Article ID: CBB001201829

The Enemy Within: Regulating Prostitution and Controlling Venereal Disease in Cisleithanian Austria during the Great War (2013)

unapi

During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them buxom prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. Flashers also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made immoral, but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of crimes against nature. The most common morals problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.

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Authors & Contributors
Baron, Beth
Changboo Kang
Galieti, Maria Grazia
Petrungaro, Stefano
Galieti, Luigi
Scheer, Tamara
Concepts
Public health
Sexually transmitted diseases
Prostitution
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
World War I
Medicine and government
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Italy
France
Great Britain
Cairo (Egypt)
Ankara (Turkey)
Institutions
Red Cross Societies
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