'Making a Living from Disgrace': The Politics of Prostitution, Female Poverty and Urban Gender Codes in Budapest and Vienna, 1860-1920

This chapter attempts to explore the way in which questions of gender and problems of poverty were interwoven in the period of the Dual Monarchy and even after the First World War. The history of the striking relationship between prostitution and the sexual order of bourgeois society, and between sexuality, prostitution, and the political treatment of female poverty, still awaits investigation. The social significance of the gender code as manifested repeatedly transcended the proper domains of poverty and prostitution politics. The gender politics behind the regulation of prostitution and the prosecution of covert prostitution were without doubt intended to transmit bourgeois moral codes to the non-bourgeois strata. Gender-specific discrepancies thoroughly determined not only the authorities perception of, but also their concrete administrative practice directed towards public manifestations of male and female poverty. The treatment of prostitution by the police and the authorities changed.