This book encompasses the world of prostitution in late imperial Austria. It addresses female agency and experience, contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls and women, and police surveillance. Prostitution is analyzed at three different, but interlinked levels: subjectivity, society, and state. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, in contrast to much of the historical literature, it seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-siècle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in various kinds of commercial sex, illuminate their everyday experiences, and place these women, some of whom made the reasoned economic decision to sell their bodies, in a larger social context. It investigates their interactions with the police and other supervisory agents, as well as with other inhabitants of their world, rather than focusing on the state-constructed apparatus of surveillance from the top down. Many Austrian prostitutes came from artisan and working-class, often impoverished backgrounds. They faced a complicated array of constraints that shaped the environment in which they made decisions, including lack of other economic opportunities, of education, of legal equality with men as well as legal dependence on their fathers and husbands. Despite entrenched beliefs about female sexuality and the “fallen” woman, prostitution, clandestine or regulated, was a viable choice for some women of limited economic circumstances when faced with the alternatives: low-paid, often dangerous employment in a factory, in a night café or inn, or as a servant.