The Enemy Within

Regulating Prostitution and Controlling Venereal Disease in Cisleithanian Austria during the Great War

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9646014
AutoresNancy M Wingfield (Northern Illinois University, autor correspondente)
Ano2013
Volume46
Fascículo3
Páginas568-598
Data de publicação2013-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s000893891300099x
OpenAlexW1965237662
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas8
Referências citadas30

During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.” The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution

Ancient history · Criminology · Emperor · Infantry · Political science · Sociology · Suspect · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law