Stauter-Halsted, Keely The Devil's Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 368 Gaspirinski, but we never learn if Akcura and Agaoglu were ‘jadids’ too, or whether the ‘Teacher Wars’ impacted them. The chapter therefore feels like a digression. Nevertheless, I appreciate Meyer’s bold and unusual approach to jadidism: he focuses exclusively on economic — rather than ideological — rivalries between educational reformers. (Stephane Dudoignon has pursued a similar line of argument, so some reference to his work would have been welcome in this chapter.) When Akcura and Agaoglu return to centre-stage in the final two chapters and epilogue, Meyer’s overarching vision comes back into focus. We watch these figures pivot to ride the wave of pan-Turkism, only to be left behind as the political tide turns against them. The emergence of a new kind of ‘identity politics’ in Atatürk’s Turkey is covered lucidly and concisely here. Among the highlights is Meyer’s Bierceian interpretation of the republic’s 1930s slogan, ‘How happy to call oneself a Turk!’: ‘Just call yourself Turkish, the government seemed to be saying, and we will give you no additional reasons to be unhappy’ (p. 181). ‘Turkism’ had thus been expanded to include even non-Turks, but the bounded nation-state could no longer embrace those old, ‘trans-Imperial’ literati whose vision of home had included Russian territory. Department of Asian Studies Jeff Eden Cornell University Stauter-Halsted, Keely. The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2015. x + 379 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. In May 1905, a crowd of angry workers stormed Warsaw’s brothel district, attacking sites of tolerated prostitution, smashing windows, overturning wagons and throwing furniture from second-floor balconies. Owners and operators of the city’s brothels fled in panic, later reopening their businesses far from the scene of violence and thus altering the sexual geography of the city. The furore became known as the ‘Alfonse pogrom’, named after a slang term for pimp. Why was it that, in a revolutionary year when the main focus of popular ire was the oppressive nature of autocratic rule, that these rioters had fixated on attacking the city’s pimps? In The Devil’s Chain, Keely Stauter-Halsted sets out to answer this question, and in doing so crafts a rich and lucid study of the social, political and cultural meanings of prostitution in partitioned Poland. In tendetailedchapters,TheDevil’sChainexaminesthewaysinwhichprostitution was framed as a negative product of modernity, positioned at the intersection of destabilizing social processes such as industrialization, urbanization and mass emigration. Stauter-Halsted mobilizes multiple methodological approaches to REVIEWS 369 interrogate her subject, from the social history of peasant women’s migration to the city, to the history of medicine as manifested in efforts to eradicate syphilis and venereal disease, and the cultural and political history of antiprostitution efforts. Ultimately, the book makes a convincing case for the centrality of the ‘prostitution problem’ to nationalizing elites’ concerns about Poland’s status between three empires, and their efforts to build a new Polish nation after 1918. For if, as many argued, prostitution held up a mirror to the nation, what did it mean to have prostitution without nationhood, or during the birth pangs of a new republic? These questions preoccupied the doctors, lawyers, feminists and social activists peopling The Devil’s Chain, and StauterHalsted skilfully disentangles their imbrication with broader debates about medicine, feminism, political reform and revolution. Thematically, The Devil’s Chain can be divided into three sections, covering the social causes and manifestations of prostitution, the entanglement of prostitution and migration, and the political mobilization of prostitution by national activists. The first three chapters trace the contribution of the seismic changes that accompanied the industrialization of Poland under German, Austrian and Russian empires to the increasing movement of peasant women to cities. This movement made prostitution more visible in urban regions, although as Stauter-Halsted emphasizes, urbanization did not itself cause prostitution, which also had roots in the villages and garrison towns of Poland (p. 60). Nonetheless, observers’ insistence on stitching together movement to the city and the ‘descent’ into prostitution framed the forms of knowledge about commercial sex that were...