Preliminary Programme

The American Soldier (TAS) surveys were collected throughout World War II among American GIs. Their historical importance can hardly be underestimated. Some argued that the modern survey method has been created here. Paul Lazarsfeld called it “the first systematic analysis of life”. This enthusiasm was not shared by everyone: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. lamented that the project illustrated sociology’s tendency to “whore after the natural sciences”. This disciplinary divide between mainstream sociological optimism and historiographical scepticism about the potential of quantitative surveys survives until today.

This contribution attempts to illustrate how fruitful these American Soldier surveys can be for historical research about World War II. The analysis focuses on the myths about African American sexual proclivities and confronts them with actual sexual practices and opportunities, and their connection to STIs. We connect these elements to potential differences in prostitution demand due to racist policies and culture.

We use an inventory of popular racial clichés about racial differences in sexual preferences and behaviour during the war period, and test them with the help of two surveys in India and Italy (July 1944 and August 1945 respectively). More in particular we investigate potential differences in sexually transmitted infections, and to which extent they are attributable to knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, sexual practices, and different social networks due to racial segregation. The combination of survey data collected during World War II and contemporary analytical techniques (such as zero-inflated regression approaches) provides an original replication of Samuel Stouffer’s original analysis of the surveys, as discussed in The American Soldier (1949). (Show less)

This presentation seeks to unveil the international migration patterns of sex workers in relation to entertainment events such as world fairs in the late 19th-century. Building on the historiography of female labour migration, this contribution investigates how sex workers navigated the modern economy and the new opportunities that came with it. By combining examples from various places, this paper analyzes and compares the entrepreneurial strategies of women through the lens of migration. (Show less)

Recent research on prostitution in Antwerp, based on an analysis of alien files of 1880, suggests that there was a high turnover of women working in brothels, who moved within an international circuit of urban nodes of prostitution (Greefs & Winter 2020). This paper analyses the changes over time for the late nineteenth century and focuses on the trajectories of the sex workers, adding a diachronic perspective and an focus on the agency of sex workers to the research on policies and numbers (cf Rodriguez Garcia, Van Nederveen Meerkerk & Heerma de Vos 2017). It discusses the trajectories into and out of sex work and specifically prostitution, distinguishing between different levels of licit and illicit industry; the influx and departure of sex workers in the city and their mobilities within the city. The paper is based on a database compiled from amongst others judicial case files and police documents, which provides information about hundreds of individuals working in sex work in the city for selected periods in the second half of the nineteenth century (Vanhees 2020). It analyses mobility patterns and highlights selected individual trajectories including how sex workers navigated the organizational migration infrastructure (cf Tramontana forthcoming 2022; Lesger, Lucassen and Schrover 2002) of international prostitution. (Show less)