of others.”59 Abolitionists believed that the traffic in women for the purposes of prostitution would only cease if regulated or tolerated prostitution was abolished.
The history of ‘human trafficking’ is complicated to the point that most recently historians have questioned the usefulness of human trafficking as a category of analysis. While there is no doubt about the fact the women who sold sex were victimised by individuals who exploited their labour and often used violence to do so, the social and legal status of sex workers as second-class citizens was not just tolerated, but demanded by society and the state. Furthermore, strategies that addressed ‘human trafficking’ have historically been tied to waves of nationalism and racism as well as antisemitism.60 In her chapter, Keely Stauter-Halsted offers a novel perspective on East European Jewish ‘traffickers’ and the ways in which anti-Jewish pogroms and various restrictions placed on Jews created conditions that led to the creation of broad networks facilitating migration out of Eastern Europe, specifically along the borderlands of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian frontier.
By the end of the 1950s, most countries had repealed their laws regulating prostitution. Socialist countries quickly ratified the 1949 Convention to support their public claims that prostitution had disappeared under socialism. France, regulationism’s country of origin, adopted an ‘abolitionist’ approach in 1960, as did many countries in Europe and across the globe. The category of the ‘prostitute’ disappeared from the law books and the direct exchange of sex for money remained outside of the purview of the law, that is, unregulated. The social and legal status of ‘the prostitute’ remained intentionally undefined and unclear as s*he was, in fact, not supposed to exist. Meanwhile, all the activities surrounding prostitution – from personal contacts to professional to exploitative intermediation – were criminalised, arguably expanding the reach of criminal law into both the private and working lives of sex workers.61
Histories focusing on regulationism and movements to abolish regulation often conclude their studies with the repeal of regulation and the adoption of a new abolitionist legislation, thus leaving unexplored (und often unquestioned) how the politics of prostitution and prostitution looked after abolition. Researchers have only very recently begun to mine the archives for histories of prostitution in the second half of the twentieth century, including the archives on prostitution under socialism.62 These come with their own challenges: While regulationist regimes that focused on the surveillance of prostitutes produced a wide range of archival sources, after the abolition of regulation, the documentation of commercial sex shifted as well, thus affecting the strategies through which historians can access the past.
For socialist countries, the continued existence of prostitution represented a dilemma. Leaders of socialist countries often proclaimed that prostitution had been successfully abolished with the introduction of socialism, especially when they addressed an international audience.63 However, as recent research on socialist contexts has begun to show, exchanges of sex for money or other goods continued to exist under socialism.64 At the same time, the approach taken to paid sex and the status of prostitution differed across those states. Read together, the papers presented here by Christine Brenner on Czechoslovakia, Priska Komaromi on Hungary, and Anna Dobrowolska on Poland show how socialist countries continued to treat prostitutes and ‘promiscuous’ women as deviants, often labelling them as ‘parasites.’ At the same time, a comparative reading of these papers illustrates the differences in the public discourses on and political approaches to prostitution.
The idea for this volume derived from two workshops in 2017 and 2018 in Berlin and Prague respectively. The 2017 workshop was organised by Sonja Dolinsek and Steffi Brüning and the second workshop was co-organised with Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska. Scholars from all over Europe gathered at these workshops to discuss their research on the histories of prostitution. It quickly became clear that they approached the topic from various perspectives, including legal, social, visual, or urban histories. Contributions related to Central, East-Central, and South-Eastern Europe turned out to be especially productive and eventually resulted in this book, which also includes chapters by authors who were not directly involved in the workshops. At the same time, some other contributions to the workshops appear almost simultaneously in a special issue of the European Review of History, edited by Sonja Dolinsek and Siobhán Hearne, so that these two publications together may shed new light on the history of prostitution in Europe. We are particularly grateful to Steffi Brüning who accompanied us in the early stages of this project and Alexandra Holmes who took care of the editing. The grant from the German Historical Institute Warsaw funded this publication. Last but not least, we owe a debt of great thanks to the authors of this volume who were enormously patient in the course of the last years.
Joseph Nasr, “Sex workers stranded in Germany as coronavirus shuts brothels,” Reuters, 3 April 2020, accessed 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20211006015632/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-brothels-idUSKBN21L0ZY.
Oliver Pieper, “Coronavirus: Sex workers in Germany get back to their jobs after ban is lifted,” Deutsche Welle, 11 September 2020, accessed 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20210126031512/ https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-sex-workers-in-germany-get-back-to-their-jobs-after-ban-is-lifted/a-54896365.
