Sexual Reform Research Articles

The Sexologist Albert Moll – between Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld

Albert Moll was one of the most influential sexologists during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In contrast to his rivals Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, his achievements have not yet been recognised adequately. The author gives a comparative account of the work of these three protagonists. This shows that Moll formed some ideas which are regarded as psychoanalytical today before Freud, and that he, in contrast to Hirschfeld, was able to reflect critically on contemporary discourses, such as the debates on racial improvement through eugenics. As scientific theories, Freud’s psychoanalysis represented the unconscious, fantasy, experience and latency, while Moll’s sexology represented consciousness, ontological reality, behaviour and manifestation. Moll’s major disagreement with Hirschfeld’s sexology was his advocacy of apolitical and impartial science, whereas Hirschfeld’s aim was to achieve sexual reforms politically. Added to these differences were strong personal animosities. Freud called Moll a ‘beast’ and ‘pettifogger’; and Moll complained about Hirschfeld’s ‘problematic’ character. When Hirschfeld escaped the Nazi terror and went to Paris, Moll denounced him in order to prevent him rebuilding a new existence in exile.

Saving Civilization from the "'Green-Eyed' Monster": Emma Goldman and the Sex Reform Campaign against Jealousy, 1900–1930

Author(s): Hustak, Carla C. | Abstract: This article explores the Anglo-transatlantic dimensions of the early twentieth-century sex reform movement through the lens of an economy, which, Hustak argues, marked a specific historical moment in defining political alliances at the level of embodied felt relations of power. The article examines the importance of the collaboration between British and American sex reformers by focusing on how their radical feminist and socialist politics were underpinned by their attacks on jealousy. Hustak suggests here that new transatlantic relationships were forged by British and American sex reformers through their consideration of the constitution of white middle-class citizens who were similarly shaped by capitalist and patriarchal institutions that crossed national divides, while also articulating a special kinship among white middle-class citizens in cosmopolitan bohemian communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Hustak’s use of the term emotional economy highlights how white middle-class British and American sex reformers shared similar concerns over a declining white middle-class birthrate, the nervous exhaustion of white middle-class bodies, and the eugenic future of white middle-class civilization. She suggests that sex reformers' campaigns against jealousy highlighted communal ties that defied national boundaries by identifying shared constitutions along the lines of whiteness, eugenic reproduction, and professional work regimes. Hustak uses the specific case study of sex reformer and anarchist Emma Goldman's activities in Greenwich Village as an example of an influential early twentieth-century transnational reformer whose attacks on jealousy as the 'green-eyed' monster occurred in the wider context of an Anglo-transatlantic politics of emotion.

Queer Netherlands: A puzzling example

Ever since the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, the Netherlands has been at the forefront of championing erotic freedoms. Amsterdam became internationally renowned as a city of sex, drugs and rock & roll – the gay and sex capital of the world, wide open to the celebration of erotic pleasures. The change for the Netherlands was dramatic: from a society ruled by Christian political parties and a conservative morality to a nation where sex could be enjoyed by locals and foreigners alike. The sexual revolution had far-reaching effects on Dutch society. While surveys show that most Dutch until the late 1960s were opposed to homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, abortion, divorce and preand extramarital sex, the majority a decade later claimed to accept such behavior. Stimulated by the NVSH (Dutch Society for Sexual Reform) and the COC (Center for Recreation and Culture, a code name for what would be baptized in 1971 the ‘Dutch Society for Integration of Homosexuality’), as well as by numerous social changes, the Dutch in the 1970s emerged as the most liberal nation in the world on issues of sexual morality (see Hekma and Duyvendak, 2011). This gave the Netherlands, and especially the city of Amsterdam, a worldwide reputation as a place of sexual freedom. Amsterdam became a magnet for foreign tourists, particularly its Red Light District and its gay scene. Sexual emancipation was a watershed for women and even more so for gay men – they were no longer seen as sinners, criminals or psychopaths. This narrative of sexual liberation continued with twists and turns until 2001, when the Netherlands reached the pinnacle of its erotic freedoms with the legalization of prostitution in 2000 and the opening of marriage to same-sex couples in 2001 (being in both cases the first country to do so). In the eyes of the law, homosexuality and heterosexuality were now nearly equal, though legal equality did not mean social equality. While gay and straight alike saw these legal victories as the end of a long struggle for equal rights, the media began to report on regular incidents of queer bashing, gay and lesbian teachers and students remaining closeted in schools, and LGTB people being chased out of their homes. Social problems

Tobacco, Recusals, and Sexual Assault Reforms: Correspondent's report from Australia

The Victorian Government has just released a review of its Sexual Assault Reform Strategy. The strategy was an ambitious project begun in 2007 to improve the justice system's response to sexual assault. Legislative reforms then included a ban on any cross-examination by the accused and the need to obtain leave before cross-examining the complainant on sexual history...

The Making of a Modern Female Body: beauty, health and fitness in interwar Britain

In interwar Britain female athleticism, keep-fit classes and physical culture were celebrated as emblems of modernity, and women who cultivated their bodies in the pursuit of beauty, health and fitness represented civic virtue. This article argues that a modern, actively managed female body was part of women’s liberation during this period. A modern female body required sex reform and birth control. Fitness culture was circumscribed by traditional notions of femininity. Women’s competitive sport remained controversial and slimming in pursuit of fashion was widely condemned. Women from across the social spectrum embraced sport and joined fitness organizations. The rise of a modern female body contributed towards greater equality between the sexes. However, the gender order did not change fundamentally and the ideal woman of the interwar years was represented as a modern, emancipated race mother.

<i>A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood</i> (review)

Reviewed by: A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood Joy Dixon A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood. By Antony Copley. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Pp. 410. $85.00 (cloth); $30.95 (paper). A Spiritual Bloomsbury is an ambitious and idiosyncratic book that brings together a number of Antony Copley's long-standing interests: the history of modern India, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality—or, more accurately, the history of a particular form of male homosexuality. It is also a dense and difficult work, and Copley's arguments are sometimes contradictory and often provocative. The opening lines of the prologue suggest the scope of the book: "Given two such powerful drives as the sexual and the religious, often in conflict, it is deeply intriguing to see just how any one individual manages their rivalry and seeks their reconciliation" (1). The book develops its arguments through a detailed (though necessarily selective) examination of the lives and writings of homosexual men in three successive generations—Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), E. M. Forster (1879–1970), and Christopher Isherwood (1904–86)—each of whom "shared a similar sexuality and sought in Hindu spirituality one way of achieving personal autonomy and fulfillment." They form, he suggests, "a natural trinity" in which "there is the feel of an apostolic succession." The reference to "Bloomsbury" in the book's title comes from the emphasis all three men placed on friendship ("the leitmotif of Bloomsbury") and on "the centrality of personal relationships" in their lives (1). Copley makes a real effort to place each of these figures within a longer sexual-spiritual tradition, linking them through a guru-disciple relationship. Copley portrays the late Victorian Edward Carpenter—a socialist and a feminist as well as a sex reformer—as both a disciple caught between different gurus and a "would-be guru" himself (10). According to Copley, the direction of Carpenter's energies was the result of his reading of Walt Whitman's work and his decision to take Whitman as a kind of guru figure. In the 1890s Carpenter set out for Colombo, in what is now Sri Lanka, on a journey to a very different guru, Ramaswamy the gnani, also known as Ilakkanam the Grammarian. Copley poses Whitman and Ramaswamy as alternatives for Carpenter, with Ramaswamy standing for transcendence and asceticism and Whitman for a "this-worldly" vision in which sex itself became a religion (15, 36–37). In Copley's analysis, "Carpenter's was a profound revolt against a Victorian cult of masculinity that denied man's feminine side. His was a quest once again for wholeness, with an emphasis on feeling rather than intellect, and in Vedantism, especially with Hinduism, as he was later to argue, endorsing a sacramental attitude to sex, he found the means for both his self-acceptance and self-transcendence" (28). [End Page 395] In E. M. Forster, Copley finds one of Carpenter's many "disciples," but Forster's own ambivalence about Carpenter's vision, especially as the years wore on and "Carpenter's idealism began to look dated and naïve," ultimately led him in a very different direction (98). Copley characterizes Forster's political and philosophical position as a "troubled loyalty to liberal humanism" and argues convincingly that Forster's (in)famous injunction to "only connect" was transformed in profound ways by his encounter with Indian culture and religion: "Exposure to Hinduism had eroded the liberal humanism, there was a greater sense of irony, of man's impermanence" (108–9). Forster's Christianity faded early in his life (it was, Copley notes, only "tepid" in any case); indeed, Forster had long been critical of his family's evangelical heritage, which he saw as a religion without a sense of beauty, imagination, or any sense of the "unseen" (111–13). In mysticism, especially the mysticism of the Krishna cult, Forster found a personalized form of "transcendent release" from sexual frustration, Copley argues (114). In Copley's reading, Forster's own encounters with India were framed by his relationships with...

