Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia

Description

From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Like other systems of regulation that were in place across the European continent and beyond, women who sold sex in the Russian Empire were required to register their details with the police, attend regular gynaecological examinations, and abide by a whole host of restrictions. The regulation system had a far-reaching impact upon the lives of various groups within urban society. Brothel madams bickered with urban residents over the visibility and audibility of prostitution in urban space. Poorly paid police agents forged advantageous financial relationships with registered prostitutes and their managers. As the Russian government became more concerned with combatting rising venereal diseases amongst the population in the early twentieth century, the bodies of certain groups of lower-class men also became objects of state intervention.

In this talk, Siobhán Hearne will present an overview of her book Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (OUP, 2021). This book approaches the history of state regulation from the perspectives of those working, using, or encountering the commercial sex industry on a regular basis. Examining the lives, challenges, and voices of registered prostitutes, their clients, their managers, the police, and the urban communities who shared their streets with state-licenced brothels allows us to examine the rich tapestry of urban life in the final decades of the Russian Empire.

Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2017 and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. Her work has appeared in the journals Kritika, Journal of Social History, Revolutionary Russia, Social History, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality.