In the 1880s and 1890s prostitution became a matter of pronounced public concern in the Polish-speaking lands. The practice, of course, was not new; it had long thrived in bordellos near army barracks, in red light districts of cities, and in the back rooms of manor houses. But in the late nineteenth century as migrants poured into burgeoning metropolises from smaller towns and the countryside seeking work, and rules about tolerated prostitution changed to allow for private solicitation beyond brothels, venal sex suddenly seemed more brazen and dangerous to bourgeois observers. This is the point at which Keely Stauter-Halsted's thoroughgoing study of prostitution, and educated elite reactions to it, begins. The book considers the moral panic surrounding prostitution, the prevalent trope of the fallen woman (alongside more accurate reasons why women sold sex), the relationship between domestic service, prostitution, and the bourgeois home, myths and reality surrounding white slavery, reformist discourses about prostitution, and the shift to scientific and medical efforts, including eugenics, to control paid sex. The book shows how, over time, discourses about prostitution shifted from moral condemnation to inclusion, once Poland achieved statehood and paid sex could no longer be blamed on imperial powers, Jewish traffickers, or the women themselves. In many respects, physicians and reformers came to realize what had been true all along: namely, that women sold sex because of poverty and a dearth of alternatives.

Poverty and a disparity of power meant that household servants and other working women frequently ended up selling sex, or even that working-class women who did not see themselves as prostitutes could end up on police registries after being rounded up in a pub or neighborhood where police presumed prostitutes solicited. But Stauter-Halsted stresses that women involved in prostitution still exercised agency in using sex work as “a weapon of the weak” to achieve mobility and greater economic independence. “Selling sex,” she reminds us, “was but one of a range of difficult options” (5). These women were hardly “passive victims of their own fate,” but rather “a rising class of ambitious individuals intent on constructing their own future in a modernizing Polish society” (6).

Nowhere is this more evident than in the fascinating middle section of the book that focuses on “white slavery.” By the turn of the century, as millions of migrants traveled the globe in search of better opportunities, Polish elites and imperial authorities alike indulged in another moral panic, decrying the trafficking of “their” young women to work in bordellos from Alexandria to Buenos Aries, Chicago, Constantinople, and Shanghai. Arguing that scholarship has largely accepted the labels coined by those who indulged in the panic, Stauter-Halsted asserts that sex trafficking is fundamentally “a migration problem,” reminding her readers that the simultaneity of labor migration and sex migration meant that the latter is best understood in the context of the former. “Both engendered risks and abuses, and both were subject to nationalist pressures and imperial restrictions” (137–38). Archival evidence reveals “more human agency, more ambition, and more ingenuity on the part of female travelers than the standard story of passive victimhood implies” (139). Women frequently knew the risks of their travel with agents and they were willing to accept them for the chance to leave the village and improve their lot. The men and women who trafficked them, usually Jews, acted from similar impulses. Poles could blame the Jewish Other for immorality while thinking of the young women as innocents, but most of those “involved in the overseas transport of women did not act out of pure malevolence,” Stauter-Halsted writes. “Rather, they were desperate people reacting to challenging situations” (195). “Pure malevolence” might be an overstatement, just as the “weapons of the weak” that women deployed may have been at times rather blunt and ineffective, but one gets the point, and it's significant.

Stauter-Halsted's careful attention to the complexities of this relationship, along with her sophisticated analysis of reactions to home-grown prostitution in the Polish lands before and after independence constitutes a tour de force. The book explores the topic in archival sources from all three partitions, including police records, newspaper stories, and medical and reformist publications, often reading between the lines to restore the agency of those women who were so frequently depicted as victims or devils, but hardly ever able to speak for themselves. Because prostitution functioned as a lurid example of larger social phenomena affecting nearly everyone at the time, Stauter-Halsted's investigation of it sheds light not only on her chosen topic, but also on the prevailing concerns of a modernizing and nationalizing society at the turn of the century. The Devil's Chain is essential reading for students and scholars of Poland, the late Habsburg empire, migration, women's studies, human trafficking, and urbanization.