Where 'Reason and the Sense of Venus are Innate in Men': Male Friendship, Secret Societies, Academies, and Antiquarians in Eighteenth-Century Florence

This article studies male friendship in eighteenth-century Florence and the forms of homosociability that supported it, in particular the first Masonic Lodge in Florence, antiquarian societies, and artistic as well as literary academies. Inspired by the parallel studies of George Haggerty on British male friendship and Robert Tobin on male relations in the German eighteenth century, this contribution considers overlapping, Grand Tour homoerotic circles in Florence where British, German, and Italian men shared common interests and forged new aesthetics, taste, lifestyles and forms of knowledge transfer. This Italian case corroborates and advances the queer studies debate by furnishing a conspicuously missing tile in the mosaic of eighteenth-century homoerotic history. It proposes a queer reading of Illuminismo that can be applied to several other Italian eighteenth-century contexts to reveal Florence as a transformational space of sexual and social reform.

FRANCOIST POLITICS OF FEMALE IDENTITY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF LIDA VERONA

FRANCOIST POLITICS OF FEMALE IDENTITY: THE CURIOUS CASE OF LIDA VERONA

SEXOLOGY IN THE YISHUV: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF SEXUAL CONSULTATION IN TEL AVIV, 1930–39

This article examines the assimilation of sexology and sexual reform in the Yishuv of the 1930s. Prominent German sexologists visited Palestine, texts they authored were translated to Hebrew and Yiddish, and members of the Yishuv community traveled to central Europe to learn sexual-reform ideas. In 1931 and 1932, three consultation centers were opened in Tel Aviv, accompanied by Q&A columns in the general and medical press. In these centers and columns, men and women consulted medical doctors on contraception, impotence, abortions, and the everyday of heterosexual life. This short-lived experience was inspired by similar European experiences, especially in Weimar Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The 1930s discourse on sexuality was sometimes compatible with mainstream Zionist ideology and sometimes at odds with it. It came to an end during the last years of the decade, following the Arab Revolt, the Holocaust, and the demographic struggle over Palestine.

The Whole World Revolves Around It: Sex Education and Sex Reform in First Republic Czech Print Media

The Whole World Revolves Around It: Sex Education and Sex Reform in First Republic Czech Print Media

Sodomy, Sin, and String Writing: The Moral Origins of AndeanKhipu

According to the anonymous seventeenth-century author of the Quito Manuscript, ancient Andeans once possessed a writing system (qillqa) that they replaced with knotted strings (khipu) as part of the religious and sexual reform of their nation. The manuscript's redactor, Fernando de Montesinos, added to the text his own speculations about Andean writing, which he linked to the Tree of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. For both of these authors, ideas about indigenous “writing” were not neutral, but were intertwined with arguments about the moral and cultural merits of Andean civilization. This essay explores how each author's claims about writing and knotted strings—qillqa and khipu—were intrinsic to their political and theological aims, fitting into a larger discourse about the justification of colonial rule.