Suzanne Hoff and Eefje de Volder, “Preventing human trafficking of refugees from Ukraine. A rapid assessment of risks and gaps in the anti-trafficking response,” (May 2022), accessed 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220510130104/ https://freedomfund.org/wp-content/uploads/UkraineAntiTraffickingReport_2022_05_10.pdf.
Trans*sexworks, “Drop-in Reminder: Peer Counselling for Sex Workers Fleeing Ukraine”, 30 March 2022, accessed 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/2/ http://transsexworks.com/drop-in-reminder-peer-counselling-for-sex-workers-fleeing-ukraine/.
For an overview of contemporary research on prostitution and human trafficking from ‘Eastern Europe’ see for example the thematic issue “Mythos Europa – Prostitution, Migration, Frauenhandel”, Osteuropa 56, 6 (2006); Rutvica Andrijasevic, “Beautiful dead bodies: Gender, migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns,” Feminist Review 86 (2007): 24–44; Rutvica Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Kamala Kempadoo, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015); Jürgen Nautz and Birgit Sauer (eds.), Frauenhandel. Diskurse und Praktiken (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2008); Ryszard W. Piotrowicz, Conny Rijken, and Bärbel Heide Uhl, Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018); Maria Boikova Struble, The Politics of Bodies at Risk: The Human in the Body (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019); Jennifer Suchland, Economies of Violence. Transnational Feminism, Postsocialism, and the Politics of Sex Trafficking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Sheldon X. Zhang, “Beyond the ‘Natasha’ story – a review and critique of current research on sex trafficking,” Global Crime 10, 3 (2009): 178–195.
Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, “Jewish international conference on the suppression of the traffic in girls and women held on 5, 6, and 7 April 1910 in London,” Official Report (London: Wertheimer Lea & Co, 1910), 36–37. For more information on the JAPGW, see Ellery Gillian Weil, “Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women (Jewish Women’s Archive, 23 June 2021), accessed 5 February 2022, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/jewish-association-for-the-protection-of-girls-and-women. For a recent study, see Mir Yarfitz, Impure Migration. Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).
Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, “Menschenhandel und Ausbeutung von Frauen und Kindern im deutschen Prostitutionsmilieu [Human trafficking and the exploitation of women and children in the German prostitution milieu],” (17 June 2019), accessed 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20210628111326/ https://www.hss.de/news/detail/menschenhandel-und-ausbeutung-von-frauen-und-kindern-im-deutschen-prostitutionsmilieu-news4709/. The Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung is a foundation connected to the Bavarian party CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union) and thus takes a faith-based and rather conservative view on questions of gender and sexuality, including prostitution.
Ludmila Bogdan, “Human Trafficking, Information Campaigns and Public Awareness in Moldova: Why Do Anti-Trafficking Organizations Operate under Inaccurate Assumptions?,” International Migration (2021). On the methodological implications of narratives of backwardness for the history of gender in Eastern Europe see Dietlind Hüchtker, “Zweierlei Rückständigkeit? Geschlechtergeschichte und Geschichte Osteuropas,” Osteuropa 58, 3 (2008): 141–144.
The research literature on these questions has become so vast that it is not possible to list it here. However, some suggestions for further reading include: Synnøve Økland Jahnsen and Hendrik Wagenaar, Assessing Prostitution Policies in Europe (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019); Joyce Outshoorn, The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States, and the Globalisation of Sex Commerce (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Hendrik Wagenaar, Sietske Altink, and Helga Amesberger, Designing Prostitution Policy: Intention and Reality in Regulating the Sex Trade. (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2017). One of the editors, Sonja Dolinsek, has been collecting research on sex work across various disciplines and with a global perspective at https://sexworkresearch.wordpress.com/.
Beate Andrees, “Forced labour and trafficking in Europe: how people are trapped in, live through and come out,” Working Paper (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2008), accessed 7 February 2022, https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/publications/WCMS_090548/lang--en/index.htm; Joel Quirk, Caroline Robinson, and Cameron Thibos, “Editorial: From Exceptional Cases to Everyday Abuses: Labour Exploitation in the Global Economy,” Anti-Trafficking Review 15 (September 2020): 1–19.
Petra Follmar-Otto, “Menschen landen in Sklaverei ähnlichen Situationen,” interview by Sarah Zerback, Deutschlandfunk, 19 August 2019, Transcript. accessed 17 May 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20200926211103/ https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/kampf-gegen-menschenhandel-menschen-landen-in-sklaverei.694.de.html?dram:article_id=456943.
