An ‘Elusive’ Phenomenon: Feminism, Sexology and the Female Sex Drive in Germany at the Turn of the 20th Century

Abstract

This article examines how four feminists belonging to the broadly defined left-wing of the Wilhelmine-era German women's movement – Henriette Furth, Johanna Elberskirchen, Ruth Bre and Grete Meisel-Hess – engaged with scientific knowledge to redefine early 20th century understandings of the female sex drive. It contextualizes these authors' efforts to redefine the sex drive within contemporary sex reform politics and changing scientific understandings of human sexuality. The article illuminates how these four feminists used scientific knowledge to redefine the female sex drive as a simultaneously physiological and psychological phenomenon that was active, desiring and naturally in need of satisfaction. It further shows how these feminists mobilized this definition to assert women's ‘biological right’ to sexual emancipation and self-determination. However, this article also examines the conflicts this particular representation of the female sex drive provoked within the broader German women's movement, as well as the political restrictions it imposed upon feminist demands as a result of the biopolitical, racialist and heterosexist valences of fin-de-siecle sexual science. This article points up both feminists' contributions to scientific knowledge about sexuality and the difficulties of using science to advance feminist causes.