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Stauter-Halsted Keely , The Devil's Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 2015), pp.ￂ 380, $39.95, cloth, ISBN:ￂ 10987654321.
Book Review
There are a number of reasons why this book is important. Firstly, it offers what is largely missing from the current literature on eugenics, public health and social medicine in East-Central Europe: the social and medical management and, ultimately, the control of the female body and female sexuality. Certainly, Nancy M. Wingfield, Maria Bucur, Zsuzsa Bokor and Magda Gawin, among others, have dealt with this topic before, and in other national contexts. However, what Keely Stauter-Halsted offers in The Devil's Chain is a synthesis, not only of debates on prostitution in the Polish lands, but of broader debates on gender, identity and nationalism in East-Central Europe, before and during World Warￂ I.
The book is predicated on the argument that, from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of World War I, the social phenomenon of prostitution in partitioned Poland underwent a convoluted process of explanation and analysis, from its depiction as repugnant and outside the body of the nation to a more inclusive interpretation, allowing for moral redemption, social integration and ethnic...