Sexual Reform Research Articles

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895): A 200-Year Jubilee with Pitfalls

For the opponents of the sexual reform movement, he was the father of all evil; for the proponents of the decriminalization of same-sex desire, he paved the way for objective research. With the term “Urning”, he gave homosexuals an anthropological dignity. The Hanoverian lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) was notorious during his lifetime and at times esteemed after his death, but it was not until the 1990s that he became the secret hero of sexual emancipation and sexual history/historiography. Streets and squares were named after him, but his life’s work was also often instrumentalized.

Bishops, Brothels and Byron: Hypocrisy and the 1844 Brothel Suppression Bill

The House of Lords debate over the 1844 Brothel Suppression Bill was derailed by an accusation of hypocrisy. An opponent of the measure, Earl Fitzhardinge, shifted attention from legal reform to the notorious brothels operating on Church of England property, and argued that the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey should be prosecuted were the bill to become law. In addition to offering an interesting case study of clerical hypocrisy in practice, the story of the failed 1844 Bill provides useful context for better-known sexual reform projects of the late nineteenth century. This article focuses on three major themes that animated the events of 1844: the power of distraction and delay; the role of elite male perspectives; and the complicated but critical role of Christianity in sexual reform.

Sexual Knowledge and Expertise in Europe's East: Transnational Exchanges

East Central Europe played a crucial role in shaping the development of sexual science from the 1870s onwards. The life-histories of influential and well-known figures such as Sigmund Freud (born in Freiberg/Příbor), Magnus Hirschfeld (born in Kolberg/Kolobrzeg) and Karl Maria Kertbeny (born in Vienna, based in Budapest) reveal the imperial interconnectedness of East Central Europe with what would become Western Europe. By 1932, when the World League for Sexual Reform held its congress in Brno (following previous meetings in Berlin, London, Vienna, and Copenhagen), the society had established branches across the region, including Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. In that same year, Poland decriminalised homosexual acts. Yet, East Central Europe is often neglected in the history of sexology and little is known about how sexual science in these regions shaped, and was shaped by, global networks of knowledge production. Indeed, despite recent attempts to demonstrate the ways in which sexual science was a truly global enterprise, East Central Europe remains to be fully incorporated into our mapping of the global networks of sexological dialogue and exchange.1 This is especially true of scholarship on the period after the Second World War. Historians have tended to misconstrue the transnational nature of sexual science in East Central Europe both before and after 1945. First, the contribution of East Central Europeans to European cultures of scientific exchanges has been obscured by the tendency of much historical writing to focus on a small number of key pioneers (Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis). Second, it is assumed that East Central European sexual science was largely cut off from international networks of knowledge exchange after the Second World War following the onset of the Cold War.2 Third, there are preconceived notions that communist authoritarian governments, having curtailed political freedoms and economic entrepreneurialism, must have also taken a repressive stance against sexual expression.3 Fourth, the dominance of 1989 as the fundamental caesura has encouraged a periodisation that fails to draw enough attention to the shifts in transnational patterns of knowledge exchange around sexual politics during the period 1945 to 1989 and fails to identify key continuities that link the sexual politics of the contemporary world with those of the communist period. None of these assumptions can withstand scrutiny, as the articles in this forum reveal. Building on a recent boost in scholarly interest in the sexual histories of the region,4 we present a collection of papers that each detail the transnational connections of local sexual experts in creating sexual knowledge both before and during state socialism.5

Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference.

This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the 'scientific spirit' in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered under its banner) look serious, legitimate and, most importantly, scientific. The conference was also an attempt by organizer Norman Haire to exert control over the strategy of sexology, an enterprise that put him at odds with other prominent sexologists of the time. Crucially, Haire understood sexology as inherently intellectually interdisciplinary, but was strategically convinced that the only sound rubric through which to promote and gain acceptance for the movement was through medical science. This central debate, about how best to define the contested concept of sexology, continues among historians today. By examining how the 1929 conference organizers wrestled to define their sex-reforming remit and how they curated the conference to that end, this paper will offer a window onto the mechanisms via which adherents of intellectual communities contend with heterogeneity, how we judge forms of knowledge and, ultimately, what constitutes science.