Christiana Gregoriou, Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking: Present-Day News Media, True Crime, and Fiction (Cham: Palgrave Pivot, 2018); Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk (eds.), Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017).
See for instance Sutapa Basu et al., “Selling People,” Contexts 13, 1 (February 2014): 16–25.
Philippa Hetherington and Julia Laite, “Editorial Note: Special Issue: Migration, Sex, and Intimate Labour,” Journal of Women’s History 33, No. 4 (2021): 7–39. For an overview of the historiography on trafficking and anti-trafficking also see Hetherington/Laite, “Editorial Note”.
Ibid., 21.
Michael E. Gardiner, “Everyday Knowledge,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, 2–3 (May 2006): 205–207.
On the notion of “social construction” see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1989 [1966]).
Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 125. Also see the Special Issue “Trafficking (in) Representations: Understanding the recurring appeal of victimhood and slavery in neoliberal times,” Anti-Trafficking Review 7 (2016).
Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France After 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), vii.
Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 3.
Keely Stauter-Halsted and Nancy M. Wingfield, “Introduction: The Construction of Sexual Deviance in Late Imperial Eastern Europe,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, 2 (2011): 215–224.
This notion of the “politics of prostitution” is inspired by Barbara Hobson. See Barbara Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 4. See also Sonja Dolinsek and Siobhán Hearne, “Introduction. Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe,” European Review of History 2 (2022).
For an overview of historical research on prostitution in the Middle Ages and the early modern period in Europe, see Christopher Mielke and Andrea-Bianka Znorovszky, Same Bodies, Different Women: ‘Other’ Women in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (Budapest: Trivent Publishing, 2019); Jamie Page, “Masculinity and Prostitution in Late Medieval German Literature,” Speculum 94, 3 (12 June 2019): 739–773; Jamie Page, Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
The historiography of male sex work has been gaining ground in the past decades. However, it remains patchy and fragmented. For a study on male sex work and the policing of sex work in Germany see Martin Lücke, Männlichkeit in Unordnung: Homosexualität und männliche Prostitution in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2008).
Ruth Mazo Karras, “Prostitution and the Question of Sexual Identity in Medieval Europe,” Journal of Women’s History 11, 2 (1 June 1999): 159–177, 162; Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2017) 141.
See for instance, Carol Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1977); Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
It is for this reason that we use both the terms prostitution and sex work in this introduction. When we use the terms “sex work”, we specifically intend to refer to paid sex as a way of earning a living, i.e. as a form of labour.
See for instance: Corbin, Women for Hire; Michaela Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle: Prostitution und ihre staatliche Bekämpfung in Hamburg vom Ende der Kaiserreichs bis zu den Anfängen der Bundesrepublik (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Siobhán Hearne, Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Dietlind Hüchtker, “Prostitution und städtische Öffentlichkeit. Die Debatte über die Präsenz von Bordellen in Berlin 1792–1846,” in Ordnung, Politik und Geselligkeit der Geschlechter im 18. Jahrhundert, eds. Ulrike Weckel et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), 345–364; Malte König, Der Staat als Zuhälter. Die Abschaffung der reglementierten Prostitution in Deutschland, Frankreich und Italien im 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016); Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Nancy Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Beate Althammer, “Roaming Men, Sedentary Women? The Gendering of Vagrancy Offenses in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Social History 51, 4 (2018): 736–759.
Roper, Holy Household.
Magaly Rodríguez García, “Ideas and Practices of Prostitution around the World” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, eds. Paul Knepper und Anja Johansen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 132–154.
Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
For a recent study see Anna Hájková. “Why we need a history of prostitution in the Holocaust,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 29, 2 (2022): 194–222.
Julia Eichenberg et al., “Eine Maschine, Die Träumt: Das Recht in der Zeitgeschichte und die Zeitgeschichte des Rechts,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 16 (2019).
Martin Lücke, “Hierarchien der Unzucht. Regime männlicher und weiblicher Prostitution in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 21, 1 (2010): 49–64, 51.
Susan S. Silbey, “Studying legal consciousness: Building institutional theory from micro data,” Droit et société 100, 3 (2018): 733–788, 705.
Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labour in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), 22.
Eichenberg et al., “Eine Machine, Die Träumt: Das Recht in der Zeitgeschichte und die Zeitgeschichte des Rechts,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 16, 2 (2019), accessed 24 May 2022,https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/2-2019/5719.
Reza Banakar, Normativity in Legal Sociology: Methodological Reflections on Law and Regulation in Late Modernity (Cham: Springer, 2015), 54.
