In The Devil’s Chain, Keeley Stauter-Halsted provides a nearly comprehensive account of prostitution and its significance in partitioned Poland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Analyzing an extensive array of archival and published sources, she brings to light the voices and experiences of the prostitutes themselves while simultaneously assessing the perceptions and anxieties surrounding prostitution that emanated from professionals and the upper classes. Stauter-Halsted argues that discussions of prostitution rested at the core of a broader narrative regarding Polish national identity, modernization, and political independence. The sex industry and the ills that accompanied it, she asserts, “exposed the nation’s inadequacies” (45) that needed to be reformed as Poland sought to become a modern, independent nation leading up to and after World War I.
Stauter-Halsted begins by exploring the lives of the women who worked as prostitutes and the perceptions of them in social discourse. Contrary to contemporary accounts describing the moral failings of prostitutes, she asserts that most women who engaged in the sex industry did so out of economic need to supplement wages, and often on a temporary basis. Yet the complex police regulation system targeted all single, working-class women in public areas as potential prostitutes, registering them as either acknowledged (“public”) or “secret” prostitutes on two separate rosters. In this way, working women were categorized as less moral and less virtuous based solely on their social status, despite the fact that these same women often worked within the homes of the middle and upper classes. Stauter-Halsted emphasizes the geographical integration of the working and upper classes in Polish society, and argues that this proximity helped to fuel anxieties about the threat that prostitution posed to the health and well-being both of individual families and the nation itself.
These anxieties played out in the moral panic surrounding sex trafficking. Stauter-Halsted sets contemporary Polish discussions of “white slavery” and the international sex trade into the broader context of migration and antisemitism. Stories of daughters being kidnapped and forced into the sex trade overseas played on fears about national well-being, but often exaggerated realities. Instead, she argues, women frequently exhibited agency in their efforts to flee oppressive poverty for the hope of a better life, and participated willingly in migration schemes, even those resulting in a life of prostitution. Much of the blame for the international sex trade in Poland was placed on Jews, through a series of highly publicized sex-trafficking trials. Stauter-Halsted explores the rhetoric surrounding Jewish involvement in the sex trade and its contribution to perceptions of Polish exceptionalism. She concludes that placing responsibility for the continued presence of prostitution in Polish society on the Jewish trafficker shifted the blame away from the Polish national community.
Finally, Stauter-Halsted addresses the role that social activists and medical and legal professionals played as they addressed prostitution in an attempt to improve the health of the Polish nation. Female activists came into the public sphere to “save” fallen women by establishing reform homes and promoting proper moral behavior, with marriage as the ultimate goal. Medical experts, in contrast, focused on combating venereal disease. Through their failed efforts to treat syphilis, doctors came to see prostitutes as diseased threats to the well-being of the nation, and imposed police surveillance and isolation on these women. In addition, the medical profession sought to cleanse Polish society through a growing eugenics movement that stressed celibacy and sex education. Stauter-Halsted emphasizes that while other eugenics movements focused on ethnic or religious differences in purifying the nation, in the Polish case the concern was over class-based social ills such as venereal disease, alcoholism, and prostitution.
The arguments made in The Devil’s Chain correspond to and reinforce discussions of women, prostitution, and sex trafficking in other national contexts. Although the dynamics of this story parallel and reiterate the general narrative, Stauter-Halsted’s contribution emphasizes the complex link between prostitution and national identity in Poland by methodically unpacking the variety of discourses surrounding the sex trade. She convincingly integrates the Polish issues into the broader literature on prostitution, class, urbanization, migration, and professionalization. The unique aspects of the Polish experience, for instance the complex regulation system and the Polish application of class-based eugenics, make this an important contribution to our understanding of the modernization process. This volume will be of interest to scholars of partitioned Poland, but also to those exploring issues of migration, gender, and national identity.
