Traces the history of prostitution during the period, when all prostitutes were required to register with the police, live in licensed brothels, undergo health examinations, and be treated in a special hospital if they were infected with venereal disease. Records of the era are used to examine how laws affected prostitutes' lives. Gibson teaches history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at City University of New York. First published in 1986 by Rutgers, The State University. This second edition contains a new introduction, a new Part I, and a new bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The most effective way to deal with prostitution has always been hotly debated by governments and women s movements alike. Feminists want it abolished or regulated as sex work; governments have to safeguard public health and order. This book shows how women s movements in Western Europe, North America and Australia have affected politics on prostitution and trafficking of women since the 1970s, asking what made them successful in some countries but a failure in others. It also assesses whether government institutions to advance the status of women - so-called women s policy agencies - have played a key role in achieving policy outcomes favourable to movement demands. Written by an international team of experts and based on original sources, all chapters follow the same framework to ensure comparability. The final chapter offers an overall comparison identifying what makes women s movements successful and women s agencies effective, presenting the case for state feminism .

"This book examines how a group of transnational British-Italian women affiliated with the exiled patriots of the Italian Left repurposed traditionally feminine activities, such as fundraising, gift-giving, maternity, and memory collection, to make a substantial contribution to Italian Unification and state-building. Through their actions, Mary Chambers, Sara Nathan, Giorgina Saffi, Julia Salis Schwabe, and Jessie White Mario transcended the boundaries of acceptable behavior for middle-class women and participated in the broader female emancipation movement. By drawing attention to their activities, this book reveals how nineteenth-century female activists achieved their most revolutionary goals by using conservative, domestic, or anti-Catholic language. Adding to the growing understanding of the Italian Risorgimento as a transnational phenomenon, it also shows how non-Catholic and non-Italian women participated in the creation and development of the Italian state. Finally, the book argues for the continuing importance of religion in both politics and philanthropy throughout the nineteenth century."

Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores nineteenth-century Italian sexualities from a variety of viewpoints, illuminating in particular personal and political relationships, same-sex desires, gender roles that defy societal norms, sexual behaviours of different classes and transnational encounters.

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-siècle 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.

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.

Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is about sex work and prostitution third sector organizations (TSOs): non-governmental and non-profit organizations that provide support services to, and advocate for the well-being of people operating in the sex industries. With a focus on three vast and extremely diverse regions, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, this book provides a unique vantage point that shows how interlinked these organizations’ histories and configurations are. TSOs are fascinating research sites because they operate as zones of contestation which translate their understandings of sex work and prostitution into different support practices and advocacy initiatives. This book reveals that these organizations are not external to normative power but participate in it and are subject to it, conditioning how they can exist, who they can reach out to, where, and what they can achieve. Third Sector Organizations in Sex Work and Prostitution is a resource for scholars, policymakers, and activists involved in research on, and work with third sector organizations in the fields of sex work and prostitution, gender and sexuality, and human rights among others.