The Economic Impact of Banning Billionaires: An Analysis of Wealth Accumulation and Market Dynamics

This article examines the issue of banning billionaires and provides a comprehensive analysis of potential policy implications. First, the article discusses the possible negative impact of banning billionaires on innovation and the spirit of adventure, highlighting their important role in funding support, venture capital and high-risk projects. Second, the article analyzes the potential adverse effects of banning billionaires on charitable giving and philanthropy, as well as the possible impacts on economic growth and job opportunities. Finally, the article points out that the prohibition of billionaires is not the same as eliminating the upper class of society, stressing that solving social inequality requires more comprehensive policies and systems Sex reform.

Marxism and Homosexual Liberation

Abstract The decriminalisation of homosexuality was a measure originally adopted by the bourgeois revolutions, which was abandoned by the bourgeois parties as the rise of the labour movement led the bourgeoisie to seek a compromise with landlords, clergy and monarchy in different countries. The demand to decriminalise homosexuality was therefore taken over by the Marxist workers’ parties, such as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War and the Bolshevik Party in Russia after the Revolution of October 1917. This article outlines the cooperation between the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee led by Magnus Hirschfeld and Social Democracy to decriminalise homosexuality by removing Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code before the First World War. It also describes the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia under Lenin, with the adoption of the first Soviet Penal Code in June 1922, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s relations with prominent figures of the early Soviet government such as N.A. Semashko, the first People’s Commissar of Public Health, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education. Those ties ceased with the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933, which resulted in the destruction of the institutions created by Hirschfeld, such as the Institute for Sexual Science and the World League for Sexual Reform, while in the Soviet Union itself Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in March 1934, shortly before Hirschfeld’s death, linking homosexuality and fascism.

In defence of William Chidley

William James Chidley (1860–1916), a ground-breaking Australian sex reformer, has been the subject of a considerable literature. When he came to public attention via his public lectures on a ‘kinder’ mode of sexual intercourse, and police attempts to silence him failed, the New South Wales (NSW) authorities brought about a series of confinements to mental asylums, supposedly to protect the public from Chidley’s obscenities. He died at Callan Park asylum in December 1916. But an attempt was made to discredit Chidley even in death, with a medical officer claiming that the post-mortem showed that he had syphilis. This article examines previously undiscovered material on Chidley’s medical examination from his first admission to the Callan Park asylum in August 1912 which strongly suggests that Chidley did not have syphilis then and could not have contracted it later. The Chidley affair signalled the development of a new, but short-lived, ‘political’ phenomenon in NSW: the willing intervention of asylums to protect the community from ideas which governments considered harmful, where the existing laws had little purchase. Continuing public discontent with asylum policies was to be a major factor in the calling of a Royal Commission into lunacy in 1923.

La liberación de las oprimidas. El neomalthusianismo y la maternidad consciente en el anarquismo femenino

During the 19th century, Malthus’s theory was supported by various sectors of Spanish society, such as the Church and the Bourgeoisie, because this was how they justified the social inequalities of the proletariat. However, starting in the 20th century, Spanish anarchists tried to remedy the population problem through a new Malthusianism that offered other preventive remedies to the working class, such as conscious motherhood classes. Added to the need to reduce the number of births was interest in quality of life. In this study, the theories of Birth Control and Neo-Malthusianism are examined in order to verify the influence they exerted on Spanish anarchism through the historical-educational method. Likewise, a historical review is made by the acratic press of the first decades of the 20th century to publicize the awareness campaigns that were directed towards women in order to achieve women’s liberation through the Belly strike and eugenic discourse, and the slogans of a conscious motherhood are analyzed, which were published, especially, in the journal Free Women. Anarchist women wrote 10 articles out of a total of 305 texts related to conscious motherhood and health problems, knowledge that was very necessary at the time to prevent diseases and reduce infant mortality, but they were not as successful as a sexual reform project.