Elisabeth Holzleithner, “Emanzipation Durch Recht?,” Kritische Justiz 41, 3 (2008): 250–256.
Sonja Dolinsek, “Menschenrechte und die ‘Prostituierte’ im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Menschenrechte und Geschlecht im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Carola Sachse and Roman Birke (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018), 185–206; Mirjam Schnorr, “Die “Hurenbewegung”. Zum (medialen) Kampf von Frauen in der Prostitution um Rechte und Anerkennung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit 1975,” in Menschenrecht als Nachricht. Medien, Öffentlichkeit und Moral seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Birgit Hofmann (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2020), 307–345.
See Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency, and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking; Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).
Karl Schlögel, “Grenzland Europa,” in Karl Schlögel, Die Mitte liegt Ostwärts (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008) (2. Ed), 186–194.
Hobson, Uneasy Virtue, vii.
Heike Mauer, Intersektionalität und Gouvernementalität. Die Regierung von Prostitution in Luxemburg (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2018); S. Majic and C.R. Showden, “Redesigning the study of sex work: A case for intersectionality and reflexivity” in The Routledge International Handbook of Sex Industry Research, eds. S. Dewey, I. Crowhurst, C. Izugbara (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), 42–54.
For a recent historiographical overview, see Dolinsek and Hearne, “Introduction”.
Julia Roos, Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman’s Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919–33 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 14–57; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
The German term would be “Sittenpolizei” and the French “police des moeurs”.
Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., Selling Sex in World Cities: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
Roos, Weimar through the Lens of Gender, 14.
Timothy Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in the Archives: Problems and Possibilities in Documenting the History of Sexuality,” The American Archivist 57, 3 (1994): 519.
Ibid.: 523.
See, for example: Wingfield, The World of Prostitution.
Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 78–79.
Maria Bucur, “Fallen Women and Necessary Evils: Eugenic Representations of Prostitution in Interwar Romania” in Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900–1940, eds. Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 335–350; Gábor Szegedi, “Stand by Your Man: Honor and ‘Race Defilement’ in Hungary, 1941–44,” The Hungarian Historical Review 4, 3 (2015): 577–605.
Victoria Harris, “In the Absence of Empire: Feminism, Abolitionism and Social Work in Hamburg (c. 1900–1933),” Women’s History Review 17, 2 (2008): 279–298; Bettina Kretzschmar, “Gleiche Moral und gleiches Recht für Mann und Frau”: Der deutsche Zweig der Internationalen abolitionistischen Bewegung, 1899–1933 (Sulzbach/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2014); Julia Laite, “The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: Abolitionism and Prostitution Law in Britain (1915–1959),” Women’s History Review 17, 2 (2008): 207–223.
Dolinsek and Hearne, “Introduction”.
Lutz Sauerteig, “Frauenemanzipation und Sittlichkeit. Die Rezeption des englischen Abolitionismus in Deutschland” in Aneignung und Abwehr: interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert, eds. Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann and Willibald Steinmetz (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998), 159–197.
Sonja Dolinsek, “Tensions of abolitionism during the negotiation of the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 29, 2 (2022); Sonja Dolinsek and Philippa Hetherington, “Cold War and International Law: Socialist Internationalism and Decolonizing Moralities in the UN Anti-Trafficking Regime, 1947–1954,” Journal of the History of International Law 21, 2 (2019): 212–238.
Paul Knepper, “British Jews and the Racialization of Crime in the Age of Empire,” British Journal of Criminology 47, 1 (2007): 61–79; Susanne Omran, Frauenbewegung und “Judenfrage” Diskurse um Rasse und Geschlecht nach 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2000).
Corbin, Women for Hire.
See, for instance, Steffi Brüning, Prostitution in der DDR: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel von Rostock, Berlin und Leipzig, 1968 bis 1989 (Berlin: be.bra, 2020); Rachel Hynson, “‘Count, Capture, and Reeducate’: The Campaign to Rehabilitate Cuba’s Female Sex Workers, 1959–1966,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, 1 (2015): 125–153; Special Issue “Prostitution in twentieth century Europe,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 29 2 (forthcoming).
Dolinsek and Hetherington, “Cold War and International Law”.
Siobhán Hearne, “Selling sex under socialism: Prostitution in the post-war USSR,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 29, 2 (2022): 290–310; Ivan Simic, “Prostitution in socialist Yugoslavia: From Stalinism to the Yugoslav way,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 29, 2 (2022): 249–267.