In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith presents a fascinating case study of the ways in which images of the prostitute and images of the “New Woman” blurred during the Weimar period. Her careful reading and persuasive interpretation of a variety of sources shed new light on this period, which was so decisive for changing gender roles. Smith begins with an examination of discussions about prostitution in the Wilhelmine era. Rather than invoking prostitution as a symbol of decadence and immorality, she shows how different writers, artists, politicians, and activists linked discussions of prostitution to criticism of marriage, consumer culture, and alienation in modern society. To that end, Smith relies on scholarship from history and literary studies, as well as on novels, essays, short stories, travel guides, popular films, newspaper accounts, government documents, and other archival records. Social historians will likely be most interested in the newspaper and archival materials, which offer some perspective on the everyday experiences of prostitutes. The bulk of the analysis focuses on representations of prostitutes and prostitution: as Smith writes in her conclusion, for Berliners, “images and representations mattered as much if not more than hard statistics” (186) for their ideas about prostitutes.

Smith begins her study with close readings of writings by Social Democratic leader August Bebel, sociologist Georg Simmel, and playwright Otto Erich Hartleben. In the second chapter, which analyzes the work of women who discussed prostitution, Smith juxtaposes the writings of women's rights activists Helene Stöcker, Anita Augspurg, Anna Pappritz, and Hanna Bieber-Böhm, with those of Margarete Böhme, the best-selling author of Diary of a Lost Girl (1905). Stöcker lauded Böhme’s sympathetic portrayal of a Lost Girl and called the novel a “new morality in an artistic form” (68). In this way, Smith shows how, by the end of the Wilhelmine era, ideas about prostitution were slowly changing—even before the outbreak of World War I. In the third and fourth chapters, she traces how Weimar writers crafted complicated and nuanced images of prostitutes who were street-smart, entrepreneurial, and matter-of-fact about sexuality. The author demonstrates how debates about prostitutes were linked to concerns about the large number of single working women in Berlin. At certain points, images of the prostitutes and so-called New Women even merged; according to Smith, this suggested an increased acceptance of flexible gender roles and ideas about sexuality. In her last substantive chapter, Smith contends that if working women could be seen as prostitutes, then prostitutes could also be viewed as working women—an interpretation supported by archival evidence, as well as by contemporary novels by Vicki Baum and Irmgard Keun.

Smith's work calls into question stereotypes that divide prostitutes into one of two groups: victims or sexual monsters. Although she considers the precarious economic situation in which many prostitutes lived, Smith emphasizes the prostitutes’ potential for agency and autonomy. She uses the phrase “self-conscious commodities” (18) to describe the agency of women in the marketplace, where they made choices about how they presented themselves, how they worked, and how they lived their lives. In this way, the author differentiates her own work from previous studies by Marsha Meskimmon, Dorothy Rowe, Hanne Bergius, and Victoria Harris through her nuanced understanding of the image and agency of prostitutes.

Drawing on Gayle Rubin's radical theory of sex—in which decriminalization and destigmatization of prostitution allows for new productive discussions of different kinds of sexuality, desire, and individual freedom (“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance [1984], 267–319)—Smith argues that the acceptance of prostitution allows for the acceptance of other kinds of sex: “prostitution played a central role in the renegotiation of erotic life” (21). By withholding moral judgment and upending hierarchies that privilege marital sexual activity, Smith argues, observers can gain a more effective and accurate understanding of the social climate in which prostitution was debated and discussed. Readers who accept Rubin's theoretical approach may be more open to Smith's conclusions. For example, Smith's own theoretical approach informs her interpretations of Jeanne Mammen's watercolors and drawings of nightlife and café culture, which appeared widely in Weimar-era publications such as Ulk, Jugend, Simplicissimus, and Uhu. She describes the poses and faces of Mammen's prostitutes as examples of “masks of impassivity” (148) that represented what Helmut Lethen has termed “cool conduct” (Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany [2002]), as well as playful questioning of gender and moral norms. One could also argue, however, that these blank faces were instead evidence of what nineteenth-century moralists might have referred to as the “soul-numbing” nature of work as a prostitute.

As Smith notes at several points, her analysis focuses primarily on middle-class and lower-middle-class women rather than on poor women, who might not have experienced street walking as an instance of autonomy and agency. The cultural works she studies link prostitution to the new possibilities women had for gender roles and independence. Readers could gain a more complete picture of prostitution by considering this book alongside the recent history of Weimar prostitution reform by Julia Roos (Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Women's Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919–1933 [2010]), or by looking at the primary sources and accounts about prostitutes collected during the Wilhelmine- and Weimar-eras. By calling into question narratives that describe prostitutes as either sexual predators or victims, Smith has nevertheless provided an important corrective to existing scholarly claims about prostitutes. Her powerful interpretation of a variety of primary sources makes this book an important contribution to the history of the late Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic, and modern gender studies.