Introduction: prostitution in twentieth century Europe

ABSTRACT

Despite the proliferation of diverse historical research on commercial sex in recent years and the recognition of the continued political salience of the topic, prostitution has remained on the margins of the historiography of Europe. This special issue seeks to shift prostitution into the very centre of European history. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this issue encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. Historiography on prostitution in Europe has predominantly focused on state-regulated prostitution,which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The articles in this issue shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. In this introduction, the editors sketch out key trends in state approaches to commercial sex in twentieth century Europe, focusing specifically on the law, policing practices and the gendered politics of labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Prostitution
• police
• Europe
• labour
• gender
• sexuality
• sex work

Like every other social practice, prostitution has a history. Despite assumptions about the immutability and ahistorical character of commercial sex inherent in the phrase ‘the oldest profession’, as well as contemporary attempts to re-define prostitution as violence, the practice and organization of commercial sex, its cultural meanings and representations, as well as the legal and political attempts to managing it have taken different forms across time and space.¹ Writing about the history of prostitution (and the history of sexuality more generally) offers a much broader perspective on ‘the social relations and ways of life at any particular time’, which moves beyond focusing solely on sexual relations.²

The history of prostitution in twentieth century Europe needs to be embedded within the much longer social and cultural developments that have been highlighted within histories of gender and sexuality and, specifically, the meanings and practices of commercial sex. The history of prostitution in Europe stretches back to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. This longevity has lent itself to diverse interpretations in the public sphere: for some, it testifies to the ineradicable nature of prostitution; for others the connection between commercial sex and enslavement proves the inherently unfree nature of prostitution.³ From another perspective, one of the most significant ancient legacies is evident in the Roman laws regulating prostitution. As Thomas McGinn argues: ‘The ultimate aim of Roman law regarding prostitution was to draw a line […] that would ideally keep prostitutes and pimps frozen in place on the periphery of Roman society.’⁴ Ancient legacies are also visible on a semantic level. The word ‘prostitution’ derives from the Latin prostare and prostituere, literally meaning ‘to place before’ and ‘to set out’, and these terms were used to describe female sex workers standing in front of brothels or on the streets.⁵ Female prostitutes were outcasts in Ancient Rome and the ‘idea of “whore” as a label applicable to all immoral women remained a major theme in later Western attitudes’ to women and women’s sexuality.⁶

Much research has been devoted to the ways in which Christianity, as well as religion more generally, has shaped attitudes towards sexuality, and, more specifically commercial sex, in medieval and early modern Europe. Women’s engagement in prostitution, as well as all other forms of extramarital sex, was strongly condemned by religious thinkers. Thomas Aquinas referred to prostitution as the ‘sewer’ of society, and something that needed to be tolerated, strictly regulated and spatially segregated. Martin Luther insisted that the only legitimate forms of sexual activity were those that took place within the bonds of marriage.⁷ Ruth Karras argues that in the context of medieval Europe ‘there was no conceptual space in the medieval scheme of things for a sexually active single woman who was not a prostitute’.⁸ Therefore, the stigmatizing potential of the label of ‘prostitute’ stretches across many centuries, as well as across multiple social structures and political regimes.

The articles in this special issue focus on the twentieth century, but they build on a broad range of historical research on commercial sex in multiple European and imperial contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our issue takes a wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and includes the international stage of the United Nations. It thereby encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences.⁹ Furthermore, approaching twentieth century European history through the history of prostitution complicates narratives of liberalization and progress. While sensitive to the fragility of progress and the many backlashes against it, historians of sexuality in Europe tend to agree that the twentieth century brought important advancements the realm of sexual rights, including greater access to contraception and abortion, growing acceptance of extramarital sex, and tentative steps towards gay liberation.¹⁰ However, as Dagmar Herzog has argued, ‘the story of sexuality in twentieth century Europe [was] also one that was filled with tremendous conflicts.’¹¹ Therefore, it is important to examine not just liberal moments, but also the ‘backlashes against liberalization’, and, we would add, the continuities in exclusion, discrimination and marginalization across the twentieth century.¹² Despite significant processes of democratization and legal reform in the field of gender and sexualities across Europe after 1945, prostitution and people who sold sex remained at the fringes of European societies. Whether sex workers were explicitly penalized or simply relegated into a legal grey area of non-existence, European societies’ reluctance to integrate sex workers as equal citizens reveals the limits of sexual liberalization on the European continent.

