Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe

Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe PDF Author: Sonja Dolinsek
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000868990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. 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 book encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. This book moves beyond exploring state-regulated prostitution, which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex across 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 nine chapters shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution well into the second half of the twentieth century 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. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe

Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe PDF Author: Sonja Dolinsek
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000868990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. 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 book encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. This book moves beyond exploring state-regulated prostitution, which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex across 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 nine chapters shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution well into the second half of the twentieth century 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. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

The Devil's Chain

The Devil's Chain PDF Author: Keely Stauter-Halsted
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In the half-century before Poland’s long-awaited political independence in 1918, anxiety surrounding the country’s burgeoning sex industry fueled nearly constant public debate. The Devil’s Chain is the first book to examine the world of commercial sex throughout the partitioned Polish territories, uncovering a previously hidden conversation about sexuality, gender propriety, and social class. Keely Stauter-Halsted situates the preoccupation with prostitution in the context of Poland’s struggle for political independence and its difficult transition to modernity. She traces the Poles’ growing anxiety about white slavery, venereal disease, and eugenics by examining the regulation of the female body, the rise of medical authority, and the role of social reformers in addressing the problem of paid sex. Stauter-Halsted argues that the sale of sex was positioned at the juncture of mass and elite cultures, affecting nearly every aspect of urban life and bringing together sharply divergent social classes in what had long been a radically stratified society. She captures the experiences of the impoverished women who turned to the streets and draws a vivid picture of the social milieu that shaped their choices. The Devil’s Chain demonstrates that discussions of prostitution and its attendant disorders—sexual deviancy, alcoholism, child abuse, vagrancy, and other related problems—reflected differing visions for the future of the Polish nation.

Sexuality in Europe

Sexuality in Europe PDF Author: Dagmar Herzog
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139500732
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This original book brings a fascinating and accessible account of the tumultuous history of sexuality in Europe from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Although the twentieth century is often called 'the century of sex' and seen as an era of increasing liberalization, Dagmar Herzog instead emphasizes the complexities and contradictions in sexual desires and behaviours, the ambivalences surrounding sexual freedom, and the difficulties encountered in securing sexual rights. Incorporating the most recent scholarship on a broad range of conceptual problems and national contexts, the book investigates the shifting fortunes of marriage and prostitution, contraception and abortion, queer and straight existence. It analyzes sexual violence in war and peace, the promotion of sexual satisfaction in fascist and democratic societies, the role of eugenics and disability, the politicization and commercialization of sex, and processes of secularization and religious renewal.

Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany

Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany PDF Author: Jamie Page
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192607561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Prostitution played an important part in structuring gender relations in medieval Germany. Prostitutes were often viewed as an example of the extreme female sinfulness which all women risked falling into, yet their social role was also seen as vital to the unmarried men for whom they provided a sexual outlet. Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany is the first full-length study of medieval prostitution to focus primarily on how gender discourse shaped the lives of prostitutes themselves. Based on three legal case studies from the late medieval Empire, Prostitutes and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany examines constructions of subjectivity between 1400 and 1500. This period saw the rapid rise of tolerated prostitution across much of western Europe and the emergence of the public brothel as a central institution in the regulation of social order, followed by its equally rapid suppression from the early 1500s. By analysing how individuals interacted with cultural discourses surrounding the body, sexuality, and sin, the book explores how the concepts which defined prostitution in the Middle Ages shaped individual lives, and how individuals were able - or not - to exert agency, both within the circumstances of their own lives, and in response to official attempts to regulate sexual behaviour.

Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe

Prostitution in Twentieth-Century Europe PDF Author: Sonja Dolinsek
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032458526
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. It encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences.

Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s

Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004346252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 909

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Book Description
Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution since 1600. It analyses more than 20 cities with an important sex industry and compares policies and social trends, coercion and agency, but also prostitutes' working and living conditions.

The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria

The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria PDF Author: Nancy Meriwether Wingfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198801653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This study of prostitution addresses issues of female agency and experience, as well as contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls/women, and police surveillance. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, as so often has been the case in much of the literature, Nancy M. Wingfield seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-si cle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in commercial sex, illuminate their quotidian experiences, and to place these women, some of whom made a rational economic decision to sell their bodies, in the larger social context of late imperial Austria. Wingfield investigates the interactions of both registered and clandestine prostitutes with the vice police and other supervisory agents, including physicians and court officials, as well as with the inhabitants of these women's world, including brothel clients and madams, and pimps, rather than focusing top-down on the state-constructed apparatus of surveillance. Close reading of a broad range of primary and secondary sources shows that some prostitutes in late imperial Austria took control over their own fates, at least as much as other working-class women, in the last decades before the end of the Monarchy. And after 1918, bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition. Thus, there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution in the successor states. Legislation, which changed regulation only piecemeal after the war, often continued to incorporate forms of control, reflecting continuity in attitudes about women's sexuality.

Bawdy City

Bawdy City PDF Author: Katie M. Hemphill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848901X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
A vivid social history of Baltimore's prostitution trade and its evolution throughout the nineteenth century, Bawdy City centers woman in a story of the relationship between sexuality, capitalism, and law. Beginning in the colonial period, prostitution was little more than a subsistence trade. However, by the 1840s, urban growth and changing patterns of household labor ushered in a booming brothel industry. The women who oversaw and labored within these brothels were economic agents surviving and thriving in an urban world hostile to their presence. With the rise of urban leisure industries and policing practices that spelled the end of sex establishments, the industry survived for only a few decades. Yet, even within this brief period, brothels and their residents altered the geographies, economy, and policies of Baltimore in profound ways. Hemphill's critical narrative of gender and labor shows how sexual commerce and debates over its regulation shaped an American city.

Women in Twentieth-Century Europe

Women in Twentieth-Century Europe PDF Author: Ann Allen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137169583
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Women's lives changed more in the 20th century than in any previous century. It was a period of transformation, not only of the political realm, but also the household, family and workplace. Ranging widely over Europe, this fascinating account is one of the first comprehensive surveys of its kind.

International approaches to prostitution

International approaches to prostitution PDF Author: Gangoli, Geetanjali
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 184742158X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What is to be done about prostitution? Is it work or is it violence? Are women involved in prostitution offenders or victims? Is prostitution a private or a political issue? The answers to these questions vary depending on many factors, including where in the world you live. This book provides a valuable, detailed international comparison of the laws, policies and interventions in eight countries across Europe (England and Wales, France, Sweden and Moldova) and Asia (India, Pakistan, Thailand and Taiwan). The countries were chosen because of their contrasting social policy and legislative frameworks. Specific topics covered include national social and historical contexts in relation to prostitution; legal frameworks - with discussion of existing laws and policies and debates around legislation and decriminalisation; key issues faced - particularly relating to reasons for entering prostitution and analysis of policies and interventions. The case studies are brought to life by giving voice to the experiences of women involved in prostitution themselves together with the personal reflections of the authors. Aimed at a wide audience of students, academics, policy makers and practitioners, this book makes an important contribution to academic and policy debates in the fields of criminology, law, social policy, women's studies, sociology, politics and international relations.