Awards
- Winner of Shortlisted, RHS Gladstone Book Prize, Royal Historical Society Winner, 2023 BASEES Womens Forum Book Prize.
- Winner of Shortlisted, RHS Gladstone Book Prize, Royal Historical Society.
Overview
Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. This study examines how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted amid rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization around the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines the lives and challenges of different groups who engaged with the world of prostitution, including women who sold sex, the men who paid for it, mediators, the police, and wider urban communities. Drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Policing Prostitution illustrates how prostitution was an acknowledged, contested, and ever-present component of lower-class urban society in the late imperial period. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.
Full Product Details
Author: Siobhán Hearne (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Durham University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.50cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 24.00cm
Weight: 0.518kg
ISBN: 9780198837916
ISBN 10: 0198837917
Pages: 234
Publication Date: 07 April 2021
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
a fascinating read * Christiane Brenner, H-Soz-Kult *
Author Information
Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2017, and has since completed postdoctoral research in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Her research has appeared in the journals Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Social History, Revolutionary Russia and The Journal of Social History(forthcoming).
