‘White slave’ trafficking in turn-of-the-century Bukovina and Galicia: the experience of imperial Austria’s eastern provinces

Abstract

Few forms of socially deviant behavior received so much attention in the sexually saturated Austrian fin de siecle as Madchenhandel or trafficking in girls. Trafficking in women and girls, also known as “white-slave trafficking,” had also existed in preindustrial Cisleithania, but the discourse from the turn of the century focused above all on Bukovina and Galicia, two impoverished provinces in the eastern reaches of the Monarchy with large Jewish populations. This discussion reflected concerns about the need for social control in an increasingly anonymous, modernizing, urbanizing, and capitalist society. Certainly, Madchenhandel was in many ways a modern crime, a crime associated particularly with Jews, who were popularly believed to supply white, unwilling girls to serve as prostitutes in brothels worldwide. Modernizing communication and transportation networks, together with the anonymity of the growing metropolises in Habsburg Central Europe not only permitted largescale immigration and women to travel alone as never before, but also facilitated trafficking in women. Indeed, commercial sex was a flourishing enterprise in the expanding urban centers of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy where prostitution was tolerated and regulated by the police rather than the courts. Bukovinian and Galician newspapers regularly advertised the Austro-Americana, Cunard, and Hamburg-Amerika lines’ “newest, most comfortable, fastest, and least expensive” steamers from the port cities of Central Europe to New York, and elsewhere in North America, as well as to Buenos Aires, Africa, and East Asia.