Nancy Wingfield

Fulbright-Hays award winner traces
prostitution in the ‘Bohemian Lands’

by Tom Parisi

Professor Nancy Wingfield is spending the academic year investigating a little-studied aspect of Bohemian culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — prostitution.

Wingfield, a faculty member in NIU’s Department of History, won nine months of support for the project through the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program. The federal program provides funding to select faculty members working to improve their area studies and language skills.

Wingfield’s project examines arguments for and against the regulation or abolition of prostitution. The scope of the research extends through the fin-de-siecle, or the period from about 1890 through 1918, in the Bohemian Lands, a region encompassing most of the present-day Czech Republic.

“The history of prostitution in Modern Western Europe is well documented, but in Eastern Europe, the subject has been less studied and very little has been published in English,” Wingfield explained in a recent e-mail from Prague. The capital of the Czech Republic is serving as her home base for the research.

“I’m mapping the cities, military garrisons, pubs and dance halls throughout the Bohemian Lands where prostitutes lived and worked,” she said. “I’m trying to identify who prostitutes were in terms of age, ethnicity, language and class.

“I’m also particularly interested in the contemporary discourse on prostitution,” Wingfield added. “It was a topic of enormous interest both in the Habsburg Monarchy and elsewhere, including the United States, at this time. A wide variety of disparate groups were involved in the conversation.”

The study of prostitution is part of the study of everyday life, incorporating elements of cultural, social and gender history. “Issues of slavery and the illegal movement of women and children still resonate today in amazingly similar ways,” Wingfield said. “It fascinates me that we use some of the same terms in discussion of prostitution that were used a century ago.”

Wingfield had to demonstrate her language proficiency in both Czech and German in order to qualify for the Fulbright-Hays grant. She has been conducting her research abroad since June, poring over materials in archives and libraries in Prague and Vienna.

Archival sources of information vary widely. Police regulation of commercial sex was based on a variety of laws governing public behavior. Criminalization of commercial sex, however, focused almost entirely on female prostitutes. The notorious 1906 trial of a female brothel keeper in Vienna, who allegedly had the support of the Viennese morals police, re-ignited wide public interest in prostitution in the Habsburg Monarchy.

“The court proceedings, published in newspapers throughout the Monarchy, were sensational,” Wingfield said. “Academics, doctors, police, politicians and representatives of women’s organizations participated in the ensuing debate.”

Later this month, Wingfield will speak on her research to students visiting Prague from the University of Dundee, Scotland. She also has been asked to speak on the subject at a gender studies program in Poland.

Her goal is a book-length manuscript, though she intends to incorporate the research material into the NIU courses she teaches in family history, western civilization and gender and sexuality in history.

1-12-04