The Attitude of German Emigre Doctors Towards Medicine under National Socialism

The attitudes of emigre doctors provide some insight into whether Nazi medical atrocities were something peculiar and unique or whether they were an extreme consequence of widespread thinking and scientific concepts in medicine at the time. Doctors of the sexual reform movement and the political left partly welcomed the Nazi sterilisation law as an implementation of their eugenic ideas. Some labelled Nazi medicine plainly as charlatanism which is a protective claim by those who dream the dream of the genetic improvement of humanity. Others saw in it a cold-blooded utilitarianism, symbolising the triumph of a soldierly spartan life over the intricacies and agonies of the human soul. For those, the most important lessons of the past lay in protecting the chronically ill, the handicapped, the psychologically ill and the poor from radical utopias aimed at'making the national body healthy'.

Taming the Technological Shrew: Woman as Machine in Weimar Culture

European culture in the early twentieth century experienced two significant sites of transformation: newly emerging forms of technology and a new role for the emancipated woman. Amidst the social upheaval following WWI, these two sources of transformation were often met with cultural backlash that came in the form of conflating woman and machine. This article will study this conflation—the feminized machine and the mechanized woman—by drawing on various cultural works from Weimar Germany including writings from the Sex Reform movement, Siegfried Kracauer, and Ernst Junger. Analysis of these works will inform a reading of Maria the robot in Lang’s film, Metropolis (1927) as a representative of the popular anxiety over new technologies and the “New Woman.”

Attitudes, Rape and Law Reform in South Africa

In the last decade South Africa has undergone an extensive process of sexual offence law reform. This process has attempted, amongst other things, to address deficiencies in the criminal justice response to rape and has also recognised some of the limits to the impact of legal reform. These limits are partly defined by rape supportive attitudes and myths that appear to influence decision-making at all points in the criminal justice process. In South Africa, and many other jurisdictions, evidence suggests that police, prosecutorial and judicial decision-making is influenced, in part, by a range of social attitudes that misconstrue sexual violence, as well as serve to undermine the credibility of complainants. This article examines the impact of myths, social definitions of rape on rape law reform in South Africa and the points at which these reforms are likely to be undermined by social attitudes and what potentially might be done to address this problem.

Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform by Alison Sinclair

Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform by Alison Sinclair

The sex reform movement and eugenics in interwar Poland

This paper focuses on the relations between a liberal group of sex reformers, consisting of writers and literary critics, and physicians from the Polish Eugenics Society in interwar Poland. It illustrates the paradoxes of the mutual co-operation between these two groups during the 1930s and analyses the reason why compulsory sterilisation was rejected by politicians. From the early 1930s two movements began to forge an alliance in Poland: the sexual reform movement which advocated freedom of the individual, and eugenics, which called for limiting the freedom of the individual for the collective good. This paper draws attention to several issues which emerged as part of this collaboration: population politics, the relationship between reformers, eugenicists and state institutions, and the question of how both movements—eugenics and sexual reform—perceived the question of sexuality, birth control and abortion. It will also focus on those aspects of their thinking that led to mutual co-operation.