Historical scholarship on prostitution has rapidly developed in recent years. Until 1980, ‘the prostitute was “pornographic”’, but in the decades since the history of prostitution has become a dynamic field that intersects with social history; the history of crime and policing; histories of women, gender and sexualities; the history of medicine; urban, labour and migration history; and, more recently, global and international history.¹³ Prostitution can, therefore, be approached from multiple perspectives and requires familiarity with a broad range of methodologies. Most studies have focused on the dominant nineteenth-century policy regime addressing female prostitution, known as ‘state-regulated prostitution’, and the various campaigns for its abolition across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁴ State regulation sought to reinforce wider heteronormative norms, as it rigidly defined prostitution as a transaction involving a female prostitute and a male customer. Since most scholarship has concentrated on ‘regulationist’ contexts, most scholars have focused on female heterosexual sex work. Some scholars have addressed the politics of prostitution within colonial and imperial contexts, often stressing the connection between racist and colonial biopolitics and the politics of sexuality, which was often used to justify the creation of racially segregated brothels.¹⁵ The gendered spatial politics inherent in the local approaches to prostitution have been addressed by historians of the city.¹⁶ Scholars have examined how widespread concern regarding prostitution was connected to public fears about racial contamination, mass migration and depopulation, and often manifested itself in what has been described as the ‘white slave panic’ of the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁷ New social histories of prostitution have provided insight into the lives of women who sold sex and their managers, as well as the mechanics of the commercial sex industry.¹⁸ Prostitution has also been incorporated into histories of European experiences of the First and Second World Wars.¹⁹ Historians of Poland and Ireland have explored how discussions of women engaged in prostitution and their customers centred on how to construct a modern, healthy, independent nation-state from the ashes of the First World War.²⁰ Others have addressed the international dimensions of the history of prostitution by examining the anti-trafficking activities of the League of Nations and its committees.²¹ Only a few studies, the majority of which focus on Germany, Russia, France and Great Britain, have addressed the issue of male sex work.²² Barely any historical research has been conducted on what we would now term as ‘queer’ sex work. Therefore, in this special issue, Nikolaos Papadogiannis’ contribution on Greek migrant trans sex workers significantly expands the existing historiography.

Despite the proliferation of historical scholarship on prostitution, many European regions and historical periods remain unexplored. Since most scholarship has concentrated on female heterosexual sex work and ‘regulationist’ contexts, as well as movements to abolish such regulation, much of the existing historiography on European prostitution remains lodged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although there are a few notable exceptions.²³ The articles in this issue shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. Of the nine articles, two focus on the interwar period and one on the Holocaust, while five examine prostitution post-1945. This varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. In this introduction, we will sketch out key trends in state approaches to commercial sex in twentieth century Europe, focusing specifically on the law, policing practices and the gendered politics of labour.

The legal status of prostitution in twentieth century Europe

State regulation was the dominant approach to prostitution implemented by European governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, following the example of France, European states and empires adopted the so-called ‘French model’ of state-regulated prostitution. The term state-regulated or tolerated prostitution describes a historically specific way of regulating commercial sex, which combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so) and compulsory venereal disease (VD) examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions upon their movement. There were often significant variations in practice at a local level. The core element of state regulation, the combination of the toleration of female heterosexual prostitution with an organized method of disease control, originated in France, where it was first implemented in 1802 in Paris before spreading to other French cities.²⁴ A similar approach had already been introduced in Prussia in 1792.²⁵ Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this approach to female prostitution and VD was implemented in many regions beyond continental Europe, including in colonial and imperial settings, South America and certain African countries.²⁶ State-regulated prostitution was highly gendered because it institutionalized a ‘sexual double standard’. On the one hand, the system classified women engaged in prostitution as the sole sources of VD in order to justify coercive examinations and treatment, while also penalizing women for selling sex, and often merely just for engaging in extramarital sex. On the other hand, men were able (and even encouraged) to pay for sex before and outside marriage. State-regulated prostitution also reflected dominant separations of public and private spheres. Women selling sex were simultaneously seen as ‘public women’ who were readily available to any men, and women that needed to be excluded from public space and spatially segregated in brothels.

The key tenets of state-regulated prostitution, especially the policing methods, examination and treatment practices, as well as the sexual double standard, were increasingly criticized over the course of the nineteenth century. The most prominent movement against state regulation originated in Britain in the 1870s following the adoption of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869).²⁷ The campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts was initially not a women’s campaign, but it soon became one following the establishment of the Ladies National Association in 1869.²⁸ Josephine Butler soon became the public figure of the so-called abolitionist movement and, in 1875, Butler founded a transnational network, the ‘International Abolitionist Federation’, whose aim was to abolish state-regulated prostitution and re-establish ‘equal moral standards’ for both sexes. In France, critics of the regulation system became more vocal by the 1870s and explicitly invoked the language of human rights in their critiques of the policing of prostitutes.²⁹ Just as decades earlier the ‘French Model’ of regulation had spread across the globe, the ‘regulation-abolitionist’ stance towards prostitution spread transnationally, as local and national branches of the Abolitionist Federation were created across Europe and elsewhere.³⁰ Opposition to the state regulation of prostitution also became an integral part of socialist interpretations of commercial sex, but it was also often connected to religiously inspired regulation-abolitionist movements. Much research has been devoted to discursive representations of prostitution within regulation-abolitionist movements and wider social reform movements.³¹ While the early regulation-abolitionist movement did not advocate for the abolition of prostitution, but only of state regulation, the stance on prostitution and the social and legal status of women engaged in prostitution was often ridden with contradictions, which oscillated between human rights claims and moral condemnation.³²

Regulation-abolitionism had a remarkable international career and, by the 1920s, the transnational networks of regulation-abolitionists entered the institutional machinery of the League of Nations, where both regulation-abolitionist and women’s organizations achieved the status of recognized private voluntary organizations, whose views and recommendations were included in the official work of the League’s ‘Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children’.³³ At the time, international anti-trafficking action conceptualized trafficking as an issue connected to transnational mobility and did not address national prostitution laws. However, as more and more states represented at the League repealed state-regulated prostitution and thus supported a regulation-abolitionist approach, the latter was increasingly presented as the new, modern approach to prostitution by philanthropic and state actors.

