Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte und Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Web)
Zeit: 09.06.2016, 16 Uhr
Ort: Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte, Seminarraum, Universitätscampus, Hof 3, 1090 Wien

• Begrüßung: Philipp Ther (IOG); Vorstellung und Diskussionsleitung: Tamara Scheer (LBIHS)

Venereal disease, widespread among Austro-Hungarian troops played an important role in military intervention in civilian life, especially prostitution, during the Great War. The search for clandestine prostitutes—the female “Other”— who constituted a majority of women who engaged in remunerative sex, and whom the military considered primarily responsible for the spread of VD—and the more stringent regulation of the far smaller number of registered prostitutes kept police busy during wartime. It was not obvious, however, precisely who was a prostitute, owing to the breakdown in civilian society and the resultant increase in the numbers of women who, because of economic hardship, occasionally—or regularly—exchanged sex for goods or money. The wartime panic over prostitution reflected military-state inability to stem the spread of prostitution, and, thus, venereal disease, was an important indicator of societal and state breakdown in Austria under the exigencies of total war.
Professor Wingfield has published widely on gender, memory, and nationalism. She has finished a manuscript on prostitution in late imperial Austria.