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Corporate Social Responsibility. Sales Contacts. Ordering from Brill. Editorial Contacts. Offices Worlwide. Course Adoption. Contact Form. Established in as a minor commercial and administrative Spanish settlement, the city of Buenos Aires began to experience a certain amount of economic and political development in the eighteenth century.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, it became the centre for the demand for autonomy from Spain, which was finally obtained in Its population grew from 14, in to 25, in , and to 40, by the end of the century. In , after decades of political instability, the city was federalized, thereby concentrating the political power of the Argentine Republic. The study of prostitution in Buenos Aires has attracted the attention of researchers from various fields such as social history and cultural and literary studies, and more recently urban history and the social sciences, especially anthropology.
Although the topic has been addressed in its symbolic dimension, much less attention has been devoted to the social organization of the sex trade, its changes, the social profiles of prostitutes, and their relationships with other types of workers and social groups. Similarly, the importance granted to the period of the municipal regulation of prostitution — and to stories about the trafficking of European women stands in stark contrast to the scarcity of studies on the long period since , especially as regards issues aside from public policies implemented to fight venereal diseases.
In the last decade, the unionization of prostitutes and the reappearance of narratives about trafficked women in public debates have captured the interest of social scientists. The centrality of prostitution in popular culture and public debates about the nation in Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century were major factors that may explain the profusion of historical research about the period of municipal regulation.