State-regulated prostitution had already been abolished in many countries by the interwar period: the Netherlands in 1911, Russia in 1917, Sweden in 1919, Czechoslovakia in 1922 and Weimar Germany in 1927. It is against this backdrop that the League of Nations and its Advisory Committee published reports and resolutions calling for the abolition of state-regulated prostitution, which was framed as the main cause and driver behind the transnational traffic in women.³⁴ The regulation-abolitionist framework was eventually adopted in international law with the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (1949).³⁵ In this special issue, Sonja Dolinsek examines the negotiations of the 1949 Convention and focuses specifically on the positions that Britain and France took during this process.

The shift from regulation to its abolition had profound implications for state approaches to VD. After the abolition of regulation, legal provisions no longer specifically addressed prostitution and the term itself was supposed to disappear from the law books. By abolishing any regulatory mechanisms and legal categories related to women selling sex, regulation-abolitionists endeavoured to free women from the discriminatory treatment that they often faced at the hands of the police and other state institutions. For this reason, certain historians have described the abolition of state regulation as a liberal moment, one in which sex work was decriminalized and sex workers were liberated from the repressive hand of the state and the police.³⁶ Much of the historiography on regulation-abolitionist movements has reproduced the teleological narratives of regulation-abolitionists themselves, without enquiring further into how the state and state actors approached paid sex after the abolition of state regulation.³⁷ However, the abolition of state regulation not only created a legal grey area for the practice of commercial sex, it also did not bring an end to state interference into the lives of women engaged in prostitution.

Following the abolition of state regulation, many national governments introduced new legislation criminalizing the transmission of VD, including Denmark, Latvia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the USSR.³⁸ These new laws endeavoured to address the public health dimension of VD and reflected the broader pivot of European governments towards eugenic practices during the interwar period, driven by concern about the impact of falling birth rates on the ability to build the large armies required for modern warfare.³⁹ The wording of anti-VD legislation was gender neutral, which reflected a shift away from the regulation of prostitution as the primary method of disease control. At the same, anti-VD laws created new methods for the surveillance of sexuality in various international contexts. In practice, the new state power sanctioned in the anti-VD laws were used to discipline young women’s extramarital sexuality, and in striking continuity with state regulation, the behaviour and bodies of women selling sex.⁴⁰ Given the longstanding association of prostitution with VD and the corresponding stigma, this legislation also provided the police with new methods for targeting women engaged in paid sex.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, regulation-abolitionism was the dominant approach to prostitution across Europe. Regulation-abolitionism promised freedom from discrimination and police repression, but it was rife with contradictions, as an increasing amount of research indicates.⁴¹ Selling sex and paying for sexual services were technically not illegal under regulation-abolitionism and women selling sex were not deemed to be outright 'criminals', but nevertheless sex workers were not freed from the grasp of criminal law. The regulation-abolitionist country par excellence, the United Kingdom, offers the earliest example of increased police repression of sex workers. Although prostitution was never illegal in the UK, the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act made brothel keeping a summary offence and the Street Offences Act of 1959 criminalized ‘loitering or soliciting in a street or public place for the purposes of prostitution’.⁴² France also developed its own ‘regulation-abolitionist’ repressive apparatus after 1960, which gave rise to the first organized protest by sex workers in 1975.⁴³ Case studies in our special issue also reveal how regulation-abolitionist approaches did not mean the end of state and police repression, surveillance and criminalization. As Yvonne Svanström shows in the case of interwar Sweden, vagrancy legislation continued to be used against sex workers even after the abolition of regulation. In her article on West Germany, Annalisa Martin explores how urban spaces were regulated in ways that permitted the continued policing of sex workers.

The abolitionist approaches of the latter twentieth century raised questions about what the legal status of sex workers ought to be within democratic states with liberal, constitutional principles and often robust welfare systems. The question of the degree to which sex workers were objects of state control or legal subjects with human and constitutional rights to be claimed from the state has been on the political agenda since the 1970s at both the national and supra-national levels. Since the 1980s, the prostitutes’ rights movement had been formulating demands for recognition and equality in Europe.⁴⁴ However, as demands for the recognition of sex work as work became louder and reached even the European Parliament, the question of regulation resurfaced and the feminist debate around the status of paid sex has become increasingly hostile and polarized in recent decades. In the twenty-first century, the ‘new abolitionist’ movement still opposes the regulation of prostitution, but contrary to its founder Josephine Butler, it calls for the abolition of prostitution altogether. In doing so, it supports the criminalization of consensual sex acts for money and favours a repressive approach that historically was diametrically opposed to the liberal principles of regulation-abolitionism, and which has recently been described as ‘carceral feminism’.⁴⁵

The legal shift from regulation to regulation-abolitionism, including the dismantling of the legal, administrative and police apparatus addressing prostitution, had consequences not just for the administrative approaches to prostitution, but also for the archival traces of commercial sex. While ‘prostitution’ did not fully disappear as a category in filing and archiving practices, historians should be wary of assuming that documentary sources on commercial sex are limited to files categorized as ‘prostitution’.⁴⁶ This is especially true with the increased use of digitized archives in recent years, where archival catalogues do not necessarily reflect the actual availability or existence of archival documents. Rather, prostitution has been designated low on the priority list not just of digitization projects, but also of archival processing and data entry into searchable databases.⁴⁷ Thus, the study of commercial sex after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution needs to take into account how prostitution became subsumed under other issues, such as health, welfare, sexuality, women and public order. Tracing histories of prostitution after the abolition of its regulation requires an understanding of the shifting administrative categories and internal logic of local practices addressing paid sex. Last but not least, it is important to bear in mind that archives are never just ‘sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography’.⁴⁸