The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s Seaweed

The Very First Lady Chatterley? Mrs. Havelock Ellis’s Seaweed Jo-Ann Wallace On 31 May 1898 George Bedborough—secretary of the English branch of the Legitimation League (a society whose object was the legalizing of illegitimate children) and editor of the League's journal, the Adult—was arrested for selling a copy of Havelock Ellis's recently published Sexual Inversion to an undercover Scotland Yard detective, John Sweeney. As numerous biographers and historians (not to mention the detective himself) have pointed out, Sweeney was less interested in Ellis's book than in the Legitimation League's seeming advocacy of free love and the anarchists numbered among its members. However, one effect of Bedborough's arrest was the accidental suppression of Mrs. Havelock (Edith) Ellis's first novel, Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll. Seaweed, like Sexual Inversion, had been published by "Dr. Roland de Villiers" under the imprint of the University Press at Watford. It was seized, along with Sexual Inversion and several other publications, during the raid on Bedborough's shop. Although she attempted to sell it by post from her cottage in Cornwall, Edith Ellis's book dropped from sight until it was revised and reissued as Kit's Woman: A Cornish Idyll in 1907. Two years later, the novel was again slightly revised, this time eliminating much of the Cornish dialect, and published in the United States as Steve's Woman. At the instigation of Daphne (Mrs. Clifford) Bax, Edith Ellis revisited the novel again, transforming it into a four-act play that received a special performance at the Court Theatre with Beryl Faber playing the leading role. Finally, the London publisher T. Werner Laurie brought out a popular (i.e., paperback) edition of Kit's Woman in 1916, the year of Edith Ellis's death.1 The novel is of interest not only for its accidental implication in one of the famous censorship trials of the period and its subsequently volatile publishing history (described in more detail below), but for its subject [End Page 123] matter which in many ways anticipates, and quite possibly inspired, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, another famously censored and suppressed book.2 As I will argue in what follows, Seaweed presents numerous interesting challenges for literary historiography generally and for modernist literary history in particular. It requires us to broaden our understanding of literary modernism to account not only for its much-vaunted cosmopolitanism and internationalism but also for its varied and localized development, in this case the development of a specifically English modernism with its roots in late-nineteenth-century English progressive idealism. Edith Ellis & Seaweed: A Cornish Idyll Edith Ellis (née Lees, 1861–1916) was a turn-of-the-century writer, lecturer, and social experimenter. Although she is today more often remembered as the lesbian wife of the sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis—who included her as a case study in Sexual Inversion—during her lifetime she was a well-known figure in her own right.3 In the late 1880s, together with Ramsay MacDonald (who would go on to become Britain's first Labour Prime Minister), she helped establish the Fellowship of the New Life's experiment in communal living at 29 Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. The Fellowship had its origins in October 1883 when Percival Chubb (among others), inspired by the teachings of Scottish philosopher Thomas Davidson, organized a meeting of several sympathetic men and women to discuss the possibility of founding "a communistic society whose members should lead the new higher life."4 The Fellowship was committed to principles of social justice based on class and sexual reform, goals that it believed were best pursued through simplicity of living, the combining of manual with intellectual labour, and "the highest and completest education of the young."5 Less than three months after its initial meeting, a number of members split from the founding group to form the Fabian Society. There was some continuing overlap in membership in the two associations and the Fellowship—which by now had attracted the interest of people like Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Edward Pease and Frank Podmore—lasted another fifteen years. In that time, it published a quarterly magazine, Seed...

In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (review)

