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Nina Kushner, Keely Stauter-Halsted. The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland., The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 5, December 2016, Pages 1771–1772, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1771
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It is rare to find a monograph that is highly detailed, rigorous in its argumentation, and so well written that it is hard to put down. Such is the case with Keely Stauter-Halsted’s The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland. Focusing on the period from the late 1880s, when Poland existed as a partitioned state, to the establishment of a republic following World War I, Stauter-Halsted meticulously traces public and medical discourses on female prostitution, state and private efforts to control it, and the structure and practice of sex work. This research alone would make for a significant study, particularly as Stauter-Halsted deftly shows how these elements recursively shaped each other, thereby putting The Devil’s Chain at the cutting edge of prostitution studies. Stauter-Halsted, however, also uses prostitution as “a prism through which to assess Poland’s difficult transition to modernity in the context of its struggling movement for political independence” (2). In doing so, the book—based on a wide range of previously unexplored sources from media, to police records, to medical papers—models what can be gained by integrating the history of sexuality into other forms of historical inquiry.
