Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia

by Siobhán Hearne

Overview

Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. This study examines how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted amid rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization around the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines the lives and challenges of different groups who engaged with the world of prostitution, including women who sold sex, the men who paid for it, mediators, the police, and wider urban communities. Drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Policing Prostitution illustrates how prostitution was an acknowledged, contested, and ever-present component of lower-class urban society in the late imperial period. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192574961
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	04/07/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2017, and has since completed postdoctoral research in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Her research has appeared in the journals Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Social History, Revolutionary Russia and The Journal of Social History(forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Selling Sex
2. Paying for Sex
3. Managing Commercial Sex
4. Policing Commercial Sex
5. Living with Commercial Sex
Conclusion
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"In Policing Prostitution, Siobhán Hearne offers a fresh perspective on the commercial sex industry, through the lens of state intervention and the regulatory system...Policing Prostitution presents a social history of the commercial sex industry not only from the bottom up, but from the inside out. It is a superb book which will have a wide appeal, and will be of particular interest to historians of the late Russian Empire, labour and urban historians, and historians of sexuality more broadly." — Sasha Rasmussen, The Journal of the Social History Society

"Hearne challenges the traditional narrative with fascinating stories she sampled in an astonishing number of regional and central archives. One might have thought the history of prostitution and its regulation in Imperial Russia already had been written, but Hearne offers a new interpretation, introduces new voices, and raises new questions, forcing us to think anew about prostitution and sex work, and about what they can tell us about Imperial Russia. With this book we enter a new phase of the historiographical debate. Hopefully, the next book about prostitution in late Imperial Russia is not too long in coming. When and if it appears, it will have learned a great deal from Hearne's equally provocative and productive approach" — Alexandra Oberländer, Russian Review

"By centring women's experience and the lived realities of those who encountered regulation, Hearne offers powerful evidence of the weakness of the tsarist system to police and control sex work, and thus illustrates agency where scholars had traditionally assumed passivity. This eye-opening book is sure to captivate readers and scholars interested in a variety of fields, including the history of gender and sexuality, imperial culture, labour and migration studies, and military history." — Colleen Lucey, Revolutionary Russia

"a fascinating read" — Christiane Brenner, H-Soz-Kult

"The cover of Siobhán Hearne's book, Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia, is striking...Policing Prostitution is an original work of scholarship that offers a new way of understanding the "oldest profession." — Katya Motyl, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122-6008, USA

"Hearne shows in illuminating detail how urban residents, local administrators, and even the police collaborated in undermining the authority of a system that was by definition doomed to fail." — Laura Engelstein, Yale University

From the Publisher