The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria by Nancy M. Wingfield (review)

In her recent work The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria, Nancy Wingfield details the competing aims of the various groups that injected themselves into the public debate on prostitution. In a technical sense, the book is undeniably well researched, based on a trove of recently uncovered primary sources, mostly in the form of police records. With the help of these sources, Wingfield attempts to reconstruct the public lives of ordinary prostitutes, madams, and pimps in order to provide a more complete picture of the role of prostitution in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is also well written: it reads easily enough and the reader has no difficulty following the flow of the writer’s expert prose.

The problem is that—while chock-full of facts—the book does not lead anywhere new. To be sure, the project begins promisingly enough, with an account of the relevant facts of the sensational Riehl trial of 1906–07. The court proceedings gripped Austria, exposing the criminal exploitation of women in one brothel and reinforcing the ostensible link between Jews and prostitution, promoting “the image of prostitute as victim, while providing a female—Jewish—villain in the world of prostitution: the brothel madam” (19). From there, however, the book devolves into a veritable laundry list of mundane details of unremarkable individuals that, collectively, does not reveal anything a reasonably intelligent reader could not have already surmised on his or her own. For example, the majority of the book is devoted to the extremely diffuse, uneven, and inefficient manner in which the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy addressed the question of prostitution. Unsurprisingly, there was very little federal law regarding the regulation or criminalization of the sex trade. Instead, local governments were left to deal with the issue largely on their own. The reader is then treated to the tedious details of how seemingly every single municipality in the empire debated the exact same questions with the exact same civic groups promoting the exact same solutions. In some cases, the realists won. In others, the moralists carried the day. Virtually every single town that Wingfield treats in her book featured “a mixed system of regulated prostitution, clandestine and independent prostitutes” (151) that only differed in the concentration of one type of commercial sex as opposed to another. However, when all is said and done, reading these accounts amounts to a great deal of work for little gain.

As an institution that, in modern Europe, has always existed at the margins of society and of the law, prostitution presents the researcher with a potentially lucrative object of study, one that can shed light on social, legal, medical, and religious institutions and their motives. At the same time, largely due to the stigma attached to commercial sex, historical records are often incomplete or of dubious value, since the discourse on this topic so consistently reveals the prejudices of the chroniclers themselves. Indeed, as Wingfield shows in exhaustive (and often exhausting) detail, every major segment of society has an agenda of its own when it comes to addressing the problem of prostitution. Law enforcement treated clandestine prostitutes as petty criminals and devoted more resources to the human trafficking that supplied new girls to meet a seemingly insatiable demand. The politicians and the citizens they represented, however, were generally divided into two camps: moralists who saw prostitution as a symptom of moral decline and realists who viewed the sex trade as a necessary evil, an outlet for men’s sexual impulses that would lead to worse outcomes if prostitution did not exist. The medical community, for its part, regarded prostitution as a primary source of epidemic infection. However, many doctors were of a mind that the spread of sexually transmitted diseases could largely be brought under control given the proper medical supervision—in the form of compulsory physical examination of the prostitutes themselves. Meanwhile, the residents of various neighborhoods, regardless of their...