"The Sad Secrets of the Big City": Prostitution and Other Moral Panics in Early Post-Imperial Vienna. (24th April 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Wingfield, Nancy M.
• Is Part Of: Austrian history yearbook. Volume 50(2019)
• Page Start: 99
• Page End: 123
• Publication Date: 2019-04-24
• Subjects: Austria -- History -- Periodicals; 943.6
• DOI: 10.1017/S0067237819000067
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0067-2378

Abstract

Abstract : So read some of the subheadings in a 14 June 1920 article in the Wiener Montags-Presse, analyzing prostitution in post-imperial Vienna. Many journalists—sometimes, even the same journalists—continued to employ the very vocabulary, "contagion, " "contamination, " and "filth, " in their postwar exposés that they had used in their prewar and wartime reports on prostitution in the Habsburg monarchy. Viennese officials in the newly founded German-Austria (Deutschösterreich) continued to consider tolerated prostitutes a "necessary evil, " arrest women they found engaging in clandestine prostitution, subject them to pelvic examinations for venereal disease (VD), and treat these women as operating outside the bounds of society. In fact, women who practiced prostitution were a long-entrenched part of the female working class. In matters of commercial sex, Austria-Hungary's defeat in the First World War did not constitute a decisive break with the past, but rather a juncture in long-term historical processes, as this analysis of post-imperial Vienna through 1923, when postwar inflation had been tamed, reveals.