The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria

"This book is a fascinating exploration of prostitution in the multilingual space of the Austrian monarchy in the early 20th century. Nancy Wingfield is an expert in the history of Habsburg Central Europe and she draws on multilingual evidence to reconstruct the world of regulated prostitution. Like in Russia and lots of other international contexts, prostitution was regulated in the Austrian monarchy. Women who engaged in prostitution were registered by the police and were required to attend medical examinations and abide by other restrictions placed upon their visibility and behaviour. One of the things that I love most about this book is the fact that Wingfield writes in such an engaging and lucid manner. She starts the book with a bang, drawing the reader into the highly publicized trial of a brothel keeper, Regine Riehl. She was a madam who was accused of procuring, abusing, and exploiting women who were working at her brothel in Vienna in 1906 and Wingfield vividly reconstructs this trial from a variety of different perspectives. It’s a wonderful, engaging book, so that’s reason one for choosing it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The second reason that I love this book is because Wingfield explores the messiness of the regulation of prostitution in practice. It’s really easy to look at regulation as this totalizing system that was enforced from the top down but, in reality, enforcement was dependent on local police forces, local priorities, and the ethnic, social and cultural characteristics of a particular space. She looks at regulation across the monarchy, in spa towns, garrison towns, and even the countryside, which is quite significant, as there has not been much research conducted into paid sex in rural space. It’s really built into military culture in this period. In many different international contexts, the regulation of prostitution was introduced specifically with the aim of protecting military health. Therefore, it’s closely intertwined with military culture. She does map shifts that occurred following the highly publicised trial of Regine Riehl. For instance, in the wake of the trial, the Minister of the Interior solicited information from across the vast imperial space to examine how the regulation of prostitution was actually working in practice. Wingfield’s book also shows that regulation survived imperial collapse, as after the disintegration of this vast empire, certain new states that arose implemented the same regulatory legislation. The fact that regulation outlasted such colossal disruption speaks to the broader theme of continuities in the history of prostitution."