The development of policing practices and criminology

Female prostitutes became frequent objects of empirical research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the fields of criminology, anthropology, sociology, statistical analysis and medical research. Experts conducted qualitative and quantitative research in an effort to understand what exactly motivated women to engage in commercial sex and what the increased visibility of prostitution meant for the future of the imagined ‘European race’. Statistical surveys of the ages, ethnicities, social background, marital status and physical features of women engaged in prostitution were conducted in urban centres across the European continent following the publication of Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet’s landmark anthropological study of Parisian prostitutes in 1836.⁴⁹ Across the European continent, the inscription of prostitute women onto police lists and their compulsory examination under systems of state regulation meant that their bodies were regularly exposed to not only scientific investigation and criminological inquiry, but also medical experimentation.⁵⁰

Biology and physiognomy assumed a central role in nineteenth-century studies of prostitution. European experts closely studied the bodies of women engaged in prostitution in order to find common physical abnormalities indicating their innate deviance and ‘natural’ inclination to engage in commercial sex.⁵¹ The most influential and contentious study came from Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who postulated that criminality was an inherited and innate human trait that could be identified by physical defects. In his La donna delinquente: la prostituta e la donna normale (1893, English translation 1895), Lombroso set out to prove that the physical abnormalities that female prostitutes and criminals allegedly displayed were evidence of their more primitive human state.⁵² For Lombroso, prostitution was the result of biological factors, including innate criminality, uncontrollable female sexuality and women’s perceived physical, mental and moral inferiority. Lombroso’s theories of criminal atavism were widely disputed by his contemporaries, but his conclusions about female crime and prostitution continued to influence studies until the 1970s, largely because they were built on ‘age-old myths about women’s nature’.⁵³ Certain criminologists continued to be convinced by Lombroso’s idea that prostitutes formed a distinct species of woman, as well as his heavy emphasis on biological, sexual and psychological factors when explaining why women engaged in prostitution. In the current issue, Stefano Petrungaro examines the persistence of Lombrosian tropes in interwar Yugoslavian police discourse, where prostitution was often understood primarily as a psycho-physiological pathological phenomenon.

Chronologies that are structured around caesuras of political history do not capture the often contradictory rhythms and patterns of the policing of prostitution in Europe. Despite the shift from regulationist to abolitionist approaches to paid sex in most European countries, a focus on changes and ruptures risks effacing the many continuities in the administrative practices of policing at the local level. Throughout the twentieth century, the categorization of women engaged in prostitution as a threat to public order, health and morality continued across the disintegration of empires, revolution and regime change. After the collapse of the vast Habsburg monarchy, the newly emerged nation-states kept the pre-existing imperial-era legislation.⁵⁴ In Russia, seismic changes to the political and economic landscape following the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, establishment of a democratic republic and the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October 1917 brought a socialist interpretation of prostitution, but did not translate into radically different policing practices. Early Soviet leaders may have officially subscribed to Marxist interpretations of women engaged in prostitution as innocent victims of capitalism, but such women continued to be examined, arrested and considered a public nuisance across Russian cities, as they had been under tsarist rule.⁵⁵ The enduring stigmatization and social exclusion of women engaged in prostitution, combined with their categorization as a nuisance by the police and the direct/indirect criminalization of prostitution, crystallized prejudicial attitudes towards sex workers within the criminal justice system. Across the European continent, violence committed against sex workers at the hands of the police, clients or third parties often was (and continues to be) not taken seriously and even ignored by those in positions of authority.⁵⁶

Several articles in the current issue vividly illustrate continuities in policing practices and the corresponding impact upon sex workers across twentieth century Europe. Yvonne Svanström’s article explores how the Swedish police resorted to nineteenth-century vagrancy laws to continue targeting women engaged in commercial sex following the abolition of the state regulation of prostitution in 1919. Stefano Petrungaro’s and Ivan Simic’s articles on Yugoslavia reveal the lingering gulf between state ambitions and realities with regard to policing prostitution under the radically different political circumstances of the royal dictatorship of the 1930s and state socialism after the Second World War. Historians have also discussed the degree to which the policing of prostitution in Germany is characterized by continuities rather than ruptures.⁵⁷ Annalisa Martin’s research on the policing of prostitution in the local urban setting of Cologne in the 1960s points to remarkable continuities in police approaches, thus questioning the narrative of liberalization in relation to the history of prostitution in Germany.

Regardless of the political, geographical or chronological context, the policing of prostitution required some form of collaboration between the police and the wider public in twentieth century Europe.⁵⁸ Given that prostitution was either regulated or directly/indirectly criminalized across the continent, there is ample evidence indicating that women selling sex have long employed strategies to avoid police interference into their work, such as altering their working locations in response to new policing initiatives, increased public attention or technological advancements.⁵⁹ As Siobhán Hearne, Liliosa Azara and Annalisa Martin show in reference to the 1950s and 1960s, sex workers in Cologne, Milan and Riga met clients in liminal spaces like bars, hotels, public parks and taxis, or even solicited clients on the telephone, to avoid being noticed by the police or penalized under zoning laws. In light of this, detecting (often deliberately concealed) evidence of commercial sex was dependent on input from the public. Certain groups of urban residents assisted the police in enforcing the ‘socio-spatial construction of heterosexual normality’ by demarcating the moral geographies of their localities and calling on the authorities to remove manifestations of sexuality that appeared to be dangerous or deviant.⁶⁰ Denunciation letters in interwar Yugoslavia, voluntary brigades patrolling cities in the Soviet Union, and coordinated efforts to publicize photographs of sex workers and their clients in post-war Cologne all supplemented the work of police officers within each location. In contrast, some urban residents chose to help conceal prostitution, motivated by their own financial gain or indifference to the presence of commercial sex within their localities.

