The Devil’s Chain: Abolition and Social Control in Partitioned Poland by Keely Stauter-Halsted (review)

In ten thematic chapters, Keely Stauter-Halsted analyzes the unprecedented concern, even panic, about the issue of commercial sex in the Polish lands. Over some forty years, from the 1880s to Polish reunification, an emerging national elite engaged in an ongoing debate over the causes and consequences of prostitution, believing that a resolution of the problem of commercial sex in partitioned Poland was crucial for national renewal. Stauter-Halsted employs the world(s) of prostitution in the Polish lands as a prism through which to analyze the Polish transition to modernity against the background of fitful attempts toward political independence. This highly original study of gendered nationalism addresses topics ranging from child abuse through international sex trafficking (“the devil’s chain” of the title) to venereal disease. Prostitution, Stauter-Halsted explains, became a symbol of the malignant rule of the three partitioning powers, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

Following a detailed introduction in which Stauter-Halsted lays out the parameters of her study, the first six chapters of the book analyze paid sex, and the next three examine social reactions to it, with the final chapter exploring prostitution in independent Poland. She discusses the burgeoning interest among elites in the problem of prostitution in the last decades of the nineteenth century in the first chapter. This era of closing bordellos in some locations meant that more women took to the streets in search of customers at precisely the same time that a growing number of garrisons and educational institutions increased the gender imbalance in many Polish towns. The first chapter also includes a brief but useful discussion of the varied development of regulated prostitution across the Polish lands.

The second and third chapters consider the role prostitution played in the lives of the working-class women who practiced it. Stauter-Halsted argues against theories of coercion and for female agency throughout the chapter, indeed, throughout the book. Economic need, not moral weakness, was the primary reason that women turned to commercial sex to make a living. In chapter 3, she places these women in the larger urban milieu, showing how urban residents—working and middle class—interacted with the world of prostitution in their quotidian lives, explaining the influence of family roles in a girl’s involvement in commercial sex. She also explains the process of registration by which a woman became a tolerated prostitute.

The fourth through sixth chapters address the various elements of the “white slave” panic that so consumed Europeans at the turn of the century. In the Polish context, this panic arose out of the belief that large numbers of single, unaccompanied young women and girls were leaving for transoceanic locations as part of the mass migration from Europe in this period and that there was an overwhelming Jewish presence in trafficking in the Polish lands. Indeed, she explains, the image of the omnipresent Jews dominating international trade in women was among the most fraught themes in Polish prostitution narratives among Jews and non-Jews alike. Stauter-Halsted reminds the reader that underscoring the dangerous Jewish middleman in the sex trade permitted contemporary observers to highlight Polish exceptionalism and to argue that the partitioning powers refused to combat trafficking vigorously, thus tolerating the “sexual enslavement of Polish women” (173). Among the most interesting sections of the sixth chapter is her analysis of Jewish trafficking trials in the context of the Polish imagination: in a supposed reversal of the Christian civilizing mission of enslaving pagans, these trials were employed to create narratives in which Christian girls were duped into sacrificing their virtue and forcibly moved to Alexandria, Cairo, and Constantinople.

Stauter-Halsted begins her discussion of elite responses to prostitution by locating the genesis of Polish women’s public activism in their ability to respond to the so-called Alfonse Pogrom in Warsaw in May 1905. These riots occurred during the politically more permissive era of Russia’s...