‘White slave’ trafficking in turn-of-the-century Bukovina and Galicia: the experience of imperial Austria’s eastern provinces

Історичні науки UDC: 326-055.2(477.8)“18/19” ‘WHITE SLAVE’ TRAFFICKING IN Nancy M. WINGFIELD Northern Illinois University, USA TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY BUKOVINA AND GALICIA: THE EXPERIENCE OF IMPERIAL AUSTRIA’S EASTERN PROVINCES Ключові слова: «біле рабство», Буковина, Галичина, Австрійська імперія, проституція. Вінгфілд Н. М. “Біле рабство” або торгівля жінками в кінці ХІХ – на початку ХХ ст. на Буковині та в Галичині: досвід східних провінцій Австрійської імперії В статті розглянуто проблему торгівлі жінками або «Білого рабства», яке існувало у Цислейтанії в кінці ХІХ – на початку ХХ ст. На Буковині та в Галичині це явище традиційно пов’язували з євреями. Уважніше вивчення питання показує погані умови проживання молодих жінок та їх сімей, що штовхало їх на участь в таких злочинах. Значна увага зосереджена на спробах уряду подолати проблему «білого рабства», а також на створенні асоціацій, що боролись проти проституції. Загалом у дослідженні порушено питання добровільності та примусу щодо процесу торгівлі жінками з Буковини і Галичини. Відзначено, що перша світова війна спричинила значне зменшення масштабів «білого рабства». Підкреслено значення Міжнародної конвенції про боротьбу з торгівлею жінками та дітьми (1921 р.), що була підписана 28 країнами за сприяння Ліги Націй. Few forms of socially deviant behavior received so much attention in the sexually saturated Austrian fin de siècle as Mädchenhandel or trafficking in girls. Trafficking in women and girls, also known as “white-slave trafficking,” had also existed in preindustrial Cisleithania, but the discourse from the turn of the century focused above all on Bukovina and Galicia, two impoverished provinces in the eastern reaches of the Monarchy with large Jewish populations.1 This discussion reflected concerns about the need for social control in an increasingly anonymous, modernizing, urbanizing, and capitalist society. 2 Certainly, Mädchenhandel was in many ways a modern crime, a crime associated particularly with Jews, who were popularly believed to supply white, unwilling girls to serve as prostitutes in brothels worldwide. Modernizing communication and transportation networks, together with the anonymity of the growing metropolises in Habsburg Central Europe not only permitted largescale immigration and women to travel alone as never before, but also facilitated trafficking in women. Indeed, commercial sex was a flourishing enterprise in the expanding urban centers of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy where prostitution was tolerated and regulated by the police rather than the courts. Bukovinian and Galician newspapers regularly advertised the Austro-Americana, Cunard, and HamburgAmerika lines’ “newest, most comfortable, fastest, and least expensive” steamers from the port cities of Central Europe to New York, and elsewhere in North America, as well as to Buenos Aires, Africa, and East Asia.3 After the passage of 1 January 1900 law eliminating the periodical-press stamp allowed for the proliferation of inexpensive and often illustrated newspapers among an increasingly literate audience, popular discussion of “white slavery” in late imperial Cisleithania expanded. Muckraking sensationalist newspapers of the imperial and provincial capitals addressed the topic, together with salacious details on a variety of other moral crimes, including bigamy, homosexuality, Lustmord (sexual murder), prostitution, and suicide. Journals intended for women also focused on trafficking. These articles both served a didactic function (warning them of possible danger), and permitted women who were not involved in АПСНІМ. – 2014. – № 4 (4) 14 Vingfield N. М. “White slave” trafficking in turn-of-the century Bukovina and Galicia … trafficking to follow with prurient interest, feigned or real horror, the fates of their unfortunate sisters.4 These articles often discussed Bukovina and Galicia, which were a regular source of supply for stories about women and young girls who had fallen victim to traffickers. Reflecting a variety of European-wide developments, among them eugenics, criminology, and racial nationnalism, the rhetoric facilitated the language of difference. This debate included tropes such as the corruption of “innocent girls,” especially by Eastern European Jewish “Others.” These men– and women–were alleged to have kidnapped and even “enslaved” girls and taken them to racially different faraway places to ply the sex trade. A closer examination of the issue, however, reveals a more complicated picture that involved young women, some illiterate, attracted by the anticipated wealth of foreign liberators, hastily marrying these men and going abroad with them in the hope of a better life, often with the full support of their often poverty-stricken families. 5 Their hopes were perhaps encouraged by the occasional glowing letter to the newspaper from emigrants or newspaper articles, such as the one in 1905 about Rosa Pastor, a young Russian-Jewish emigrant who had worked in a cigarette factory for a decade in Cleveland, Ohio before her successful marriage to an American multi-millionaire.6 In order to supply the Monarchy’s tolerated bordellos with fresh supplies of sexual talent, pimps and other panderers, many of them Christian according to police records, regularly arranged for the transport of prostitutes to bordellos throughout Austria-Hungary and neighboring Germany. There was sometimes slippage between accusations of Mädchenhändel and Kuppelei (pandering). Criminal authorities regularly designated the activities of those accused–often not Jewish–of moving women within the Monarchy and to nearby Germany, even Italy, as “pandering,” rather than trafficking. It was, however, the “white slavers – both male and female, and popularly identified as Jewish – and those girls and women they trafficked abroad, often, but not always, poor Jews from Bukovina and Galicia, who aroused the greatest public indignation. The European Response to Trafficking at the Fin de Siècle Although the worldwide traffic in women had become a concern among European reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century, the international trade in European women and girls had a long history. In his 1904 exposé, Der Mädchenhandel und seine Bekämpfung, the police physician Joseph Schrank, who became the president of the Austrian League to Combat Traffic АПСНІМ. – 2014. – № 4 (4) in Women (Österreichischen Liga zur Bekämpfung des Mädchenhandels, founded 1902), described a lively trade in women and girls in the Kingdom of Hungary while under Ottoman Turkish domination that dated back several centuries. Even after the Habsburg conquest of Hungary, the Turks still had agents buy “pretty Christian girls” to send to their sultan and other important figures. It was only “later,” according to Schrank, that Armenian and Jewish agents became involved in this trade.7 By the late nineteenth century Hungarian Jews were participating in the transportation of w (...truncated)