The tools and technologies used to monitor women engaged in prostitution underwent transformation in the twentieth century, which offered new ways to identify suspected sex workers. In the early 1900s, the use of photographic criminal registers and the development of fingerprint identification systems provided national police forces with successful methods for identifying individuals who repeatedly committed crimes, even if they used pseudonyms or changed locations. These technologies served to cement the identity of ‘prostitute’ as permanent and unchanging.⁶¹ In the late twentieth century, CCTV became another tool in the arsenal of various national law enforcement agencies for monitoring their populations, which further increased the visibility of the parties involved in the prostitution transaction.⁶²

The gendered politics of labour

Despite the widespread cliché that ‘prostitution is the oldest profession in the world’, sex work has rarely ever been recognized and regulated as labour, and instead states favoured punitive approaches to paid sex. However, the fact that the exchange of sex for money or other remuneration was often a method of survival means that prostitution ought to be addressed from the perspective of labour. From the 1970s onwards, a growing community of both activists and scholars have proposed a reconceptualization of ‘prostitution’ as a form of labour and, in the past two decades, the term ‘sex work’ has acquired a legitimate status in academic research.⁶³

Julia Laite has noted that using the term ‘sex work’ to refer to phenomena and practices of the past may present the danger of anachronism.⁶⁴ However, using an analytical lens that centres labour can reveal aspects of the history of prostitution that have so far received little scholarly attention. Instead of projecting current debates about whether sex work was work or a stark representation of gender inequality back into the past, historians need to examine what constituted ‘work’ for different actors in different times and places, as well as how gendered notions of labour and sexuality shaped conceptions of legitimate/illegitimate work. The shifting conceptualization of prostitution from deviant and immoral sexual behaviour to a form of work needs to be critically examined.⁶⁵ At the same time, analytical categories are required to explain the social and working lives of people of the past, including those who sold sex. To this end, concepts such as ‘sexual labor’ or ‘informal labor’ may be most appropriate for describing the economic activity of exchanging sex for money.⁶⁶ In our special issue, Anna Hájková develops the notion of sexual barter to approach the multiple ways in which sexuality was used for survival during the extreme circumstances of the Holocaust, drawing on existing research stressing the labour aspects of prostitution by Luise White and Judith Walkowitz.⁶⁷ Hájková also builds upon the concept of the ‘economies of makeshift’, coined by Olwen Hufton, to describe the many survival strategies of the poor who engaged in multiple forms of what today we may refer to as ‘informal labor’.⁶⁸ Similarly, Nikolaos Papadogiannis offers insight into the lives of Greek migrant trans sex workers in the 1960s and 1970s and thus explores the nexus between gender, sexuality and labour mobility in the late twentieth century.

Beginning in the medieval period, prostitution was not only not considered to be work, but work was considered to be an antidote to female prostitution. Like beggars and homeless people, female prostitutes were often targeted by European vagrancy laws, whose primary purpose was ‘to establish control over idle individuals who could labor but choose not to’.⁶⁹ The ‘obligation to labor’ was central to vagrancy legislation.⁷⁰ At the same time, vagrancy legislation was highly gendered, in that the ‘male vagabond’ and the ‘female prostitute’ were seen as ‘distinct but equivalent characters’.⁷¹ The association between vagrancy and female prostitution is particularly evident in English Common Law and can even be traced as far back as the fourteenth century, even though ‘common prostitutes’ were only explicitly included among ‘idle and disorderly persons’ in the 1822 Vagrant Act.⁷² As David Hitchcock has argued, multiple assumptions underpinned the penalization of female prostitutes under vagrancy laws, including moral condemnation and assumptions about idleness, but also ideas ‘about the wrong type of labor’ and illicit mobility.⁷³ The label ‘common prostitute’ was vague and ‘was applied to women found wandering in public and behaving noisily, indecently or boisterously’.⁷⁴ The term was removed from the law books only with the United Kingdom’s Policing and Crime Act of 2009.

According to gendered notions of domesticity and the dominant gender division of labour, women’s ‘natural’ place was often regarded as the home. Therefore, the solution to women’s vagrancy was seen in projects of moral reform and re-education.⁷⁵ There is no simple narrative on reform movements and their motivation to support the transition of women engaged in prostitution into a ‘respectable’ life, but many attempts to re-educate women to perform ‘acceptable’ femininity have often been closely connected to practices of forced labour and workhouses. The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland represent the most long-lasting institution that promoted moral reform through forced labour, but workhouses were common across nineteenth- and twentieth century Europe. These institutions existed in the Federal German Republic until the 1960s, as Annalisa Martin’s article in our special issue shows.⁷⁶ Corrective institutions and labour camps were also common in socialist contexts, where the goal was to re-educate former prostitutes to become workers and, by extension, valuable members of the newly founded socialist society.⁷⁷ As Sonja Dolinsek shows in the current issue, the question of re-education through labour also surfaced in discussions of the 1949 anti-trafficking convention. The history of the coerced re-education of so-called ‘asocials’ (in this case, women engaged in prostitution) through labour ought to be incorporated within broader histories of ‘convict labor’ and unfree labour.⁷⁸

