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Berlin Coquette. Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890-1933. Jill Suzanne Smith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP and Cornell University Library, 2013. Paper $27.95, hard $69.95.
Jill Suzanne Smith's book stakes out a large territory. Her study seeks to offer a cultural and intellectual history of prostitution in two eras of German history, while also offering readings of a wide range of cultural products. Covering feminist journals, drama, literature, film, cabaret, literature and more, the book offers sweeping and compelling arguments that Smith weaves into a important contribution to scholarship on German modernity and gender studies.
In Smith's work, the prostitute stands as a code through which a number of cultural debates find expression: women's sexuality, women's sexual desire, morality and labor. The book is split in half. The first two chapters provide insight into the discourse on prostitution in the late Wilhelmine era, and the final two shift to the Weimar Republic. During the Wilhelmine period, the relationship of the prostitute to Victorianera bourgeois debates on family, love, hygiene, sexually transmitted disease and women's increasing independence prevail. The range of debates in the Wilhelmine era proves most surprising, and Smith provides extensive cultural-historical background and a wealth of archival research to cast light on the prevailing attitudes toward prostitution. On one end of the spectrum, feminist movements were looking to rid society of prostitution as it became associated with the sexually transmitted diseases and a corresponding 'social disease' eating away at the bourgeois morality of German society. On the other end of the spectrum, competing movements went so far as to demand socially acceptable means of expression for female desire, extending Nietzschean individualism to "championing gender-blind individual [sexual] self-fulfillment" (88).
It is striking how often the debates were led by engaged civic activists who were bourgeois women, whether this came in the form of the many feminist organizations that either sought to support and protect prostitutes in their work, on one hand, or sought to criminalize prostitution and reform the "fallen women," on the other. Even some of the most famous "memoirs" by prostitutes were, in fact,...