Reviewed by: In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature Paul Gordon Schalow In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature. By Jim Reichert. Stanford University Press, 2006. 282 pages. Hardcover $60.00. The forty-five-year reign of the Meiji emperor from 1868 to 1912 was long enough to encompass both the initial exuberant attempts to transform a land and a people into something suitably modern, as well as the subsequent sober recognition of the cost of that transformation and a kind of nostalgia, especially in the capital city of Tokyo, for what had been Edo culture. "Civilization and Enlightenment" was the byword of the [End Page 237] new imperial reign, and reform affected every area of life. The idea of what constituted an appropriately modern army and navy, or transportation system, or political structure, and so forth, evolved over time, and eventually new institutions replaced those of the Edo era. Once in place, moreover, the new army and navy, transportation system, political structure, and other state structures marked for reform were endorsed in various visible and gratifying ways: by, for example, the victories against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, by the obvious increased ease of commuting within cities and traveling across regions, and by the palpable sense that Japan had catapulted itself into the ranks of major world powers. The Meiji oligarchs also addressed the idea of what constituted a suitably modern sexuality for the Japanese people. Serving as a spokesperson for the government, the educator and reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi endorsed the model of one husband/one wife embodied in his own marriage. In the legal realm, prostitution was outlawed, as was anal intercourse between males. (The limited effect of these laws has been discussed in detail by Greg Pflugfelder in his study Cartographies of Desire, University of California Press, 1999.) The regulation of sexuality had always been a major concern of the Tokugawa bakufu, as shown by the various attempts beginning in the seventeenth century to isolate male prostitution in "theater districts" and female prostitution in "pleasure quarters" in the urban centers, but the Meiji control of sexual commerce became prescriptive in ways never seen before. The aim of these reforms was ostensibly the ennobling of relations between the sexes and the elevation of the status of women, but in fact the results were highly ambiguous. Sexual reform had major repercussions for Meiji literature, of course, since the life force (eros) had always been one of Edo literature's wellsprings. Jim Reichert's fascinating and timely book, In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature, is the first study of Meiji literature to consider what happened when "compulsory heterosexuality" was imposed in the wake of modernization. Reichert approaches his ambitious project by providing a detailed discussion of several important authors and texts that clarify in specific ways how writing on male-male sexuality was reformulated and even erased in the Meiji era. It is an important and revisionist project, intended to change the master narrative of Meiji literary history that until now, he argues, has "largely overlook[ed] the impact of changing notions of sexuality and masculinity on the development of modern Japanese literature" (p. 9). Reichert divides his discussion into four stages that correspond to the standard division of Meiji literary history into early, reformist, neoclassical, and late periods, roughly corresponding to decade-long intervals from the 1870s to mid-1880s, the late 1880s to mid-1890s, the late 1890s, and finally the first decade of the twentieth century to 1912. To illustrate the earliest transition from Edo to Meiji, the study addresses Shizu no odamaki (a late Edo work) and Sawamura Tanosuke akebono zōshi (from 1880), two popular books that circulated in the early years of the Meiji period and depicted male-male sexuality in terms consistent with the Edo construct of nanshoku (male love). These books and others like them remained highly influential despite the Meiji government's reform efforts. Reichert makes the excellent point that readers did not approach these transitional depictions merely as nostalgic remnants of a bygone Edo mode of male-male intimacy...

Feminism vs. the State?: A Decade of Sexual Offences Law Reform in South Africa

abstract South Africa's transition to a democratic state has been accompanied by an intensive focus on the use of the law as an instrument to address high levels of sexual assault as well as other social problems. Feminist legal scholars and activists have been involved in an ongoing critical engagement with government policy and law reform surrounding equality. Many leading feminists have questioned the extent to which the law can ever effectively deter violence against women. Others argue that feminist activists in a transitional democracy are provided with both the space to advocate for substantive law reforms, as well as the opportunity to ensure that the human rights set out in the Constitution are entrenched and interpreted in a way that consciously furthers the rights of women in this country. This article provides the groundwork for a critical analysis of the strategies adopted over the past 10 years.

Remapping the Sites of Modern Gay History: Legal Reform, Medico-Legal Thought, Homosexual Scandal, Erotic Geography

E thirty years ago Jeffrey Weeks published his groundbreaking Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977)—an immensely influential history of the British sexual reform movements from the 1870s to the 1970s. Its appearance was followed closely (and in some ways serendipitously) by Robert Hurley’s 1978 English translation of Michel Foucault’s commanding Introduction to his projected six-volume History of Sexuality. Foucault’s theoretical work dismissed the belief that during the Victorian period “modern Puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence” wherever sexuality was concerned. These two remarkable books—if emerging from divergent intellectual contexts—took similar initiatives to explain how the category of the “homosexual” came to define a particular kind of modern sexual identity, one that differed markedly from earlier understandings of the man-loving man as a “sodomite.” Both Weeks’s and Foucault’s studies, though methodologically distinct from each other, advanced well beyond limited