Protecting ‘injured female innocence’ or furthering ‘the rights of women?’ The sexual Slander of Women in New York and Victoria (1808–1887)

ABSTRACT By the end of the nineteenth century, reforms across the British common law world—often labelled ‘The Slander of Women Acts’—enabled women to sue more easily for sexual slander by removing the burden of proving economic loss, known as ‘special damage’. Sexual slander was a pressing and highly gendered issue. Women brought actions in the thousands seeking to vindicate their reputations when subject to slurs of prostitution, unchastity, fornication, or adultery. These cases spurred transnational debates about the status of white women in the transpacific New World and English law's failure to incorporate their interests and experiences. This article compares and connects reform efforts in New York with those in Victoria. It argues that whereas New York cases and legislators emphasised the need to ‘protect innocent females’ and employed racially coded language linking sexual morality with whiteness, Victorian judges and politicians framed sexual slander reform as an issue of women's rights.

Distributing condoms on the factory floor: Communists and sexual health in the Netherlands

Dutch communists were remarkably progressive in their views on (heterosexual) sex, sex education, contraception and family planning. Many were active members of the Nederlandse Vereniging van Sexuele Hervorming ('Dutch League for Sexual Reform' or NVSH), and were passionate advocates of sexual health, and promoted the use of contraceptives and the legalisation of abortion. This progressive stance on sexuality and contraception was not led by the Dutch Communist Party (CPN). In fact, from the 1940s until the late 1960s, topics related to birth control, sex education and family planning had been given a wide berth in the CPN and its organisations. The CPN seemingly followed the example set by the Soviet Union, where, after a very brief moment of sexual liberation in the early post-revolution years, conservative views about sexuality, the family and household organisation had prevailed. Considering the Dutch party's refusal to address sex education and family planning, it is quite remarkable that so many of its members were such passionate advocates of sexual health. Based on a series of interviews with twenty-five cradle communists, communist archives, and a wide range of other sources, this article explores communists' stance on sexual health, and discusses their roles in the NVSH and the abortion rights movement during the Cold War. It argues that in regard to sexuality and sex education, the ideas of Dutch communists were much more in line with utopian socialist traditions that predated the Russian revolution as well as anarchist traditions carried through to communists, than with the Soviet ideology.

Disability as Metaphor and Lived Experience in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall

Disability as Metaphor and Lived Experience in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall Jason S. Farr (bio) Disability studies scholars often champion the investigation of the lived experiences of disability over metaphor. In Disability Theory, for instance, Tobin Siebers historicizes disabled bodies in part because metaphor often converts disability into something else.1 Given the exclusionary nature of ableist metaphors, Siebers adopts this approach for good reason. I would argue, however, that we are at a point now in eighteenth-century literary disability studies in which we can do both; that is, we can uncover lived experiences of disability in the eighteenth century and we can take metaphor seriously. By juxtaposing literary representations of ableist metaphor with dynamic, three-dimensional portrayals of disability, we may conceptualize how disability was often imagined as deprivation but also how it could serve personally and socially transformative ends in narrative. To show how such a method works, I examine Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762): two novels that portray physical disability in starkly different terms. Pamela conceives of deformity as a plot device while Millenium Hall reveals how socially constructed bodily standards subjugate disabled people.2 Despite their differences, these novels depict disability and queerness as transformative narrative devices for imagining social and sexual reform. [End Page 309] In Pamela, Richardson shores up the able-bodied, heterosexual romance between Pamela and Mr. B. through Mrs. Jewkes, who is portrayed as monstrous in her embodiment and queer desire. In its plot development, Pamela adheres to the tenets of what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder call "narrative prosthesis," or a transhistorical representational model in which disability serves as a "crutch" for generating plot conflict and resolution.3 According to the tenets of narrative prosthesis, "the materiality of metaphor" is the tendency of narrative to make abstract concepts visible in the disabled body, which are first uncovered and then explained and justified. As a result, disability is brought from the margins to the heart of the narrative before it is finally rehabilitated, fixed, or eradicated.4 In Pamela, Mrs. Jewkes's disability and queerness work together as narrative prostheses to ground Richardson's conceptions of libertinism, female virtue, and sentiment. For example, upon first meeting Mrs. Jewkes, Pamela describes her in these terms: "She is a broad, squat, pursy, fat Thing, quite ugly. … She has a huge Hand, and an Arm as thick as my waist. … Her nose is flat and crooked, and her Brows grow over her Eyes; a dead, spiteful, grey, goggling Eye, to be sure, she has. And her Face is flat and broad."5 Mrs. Jewkes is also said "to waddle" when she walks, indicating a mobility impairment that would appear to supplement her monstrous body and intentions (PA, 114). Pamela's portrayal of Mrs. Jewkes reveals physiognomic thought, in which an unconventional appearance mirrors inward depravity. Pamela's caricature of Mrs. Jewkes's facial features—the sustained attention to her "flat and crooked" nose and eyebrows—is supposed to reveal her inner wickedness (114). Pamela construes Mrs. Jewkes's face as a metaphorical repository of uncouthness that threatens young women's virtue. Mrs. Jewkes's character also symbolizes the libertine sexuality that Richardson hopes to expunge from British society. Mrs. Jewkes pursues Pamela aggressively, just as Mr. B. does. In these characters' alignment, Mrs. Jewkes's deformity becomes a metaphor for Mr. B.'s sexual excess. Pamela describes her first meeting with Mrs. Jewkes in these terms: "The naughty Woman came up to me with an Air of Confidence, and kiss'd me, See Sister, said she, here's a charming Creature! would not she tempt the best Lord in the Land to run away with her!" (PA, 107). Mrs. Jewkes justifies Mr. B.'s ignominious actions by calling attention to Pamela's desirability. Later, in the carriage ride to Lincolnshire, Pamela reports that Mrs. Jewkes sat next to her, "squeezing my Hand, and saying, Why you are very pretty, my silent Dear! and once she offer'd to kiss me. But I said, I don't like this Sort of Carriage, Mrs. Jewkes; it is not like two Persons...