Despite widespread evidence regarding the use of force and coercion in projects aimed at ‘re-educating’ women who were engaged in prostitution, the dominant narrative of unfree labour in the context of commercial sex remains that of ‘human trafficking’. From the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, migrant women’s engagement in prostitution was frequently presented in government, academic, philanthropic and popular discourse as a form of coerced and exploitative recruitment abroad, rather than a form of labour migration embedded within complex gendered social and economic hierarchies. These interpretations were popularized during the international ‘white slave’ panic, which erupted across Europe following the publication of W. T. Stead’s journalistic exposé ‘The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon’ in 1885.⁷⁹ The term ‘white slavery’, or the ‘traffic in women’ as it was also known, referred to the abduction of ‘innocent’ white women and girls by unscrupulous and ambiguously ‘foreign’ pimps, frequently represented as Jews in the European context.⁸⁰ At the turn of the twentieth century, government officials, doctors, jurists and members of philanthropic organizations met at international congresses dedicated to tackling the problem and anti-sex trafficking legislation was introduced across the European continent between 1895 and 1912. The League of Nations took on the cause after its formation in 1919 and spent the interwar years strengthening the legal tools aimed at curbing the ‘traffic in women and children’.⁸¹ Anti-trafficking initiatives at the national and international level presented prostitution as distinct from other forms of labour, and did not connect their analyses of the commercial sex industry to the broader exploitative conditions of capitalism that underpinned the global economy.⁸² The International Labour Organization, for instance, had a ‘limited interest in trafficking as a byproduct of unemployment and poor labor conditions’ and the general approach supported by the League of Nations aimed at keeping women away from sex work, rather than addressing it as labour.⁸³ By the 1930s, the fight against human trafficking was increasingly connected with the illiberal project of global crime prevention.⁸⁴

Scholars have begun connecting analysis of the cultural and discursive construction of trafficking with social histories of women’s transnational labour and migration, thereby also stressing the necessity to avoid static dichotomies of exploitation and agency in histories of trafficking and focus instead on the historical reconstruction of a ‘range of experiences’.⁸⁵ Historians have also addressed this omission by deconstructing the analytical category of the ‘traffic in women’ and situating the migratory patterns of women who sold sex within broader waves of population mobility occurring in the early twentieth century, particularly the mass migration of European subjects to South America, North Africa and the Middle East.⁸⁶ Most recently, Julia Laite and Philippa Hetherington have questioned the usefulness of ‘human trafficking’ as a category of historical analysis.⁸⁷ Despite the emergence of these important studies, the separation of prostitution from other forms of migrant labour continues to have an impact on contemporary scholarship, as migrant women who sell sex have long been excluded from contemporary migration and diaspora studies.⁸⁸

The articles that follow address the themes of law, policing and conceptions of work to examine prostitution from the perspectives of various state actors, urban communities and women engaged in paid sex. In exploring various geographical contexts, our issue encourages readers to think comparatively about state approaches to, and experiences of, prostitution across Europe in the twentieth century, and invites critical reflection on the continued salience of these issues in the present day.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. We also thank numerous scholars who have supported this special issue, who have discussed the topic with us during various workshops and/or have commented on earlier drafts of this introduction, particularly Elisa Camiscioli, Anna Hájková, Lesley Hall, Philippa Hetherington, Julia Laite, Jessica Pliley, Iris Schröder and Sébastien Tremblay. We are especially grateful to our contributors for bringing this special issue to fruition.

We would also like to thank Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Steffi Brüning, and the participants of the ‘Perspectives on the History of “Prostitution” in East-Central Europe’ workshop, held in Prague in 2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Siobhán Hearne would like to acknowledge the generous financial support provided by the UK’s Leverhulme Trust under Leverhulme Trust grant ECF-2018-268.

Notes on contributors

Sonja Dolinsek

Sonja Dolinsek is a doctoral candidate at the Chair for Global History of the 19^th Century at the University of Erfurt and a research assistant at the Chair of Media, Algorithms, and Society in the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University. She has taught as a visiting lecturer at Free University Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin and is currently completing her PhD on the transnational history of the politics of anti-trafficking and prostitution after the Second World War. In 2016, she was a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College.

Siobhán Hearne

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University (UK). She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021), as well as various articles about prostitution, venereal diseases and pornography in imperial Russian and Soviet history.

Notes

1. On the career of the metaphor of the ‘oldest profession’, see Mattson, “The Modern Career of ‘the Oldest Profession.’” On discourses of prostitution as violence, Shah, “Prostitution, Sex Work and Violence.”

2. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 2.

3. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome; Flemming, “Quae Corpore Quaestum Facit”; Faraone and McClure, eds., Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World.

4. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law, 347.

5. Flemming, “Quae Corpore Quaestum Facit,” 43; Stumpp, Prostitution in der römischen Antike, 20. This was not the most common term used in Ancient Rome, but it is the most influential. Other terms include meretrix and scortum in Latin and hetaira in Greek.

6. Strong, Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World, 197.

7. Roper, The Holy Household. For a broad overview of the relationship between Christianity and the history of sexuality, Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World; Schuster, Das Frauenhaus; Mazzi, A Life of Ill Repute.

8. Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 141. See also Karras, Common Women.

9. On the historiography and debate concerning the advantages and disadvantages of comparative and transnational perspectives, see Haupt and Kocka, eds., Comparative and Transnational History.

10. Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style; McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism; Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution; Fishman, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution.

11. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 218.

12. Ibid., 1.

13. For a review of the historiography on prostitution until 1999, see Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History.” For a more recent overview see Rodríguez García, “Ideas and Practices of Prostitution,” 138.

14. Corbin, Women for Hire; Gibson, Prostitution and the State; Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters; Guereña, “Prostitution and the Origins of the Governmental Regulatory System.” For a comparative study on the abolition of regulated prostitution in France, Germany and Italy, see König, Der Staat als Zuhälter. On abolitionism, see Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Azara, L’ uso politico del corpo femminile; Machiels, Les féminismes et la prostitution; Laite, “The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene”; Kretzschmar, “Gleiche Moral und gleiches Recht für Mann und Frau.”

15. On colonial and imperial contexts, Kozma, “Prostitution and Colonial Relations”; Walther, Sex and Control; Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Maghraoui, “Gendering Urban Colonial Casablanca”; Taraud, La Prostitution colonial; Francesca Locatelli, “Beyond the Campo Cintato.”

16. Rodríguez García, van Voss and van Nederveen Meerkerk, eds., Selling Sex in the City; Ross, Public City/Public Sex.

17. Szegedi, “Stand by Your Man”; Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 99–128; Wingfield, “Destination: Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Constantinople”; Stauter-Halsted, “A Generation of Monsters”; Knepper, “The ‘White Slave Trade’”; Wilson, “Migration, Empire and Liminality.”

18. Laite, Common Prostitutes; Wingfield, The World of Prostitution; Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich; Hearne, Policing Prostitution.

19. Timm, “Sex with a Purpose”; Wingfield, “The Enemy Within”; Czech, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Control of Sexuality”; Hearne, “Sex on the Front”; Röger, Wartime Relations; Roberts, “The Price of Discretion”; Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich.

20. Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain; Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society.

21. Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism”; Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations”; Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis.“

22. Healey, “Masculine Purity and ‘Gentlemen’s Mischief’”; Beachy, Gay Berlin; Evans, “Bahnhof Boys”; Lücke, Männlichkeit in Unordnung; Revenin, Homosexualité et Prostitution Masculines; Peniston, “Pederasts, Prostitutes, and Pickpockets”; Hindmarch-Watson, “Male Prostitution and the London GPO.”

23. Caslin, Save the Womanhood!; Havelková, “Blaming all Women”; Waters, “Restructuring the ‘Woman Question’”; Laite, Common Prostitutes; Azara, L’ uso politico del corpo femminile.

24. Corbin, Women for Hire; Harsin, Policing Prostitution, xvi. For a more recent study see Plumauzille, Prostitution et revolution.

25. Hüchtker, “Prostitution und städtische Öffentlichkeit.”

26. On South America, Guy, Sex and Danger.

27. On the policing of prostitution in Britain in this period, see Lee, Policing Prostitution, 1856–1886.

28. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 90–136. The full name was the Ladies National Association for the Abolition of the State Regulation of Vice and for the Promotion of Social Purity. In 1915 it became the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene.

29. Miller, “The ‘Romance of Regulation’”; Berlière, La Police des moeurs, 137.

30. Summers, “Which Women? What Europe?”; Kretzschmar, Gleiche Moral; Machiels, Féminismes. See also Summers, ed., “Gender, Religion and Politics.”

31. The most significant study is Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight.

32. On German abolitionism, Roos, Weimar Through the Lens of Gender; Marhoefer, “Degeneration, Sexual Freedom.”

33. Pliley, “Claims to Protection.”

34. This explanation of trafficking cannot be taken at face value and instead must be carefully analysed as a specific way of framing transnational prostitution by women’s and abolitionist organizations. See Chaumont, “La construction sociologique de la réalité.”

35. Dolinsek and Hetherington, “Cold War and International Law.”

36. Roos, Weimar Through the Lens of Gender.

37. An example of such an approach is König, Der Staat als Zuhälter.

38. Lunderberg, “Paying the Price of Citizenship”; Blom, “Fighting Venereal Diseases”; Lipša, Seksualitāte un sociālā kontrole, 435–41; Roos, Weimar Through the Lens of Gender, 2; Castejón Bolea, “Doctors, Social Medicine, and VD,” 68; Bernstein, “Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia”; Evered and Evered, “‘Protecting the National Body.’”

39. The literature on European eugenics is vast. For a thorough overview, see the various chapters in Bashford and Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics.

40. Little research has so far been carried out on the public health policy concerning venereal diseases after regulationism, although there are a few notable exceptions: Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle; Marhoefer, “Degeneration, Sexual Freedom”; Hearne, “The ‘Black Spot’ on Crimea.”

41. These contradictions are yet to be fully explored on the basis of archival sources. For an overview of the politics of prostitution in the latter decades of the twentieth century in Europe, see Outshoorn, ed., The Politics of Prostitution.

42. Laite, Common Prostitutes.

43. Mathieu, “An Unlikely Mobilization”; Mathieu, Mobilisations de prostituées; Aroney, “The 1975 French Sex Workers’ Revolt”; St. Denny, “The Gradual Transformation.”

44. Research on the political organizing of sex workers has only recently emerged. Beside the sociological research by Lilian Mathieu on the French movement, only Germany and Britain have received the attention of historians thus far. See Kempadoo and Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers; Heying, Huren in Bewegung; Connell, “PROS”; Walkowitz, “Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution.”

