Introduction: Prostitution in twentieth-century Europe

Despite the proliferation of diverse historical research on commercial sex in recent years and the recognition of the continued political salience of the topic, prostitution has remained on the margins of the historiography of Europe. This special issue seeks to shift prostitution into the very centre of European history. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this issue encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. Historiography on prostitution in Europe has predominantly focused on state-regulated prostitution,which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The articles in this issue shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. In this introduction, the editors sketch out key trends in state approaches to commercial sex in twentieth century Europe, focusing specifically on the law, policing practices and the gendered politics of labour.