“Whordoms and adulteries”: Sexual Crimes and Legal Reform in Milton’s Prose

“Whordoms and adulteries”: Sexual Crimes and Legal Reform in Milton’s Prose

Against Rights: Jeremy Bentham on Sexual Liberty and Legal Reform

“it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” Jeremy Bentham, “A Fragment on Government,” 1776 (393) “If Wealth and Bodily Pleasures are no means of H...

Getting Consent ‘Right’: Sexual Assault Law Reform in New South Wales

For the purposes of rape/sexual assault, the preferred approach for pursuing modernisation in Australia has been to legislate a positive definition of consent as ‘free and voluntary agreement’. The absence of consent in this form has become the primary touchstone for the crime. And yet, despite multiple waves of progressive legislative reform, too few victims of sexual violence find justice in the criminal courts. This article questions whether prevailing statutory models of consent definition may be more problem than solution. Drawing on the work of Pateman and Gatens in particular, I argue that while the repetition of the words ‘free and voluntary agreement’ make it a familiar and reassuring formula, its meaning is neither self-evident nor self-executing. It is possible that the definition opens a ‘gap’ between what is intended by the phrase and how it is filled in practice by the ‘common knowledges’ (Mariana Valverde, Law's Dream of a Common Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2003)) of rape myths. Myth as ‘misunderstanding’ may be capable of legislative correction, but legislative correction of myth, understood as an excess of signification (Roland Barthes, Mythologies trans A Lavers (Jonathan Cape, 1972)), is elusive. The article also suggests that the practice of legislative correction may be flawed to the extent that it relies on naming and marking the limit of what consent is not – via categories of (exceptional) circumstance and vulnerability.

The sexual life of our time: Medical censorship in early-20th-century England.

This article challenges the widely held belief that early-20th-century England was one of the most sexually repressed countries in the Western world. Late Victorian physicians discussing sexual diseases and dysfunctions were granted immunity from prosecution if their publications were sold through a recognized medical publisher only to Members of the Medical, Legal and Clerical Professions. It was assumed that those same constraints applied to publications concerning the psychology of the sexual life (sexology). In 1908, Rebman Limited, a well-known medical publisher, advertised Eden Paul's (1908) translation of Iwan Bloch's The Sexual Life of Our Time (hereafter, "Sexual Life") without any restrictions. Although a magistrate ruled the book obscene, the U.K. Home Office allowed republication on condition that its sale was strictly limited. The Rebman case reveals how the U.K. Home Office tried to police the new science of sexology by limiting its circulation, not censoring its content. Despite these restrictions, Sexual Life circulated among lay readers, thereby inviting further research into how even "censored" material shaped debates on sexual, social, and political reform. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Two Is a Crowd: An Australian Case Study on Legislative Process, Law Reform Commissions and Dealing with Duplicate Offences

