Gendered moral panics in the late Habsburg Monarchy

Abstract

In the late Habsburg Monarchy, gendered concerns about prostitution, venereal disease, and white slavery (today called sex trafficking) echoed moral panics elsewhere across Europe about perceived threats that these issues posed to the existing social order. The particular context of political and social transformations in Austria-Hungary informed these fin-de-siècle panics. They included the specific relations of the Dual Monarchy after the settlement of 1867, ongoing internal migration that an expanding railway network facilitated, growing transatlantic migration, an expanding public sphere, and interactions among multi-confessional, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual populations. Continuities in attitudes toward, and laws addressing, the treatment of prostitution and venereal disease in the postwar successor states was in part the result of continuity in attitudes toward class, gender, and sexuality that had set prostitutes apart as Other in Austria-Hungary.