Unamuso of Tiflis: Urban Women in Pre-Revolutionary Georgia

This article examines the history of prostitution in Tiflis from its legalization in the Russian Empire to the implementation of the regulation and monitoring of prostitution in Georgia between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It presents previously unknown facts related to prostitution surrounding the government’s regulation and medicalization of the practice to public attitudes towards it. This article also highlights the intersection of gender, class, and political power in shaping attitudes toward prostitution and regulating sexuality. Furthermore, it argues that the concerns surrounding prostitution in Tiflis reflected wider anxieties about social change. Finally, the article illustrates how the history of prostitution in Tiflis reveals the selective nature of major historical and national narratives and the exclusion of marginalized groups from social and economic discourse in twentieth-century Georgia.