NIU history professor Nancy Wingfield is taking a new look at the world’s oldest profession.

Wingfield currently is in the Czech Republic conducting research on prostitution. She won a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship Program. She is studying late 19th- and early 20th-century Bohemian cultures and attitudes toward the practice.

Her interest in the subject began when she noticed prostitutes along a Czech highway during a previous research trip, Wingfield said.

Wingfield’s research examines a period of prostitution in eastern Europe, including a conflict between those who wanted to abolish prostitution and those who were in favor of regulating it.

“By the late 19th century, there was ongoing disagreement between the abolitionists and the regulationists, both of whom considered prostitution an evil, but who proposed conflicting solutions to the issue. The former wanted to do away with prostitution altogether, while the latter did not think eradication of prostitution was possible, and thus sought to control it,” Wingfield said.

Some people saw prostitution as a sign of degeneration in a person, while others believed it to be a sexual outlet for men who could not afford marriage, Wingfield said.

Eventually, she said, the Austrian Republic regulated prostitution, while Czechoslovakia abolished it.

Tracking century-old trails left behind by prostitutes has taken less-than-conventional means.

“Most prostitutes didn’t leave much in the way of material culture … because many of them were ‘secret,’ or unregistered, prostitutes,” Wingfield said. They left behindcourt documents and health books that detailed medical examinations, she said.

Wingfield plans to integrate her research into her classes, primarily a history course on gender and sexuality.