This chapter focuses on three specific factors pivotal to the emergence of sexology in Germany during this time: the vaunted status and increasingly important political role of science and medicine; the growth of a discourse on modernity and its effects, above all on health and morality; and the expansion of variegated reform movements and their increasing reliance on science to support their demands and visions for change. It then illuminates the integral role sex reform groups played in creating, collecting, curating, and circulating sexual scientific knowledge, and especially highlights the roles women played in building sexology as a field of knowledge—as well as the opposition their involvement increasingly provoked.

26. Tracing the etymology of the term "sexology" is itself a challenge, as descriptors of the fi eld vary across languages. Volkmar Sigusch has identifi ed the Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza as the fi rst sexologist, and noted that although Mantegazza did not use terminology such as sexology or sexual science to describe his work, he did characterize it as belonging to a "science of embraces" ( Geschichte der Wissenschaft , 122). It is fascinating to note that one of the fi rst recorded uses of the English term "sexology" was in the work of a woman, American writer Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard. Though little is known about Willard herself, the very title of her 1867 book, Sexology as the Philosophy of Life: Implying Social Organization and Government, defi nes sexology in a way that highlights an intrinsic element of the scientization of sex: namely, that the study of sex was prompted by social concerns and endeavored to offer solutions. In 1889, the British mathematician, eugenicist, and Germanophile Karl Pearson wrote in his refl ections on the end of the London-based "Men and Women's Discussion Club" that "the possibility of a 'learned society' to collect the facts of sexualogy had entered the minds of some of the men before the club was established"; however, he noted that such a society seemed "unfeasible" in the early 1880s because of "the unknown factor of how women would treat the proposal" (University College, University of London, Special Collections, Pearson Papers, 10/1 Minute Book of Men and Women's Club, Karl Pearson concluding refl ections; undated but ca. June 1889; emphasis mine). However, in his refl ections Pearson added, "Personally I am rather surprised than disappointed in the amount of really good scientifi c work which has been done by the Club, and I feel it is a real loss that the club has taken no actions to collect, reunite and publish for a wider range of students some of the papers-especially the historical-read at its meetings." On the history of the Men and Women's Club, see Bland,

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This article addresses the roles women and gender played in the production of sexological knowledge in the early 20th century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. Although existing scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the work of "founding fathers" such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld, women in fact made important contributions to the field. Based on analysis of texts written between 1900 and 1931, this article shows how women were able to successfully mobilize their gender as a privileged form of "situated knowledge," and thereby assert their authority over and superior insights into certain subject areas, namely, female sexualities and sexual difference. At the same time, however, this article also highlights the constraints upon women's gendered standpoint. It shows that women's sexological writing was not just informed by their gender but also by their class and race. Moreover, because gender threatened to cast their work as insufficiently objective and scientific, women cleaved to sexology's rules of evidence and argumentation, and adopted the field's ideological trappings in order to participate in discursive contestations over sexual truths. By interrogating gender, this article introduces much-needed nuance into existing understandings of sexology, and reframes sexology itself as a site wherein new sexual subjectivities were imagined, articulated, and debated. However, it also raises fundamental questions about women sexologists' capacity to create knowledge about women and female sexualities that was truer, more correct, and more authentic than that produced by men.

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