Nancy M. Wingfield's meticulously researched book is the first full-length study to examine the Austrian Empire's complex and varied policies regarding prostitutes and their regulation by the state. The study provides an erudite treatment of legal, political, and social discourses on prostitution in Austria—ones that viewed regulation as a necessary yet difficult to enforce solution to public anxieties surrounding venereal disease and the trafficking of women. In so doing, the book offers a picture consistent with other studies of prostitution in Europe at this time. It can therefore easily be read alongside foundational studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prostitution, including Judith Walkowitz's work on England, Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980), Alain Corbin's Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (1990), and Julia Roos's Weimar Through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman's Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919-1933 (2010).

That said, Wingfield adeptly shows her readers what set Austria apart from other European countries at this time, namely, the vast variety of regional and municipal approaches to the question of prostitution. She displays an impressive range and depth of archival research in multiple languages—Croatian, Czech, German, Italian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian—that does justice to the multilingual, multiethnic empire of Cisleithanian Austria. The imperial capital of Vienna had a reputation throughout the empire as a center of vice, but Wingfield's book does not dwell exclusively on the metropolis. It acknowledges instead the influence that the capital had on both policy decisions regarding prostitution and the popular imagination, and then broadens its view to encompass other cities (e.g., the port city of Trieste) and the provinces, and to include different types and sites of prostitution—registered and unregistered (i.e., “clandestine”), brothel and street.

From the first page of the book—which begins with the story of a young woman, Olga Koprivec, who emphatically states that it was her choice to work in a brothel—Wingfield shows that one of the study's primary aims is to let “the voice of the prostitute” be heard (14). To do so, she attempts to trace prostitutes’ stories from one archive to the next, and, while some traces disappear, others lead her to a collection of photographs of brothel prostitutes in the Czech town of Budweis—all of whom resemble bourgeois daughters and mothers. Indeed, as Wingfield shows, from the turn of the century through World War I, prostitution became a topic of discussion in bourgeois circles, but it also became an option for single women from relatively privileged, educated families both during and after the war. The majority of prostitutes Wingfield finds in the archives come, however, from the working and artisan classes and were age twenty-five or younger. These women moved in and out of prostitution, using it to supplement meager wages or seeing it as a means of attaining financial independence before settling down to marry. Prostitutes, Wingfield insists throughout her study, exercised agency, and prostitution was a contingent line of work rather than a life-long profession or a moral condemnation. The novelty of this claim should not be overstated. Not only have feminist and queer theorists produced a rich body of literature on the agency of prostitutes, but scholars like Corbin, Roos, and Walkowitz have also pursued similar projects in the French, German, and British contexts, respectively, and they have done so with greater nuance than Wingfield does. For instance, she sometimes focuses on women who fit the social stereotype of prostitutes as belligerent, itinerant women, but then simply concludes that they were asserting agency. If the defiance of social and legal norms is at the core of her definition of their agency, then the author should state this at the outset of her book. Without providing a theoretical framework for her discussion of agency, Wingfield runs the risk of giving her readers a simplistic definition of agency as belligerence.

One key feature that makes Wingfield's book unique is that it does not limit its examination of prostitution to prostitutes themselves; it also describes their typical clientele, from soldiers in garrison towns to bourgeois gentlemen in the capital city, as well as the men and women who worked as pimps, procurers, and madams. Members of the last group, Wingfield shows, were often characterized as central figures of “white slavery,” which involved the trafficking of women and girls from the Austrian provinces to other cities in Europe or to brothels in South America. The specter of trafficking, Wingfield shows, was used to stoke fears of ethnic, religious, and cultural “others,” and also to express dismay at the movement of women from the Austrian provinces to the cities. Jews, in particular, were blamed for a rise in lax sexual morality and for the trafficking of women, allegations that Wingfield documents, explains, and sometimes dispels. There were instances of Jewish involvement in the sex trade, but Wingfield also provides examples of cases in which antisemitic sentiment drove police investigations away from the real perpetrators and toward innocent Jewish citizens. As Wingfield convincingly argues, Austrians’ anxieties about trafficking and sexual vice were often the result of underlying, racially inflected fears about migration and social mixing.

In providing examples that focus on Jewish involvement in the sex trade, Wingfield could have been more forceful in refuting some of the erroneous claims made against Jews. She could have also showed in more detail how antisemitism and cultural/ethnic stereotyping took on a central role in how prostitution was viewed and represented in early twentieth-century Austria. One way of mitigating the association of Jews exclusively with pimps, procurers, and traffickers would be to show the complex ways in which Jewish writers and thinkers like Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, and Stefan Zweig shaped the discourse on prostitution in fin-de-siècle Austria. These writers and their works are instead either reduced to brief descriptive summaries (Kraus) and decontextualized quotes (Roth), or relegated to footnotes (Schnitzler and Zweig). It is puzzling that Wingfield did not refer to some of the superb literary and cultural analysis that has been done on these writers in the fields of German and Austrian studies, especially since she cites cultural studies scholarship on prostitution in other European contexts (e.g., France and Russia). Discussing such works would have added a much-needed narrative dimension to Wingfield's historical study. After all, because she argues throughout her book that popular, written discourses—such as stories and court reports that appeared in newspapers—shaped public perception of prostitution, and that prostitution policy was often driven just as much by the public imagination of the sex trade as it was by local realities, a more in-depth look at those writers who engaged with contemporary court cases (like Kraus) and influenced readers’ fantasies about prostitutes (like Schnitzler and Zweig) would have provided greater evidence for this very argument.

“No other working-class profession was so well documented as regulated prostitution” (53), Wingfield writes, and that has allowed her to draw on a myriad of sources about Austrian prostitutes produced throughout the former empire: in government documents, police records, court transcripts, and newspapers. She has brought them to life for us in a readable, compelling, scholarly book that allows us to hear the voices of prostitutes telling their own stories.