Abstract This article utilizes the sexual offence reform in Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania, and Western Australia as a case study to critically examine the perils and causes of duplicate offences. For perils, this article demonstrates that the failure to abolish a lesser offence (i.e. the procurement by false pretence offence) that was rendered redundant by a statutory expansion of the primary offence (i.e. rape vis-à-vis sex obtained by fraud) would create structural incoherency in the legal framework and impede the court from giving full effect to the plain words of the amended provision. For causes, this article identifies the positive but insufficient role of law reform commissions in ensuring appropriate treatment of the lesser duplicate offence by the legislature. The article proposes that law reform commissions should be more forcefully explicit when making recommendations relating to the abolishment of redundant offences.

Reforma sexual, control de natalidad, naturismo y pacifismo. La cultura libertaria trasatlántica en las décadas de 1920 y 1930: Estudios. Revista Ecléctica (1928-1937) y su proyección y redes en América

The editors and main collaborators to the influential Spanish libertarian magazine Estudios (Valencia, 1928-1937) showed a permanent interest in connecting the magazine with the main networks of global anarchism in the interwar years, and also with contemporary international campaigns in defense of birth control, eugenics, sexual reform, naturism or pacifism. As its predecessor did—the magazine Generacion Consciente (1923-1928)—, Estudios was linked to well-known militants, writers, scientists and propagandists in general of those ideas and practices in Europe and America. Estudios built networks using the magazine itself, its personal contacts with those individuals, and also an active book sale service and an intense publishing work. Therefore, Estudios contributed to the diffusion of this new international anarchist culture of the interwar period. The Americas were crucial here, due to their financial importance for the magazine in terms of sales, but also because of the links established with militants, groups, publishers, etc., of that continent that shared the ideological and cultural orientations of Estudios.

Fare gli italiani dell’anno 3000 Paolo Mantegazza e le prospettive future dell’amore nell’Italia postunitaria

In 1897 the Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza published The year 3000. A dream, a science fiction novel in which he described the future order of mankind through the journey of a couple. While recent historiography has focused on the eugenic elements of the book, this article discusses the social and gender matters that underpin the novel. Indeed, on the basis of the emotional paradigm of romantic love, Mantegazza put the ‘sexual reform’ of the post-unified Italy at the centre of his work. Believing that «love was the first instrument of progress», he aimed to show how under the guidance of science, humanity as well as Italian society would have a future of happiness and prosperity.

Fare gli italiani dell’anno 3000 Paolo Mantegazza e le prospettive future dell’amore nell’Italia postunitaria

In 1897 the Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza published The year 3000. A dream, a science fiction novel in which he described the future order of mankind through the journey of a couple. While recent historiography has focused on the eugenic elements of the book, this article discusses the social and gender matters that underpin the novel. Indeed, on the basis of the emotional paradigm of romantic love, Mantegazza put the ‘sexual reform’ of the post-unified Italy at the centre of his work. Believing that «love was the first instrument of progress», he aimed to show how under the guidance of science, humanity as well as Italian society would have a future of happiness and prosperity.

Americans’ Views of Efficacy toward Campus Sexual Assault Reform

ABSTRACT Recently, the federal government and colleges have sought new remedies to combat campus sexual assault (CSA). Additionally, there have been calls for shifts in college culture. For this reason, an understanding of attitudes about these policies and reforms is needed. To that end, the study examines three questions. First, to what extent does the public view diverse CSA policies at the institutional-level as effective? Second, does the public express confidence in proposed changes to sociocultural facets of the college lifestyle presumed to be related to sexual assault perpetration and/or victimization (e.g., alcohol avoidance, more modest clothing choices, greater respect for women, and fewer casual sexual relationship)? Finally, what factors predict beliefs about the efficacy of these responses and cultural reforms? Using national poll data (N = 1,124) collected at the height of this debate, 2015, we explore these public attitudes. Implications are discussed.