45. See Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism.” See also Bland, “‘Purifying’ the Public World.”

46. Very little has been written on archival practices relating to material on prostitution. One notable exception, albeit for the United States, is Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in the Archives.”

47. Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable.”

48. Pande, “De(Coding) ‘Loose Women,’” 14; Ross, “Sex in the Archives.”

49. Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris; Schrank, Die Prostitution in Wien; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, 36–47; Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters, 93–107; Wingfield, The World of Prostitution, 70–6; Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 79–112; Kuhar, “Eros or Ethnos.”

50. Caplan, “‘Educating the Eye’,” 107; Sabisch, “Die Prostituierte”; Sabisch, Das Weib als Versuchsperson.

51. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 76–108.

52. Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal Woman.

53. Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal Woman, 27. On Lombroso’s continued influence in twentieth century Europe, see John Dunnage, ed., “Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909)” and Becker, “Weak Bodies?”

54. Wingfield, “‘The Sad Secrets of the Big City’”; Petrungaro, “The Medical Debate about Prostitution.”

55. Hearne, “Liberation and Authoritarianism.”

56. Frances, “Working and Living Conditions,” 699–700; Campbell and Kinnell, “We Shouldn’t Have to Put Up with This.”

57. Harris, Selling Sex; Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle.

58. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution, 162–3; Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 36–40; Stauter-Halstead, The Devil’s Chain, 21–53; Hubbard, “Sexuality, Immorality and the City.”

59. Laite, Common Prostitutes, 85; Walkowitz, “Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution.”

60. Hubbard, Sex and the City, 149.

61. Laite, “Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints.”

62. Williams, “Police Surveillance and the Emergence of CCTV”; Svenonius, “Video Surveillance in a Historical Perspective.”

63. The term ‘sex work’ originated in the United States, where it was also employed in academic research. See Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite; Dewey, “The Feminized Labor of Sex Work.”

64. Laite, Common Prostitutes, 27.

65. Sarti, Bellavitis, and Martini, eds., What Is Work?

66. On the concept of ‘sexual labors’ see Boris, Gilmore, and Parreñas, “Sexual Labors.” For an analysis of sexual labour within a broader framework of gendered and racialized informal economies, see Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners.

67. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; White, Comforts of Home. For a recent re-appraisal of Luise White’s labour-focused approach to prostitution, see Mutongi, “The Wages of Harlotry.”

68. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France. Catherine Lee applies this concept to the history of prostitution, arguing that ‘prostitution becomes, in contrast to the conceptualization of contemporary moralizing discourse, less a necessarily discrete lifestyle or identity, than one resource amongst many within a flexible and mixed individual economy (alongside, for example, theft and applications for poor relief) by which women of the marginal poor sought to survive,’ Lee, Policing Prostitution, 19.

69. Beier and Ocobock, eds., Cast Out, 1–2.

70. Beier, “‘A New Serfdom,’” 35.

71. Althammer, “Roaming Men, Sedentary Women?”

72. Mackey, Red Lights Out, 28–34; Eccles, Vagrancy in Law and Practice, 1, 22.

73. Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture, 129.

74. Lee, Policing Prostitution, 114.

75. On the gender division of labour, see Frader, “Gender and Labor in World History.” On the history of moral reform and reform institutions, see Bartley, Prostitution; Harris, “In the Absence of Empire.”

76. Urban, “The Condition of Female Laundry Workers”; Krafft, Zucht und Unzucht, 202–32; Ayass, Das Arbeitshaus Breitenau. For the persecution of prostitutes as ‘asocials’ under National Socialism, see the recent study by Hörath, “Prostituiertenverfolgung in Bremen 1933–1939.”

77. Lebina and Shkarovskii, Prostitutsiia v Peterburge, 132–78; Hearne, “Liberation and Authoritarianism,” 234–37; Wahl, “The Workhouse Dresden-Leuben After 1945”; Hynson, “Count, Capture, and Reeducate.”

78. De Vito and Lichtenstein, “Writing a Global History of Convict Labor”; De Vito, Schiel, and van Rossum, “From Bondage to Precariousness?”

79. On W. T. Stead see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81–134; Attwood, “Stopping the Traffic”; Attwood, “Lock Up Your Daughters!’

80. Research on the history of the ‘traffic in women’ has rapidly developed in the past decade. For an overview see Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking; Chaumont, Le Mythe de la traite des blanches. On the connections between antisemitism and the traffic in women see Knepper, “British Jews and the Racialization of Crime”; Omran, Frauenbewegung und ‘Judenfrage’ Diskurse, 126–54.

81. Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations.”

82. Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis,” 42; Boris and Berg, “Protecting Virtue, Erasing Labor.”

83. Boris, Making the Woman Worker, 40–1. Also see Rodríguez García, “The ILO and the Oldest Non-profession.”

84. This argument has been put forward by Petruccelli, “The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism.” Also see Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice.

85. Camiscioli, “Coercion and Choice,” 487; Laite, “Traffickers and Pimps”; Ḳozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports.

86. Kozma, “Women’s Migration for Prostitution”; Hetherington, “Victims of the Social Temperament?”; Wilson, “Migration, Empire and Liminality”; Stauter-Halstead, The Devil’s Chain, 137–68; Wingfield, “Destination: Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Constantinople.”

87. Hetherington and Laite, “Editorial Note.”

88. Agustín, “The Disappearing of a Migration Category.”