Culture, Difference, and Sexual Progress in Turn-of-the-Century Europe: Cultural Othering and the German League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, 1905–1914

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

“…This understanding of sexual science reveals, as much recent scholarship has established, the centrality of colonial frameworks and fantasies about geographically distanced and often racialized ‘Others’ within sexual scientific research frameworks (Chiang, 2009; see also Bleys, 1996; Hoad, 2000; Leck, 2018; Leng, 2016; Marhoefer, 2022; Schields and Herzog, 2021; Willey, 2018). 4 As many scholars have shown, the sexological interest in the case study sat alongside an engagement with other inter- and cross-disciplinary forms of knowledge, including comparative evidence of different sexual customs and behaviours from historical, anthropological, sociological, and zoological investigations (Bauer, 2009, 2015; Chiang, 2009; Fisher and Funke, 2015, 2018; Leck, 2016; Leng, 2016, 2018; Moore, 2021). 5 Cross-cultural and cross-historical investigations of the sexual instinct shifted attention away from the individual case study, placing greater emphasis on human developmental trajectories over large timescales.…”

“…This rhetoric of progress and development was mobilized to different ends by sexual scientists holding both conservative and reform-oriented or 'progressive' political views. 6 In fact, as Leng (2016) has shown, the very rhetoric of 'progress' (and, we would add, 'development') was premised on these racist and colonial modes of comparison. Across these different branches of sexology, the increasing separation of sex from the sole purpose of reproduction was used to measure 'progress' and establish an increasing distance between more and less highly evolved organisms and cultures (Willey, 2018: 109).…”

“…The narratives of progress and civilizational advancement employed by sexologists often reflected racist and misogynistic understandings of developmental hierarchies (Funke, 2015;Leng, 2016;Willey, 2018). Hegar, and sexual scientists inspired by his work, identified culturally advantageous and civilized expressions of the sexual instinct primarily among white men.…”

“…The League defended the rights of mothers (whether they were married or not) and their children while also advocating for the legalization of contraceptives and abortion. The journals repeatedly ‘drew contrasts with cultural and racial Others who supposedly represented humanity's sexual past’ to bolster reform-oriented arguments, including the claim that ‘(hetero)sexual independence for women’ constituted the ‘next stage in the unfolding of evolutionary law’ (Leng, 2016: 64, 65). This is evident in Stöcker's programmatic ‘On the Reform of Sexual Ethics’, published in the first issue of Mutterschutz in 1905.…”

Anna Fischer-Dückelmann. Le pouvoir aux femmes par la médecine naturelle et la Réforme de la vie

“…Est ainsi fondé en 1905 en Allemagne le Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (Ligue pour la protection des mères et la réforme sexuelle) qui a pour but une émancipation de la sexualité, notamment féminine, et un contrôle de sa propre fécondité dans un but d'émancipation des femmes et de plus grand progrès de l'humanité. Cette ligue se fonde sur les écrits de Helene Stöcker, devenus ensuite l'objet de débats car leur autrice sera considérée comme précurseuse des idées nazies sur l'eugénisme (83) . De son côté, Fischer-Dückelmann cultive son esprit critique : tout en y étant favorable, elle redoute que la contraception n'achève de soumettre les femmes à leurs époux qui n'auraient alors plus de raison de ne pas les solliciter sexuellement (84) .…”