Women on the Move: Prostitution on Syros and Corfu in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Governments across Europe began to implement systems of state-regulated female prostitution during the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1830s, authorities in British-protected Corfu and Greek Syros marshaled the bureaucracy of the modern state to protect public health—both biologically and morally—from the so-called public woman. Women working as prostitutes on both islands were registered with local authorities, inspected regularly, and hospitalized at the discretion of police and health inspectors. Despite moral and legal prescriptions, prostitution in the Greek world was a highly permeable trade. These women, who came from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, not only moved into and out of prostitution but also traversed the changing political boundaries of the eastern Mediterranean, living and working among its various port cities. Indeed they were a central component of a transforming yet still integrated region, demonstrating the persistence of a connected Mediterranean world from the early modern into the modern period.