Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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78 elizabeth harvey

girls, and associating itself with its sources of support from those who grew up during

and after the war. Connections might be made between “youth” and the “front

generation” – for instance, through the evocation of soldierly and disciplined youth.

However, they became tenuous now that the veterans were middle-aged and the

youthfulness of the front generation was preserved only in the memory of the dead.

Pitfalls therefore opened up when Nazi propaganda used generational rhetoric. As

Schmidt-Sasse has demonstrated in his analysis of Nazi speeches to youth, such refer-

ences could have the effect of opening up a generation gap between the regime and

the young. When, for instance, the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach exhorted

the “youth of today” to look back in awe at the “youth of Langemarck,” it positioned

them above all as respectful spectators of a dead young generation that had gone

before them.

Conclusion

The “cult of youth” in its early twentieth-century form, together with the “genera-

tional politics” with which it was associated, may look to us today like a cul-de-sac.

However, at the time it was taken seriously and embraced widely. In the late nine-

teenth century the belief that society needed infusing with the qualities of youthful-

ness – vitality, courage, élan, etc. – developed alongside discussions about adolescence

and the debates on “problem” youngsters. Intellectuals dreamed of liberating the

energies of the young to create an alternative culture that would be a catalyst for the

transformation of national life. Social reformers and educationalists used versions of

the “youth myth” to develop pedagogical models that would combat the ills of

“over-civilization” and the distorting and stiﬂing effects of bourgeois conventions

upon male adolescents.

The qualities celebrated in mythologized “youth” depended upon constructions

of gender. The association of youth with masculinity was evident both in the youth

cultures emerging in the pre-World War I period and all the more during World War

I, in which a “lost generation of youth” came to stand for all the potential destroyed

by the conﬂict and to legitimate a host of manifestos for postwar political renewal.

Girls and young women might contest the exclusively male-bonded nature of

generational constructs, but the “mission of the young generation” remained

predominantly a vision of virile young men redeeming a society in crisis.

The cult of youth could be associated with escape and subversion as well as with

manipulation and the exercise of power. If the liberating potential of myths of youth

could most easily be harnessed by boys and male-bonded groupings – to the exclu-

sion and at the expense of girls – there were nevertheless girls and young women

who were also fascinated by the notions of breakout from bourgeois convention. But

inherent in the new freedoms were also new forms of discipline. By the interwar

period, body culture offered a route through which young women could include

themselves alongside young men within the category of modern youth on the move.

Such inclusion required a degree of conformity with a particular ethos of health,

exertion and self-control, and the adoption of a comradely rather than sexualized

style of femininity.

Later on in the century, the cult of youth would if anything tighten its grip as the

quest for the ageless face and body – both a commodity in itself, to be achieved

the cult of youth 79

through particular forms of consumption, and a marketing device for any and every

product. In this guise, the cult of youth seems to be a permanent ﬁxture of modern

consumer culture, stretching out beyond the present into the future of a globalized

capitalism.

Meanwhile, the gloriﬁed youth of fascism litters its past. The manipulative and

repressive uses to which the cult of youth could be put were nowhere more evident

than in the ranks of the “shirted” young men – and women – of the 1930s and

1940s, ﬁguring as a visual display of fascism’s rejuvenation of the nation, but at the

same time representing the human resources of regimes mobilized for war, “service,”

and death.

NOTES

1 Frank Trommler, “Mission ohne Ziel. Über den Kult der Jugend im modernen

Deutschland,” in “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit”: Mythos Jugend, Thomas Koebner, Rolf-

Peter Janz, and F. Trommler, eds (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 14.

2 See Dagmar Reese, “Emancipation or Social Incorporation: Girls in the Bund Deutscher

Mädel,” in Education and Fascism: Political Identity and Social Education in Nazi

Germany, Heinz Sünker and Hans-Uwe Otto, eds (London: Falmer Press, 1997), pp.

106–7.

3 See Robert Wohl,

The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,

1979), esp. pp. 203–17.

4 See Daniel Pick,

Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Degeneration

in Modern France (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

5 See John R. Gillis,

Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations,

1770–Present (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 95–113; John Springhall, Coming

of Age: Adolescence in Britain 1860–1960 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986) pp.

28–37.

6 See Walter Laqueur,

Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).

7 See Tim Jeal,

Baden-Powell (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp.

390–423.

8 Günter Berghaus,

Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction,

1909–1944 (Oxford: Berg, 1996), p. 48.

9 Wohl,

Generation of 1914, p. 164.

10 Berghaus,

Futurism and Politics, pp. 57–8.

11 “Spartaco,” quoted in Berghaus,

Futurism and Politics, p. 72.

12 Quoted in Sabina Loriga, “The Military Experience,” in

A History of Young People, vol.

2: Stormy Evolution to Modern Times, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds

(Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1997), p. 11.

13 Quoted in Dan S. White,

Lost Comrades: Socialists of the Front Generation 1918–1945

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 3.

14 Quoted in Wohl,

Generation of 1914, p. 90.

15 See Margaret H. Darrow, “French Volunteer Nursing and the Myth of War Experience

in World War I,” American Historical Review 101/1 (1996): 80–106.

16 Notes for “Introduction to War Diaries” (ca. 1939), in Vera Brittain,

Chronicle of Youth:

War Diary 1913–1917, Alan Bishop and Terry Smart, eds (London: Gollancz, 1981), pp.

14–15.

80 elizabeth harvey

17 See Anita Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and

Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

18 Quoted in Claire Langhamer,

Women’s Leisure in England 1920–1960 (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 55. Donald Bradman was an Australian

cricketer.

19 See Mary L. Roberts,

Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France,

1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 63–87; Valerie Steele, Paris

Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 247–53.

20 See Catherine Horwood, “‘Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions’: Women and Bathing,

1900–1939,” Women’s History Review 9/4 (2000): 653–73, here p. 665.

21 On interwar organized youth, see the special issue on “Generations in Conﬂict” in

Journal

of Contemporary History 5/1 (1970).

22 Jiri Koralka, “Spontaneity and Organization in Czech Youth Movements,” in

La Jeunesse

et ses mouvements (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque, 1992),

p. 225.

23 Leslie Paul, “The Woodcraft Folk: Our Aims and Ideals” (1926). On the Woodcraft Folk,

see J. Springhall, “‘Young England, Rise Up, and Listen!’ The Political Dimensions of

Youth Protest and Generation Conﬂict in Britain, 1919–1939,” in Jugendprotest und

Generationenkonﬂikt in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert: Deutschland, England, Frankreich

und Italien im Vergleich, Dieter Dowe, ed. (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1986), pp.

155–7.

24 On the world jamboree held in Liverpool in 1929 and attended by 30,000 Scouts, see

Tammy M. Proctor, “Scouts, Guides, and the Fashioning of Empire, 1919–1939,” in

Fashioning the Body Politic, Wendy Parkins, ed. (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

25 Sigmund Neumann, “The Conﬂict of Generations in Contemporary Europe: From

Versailles to Munich,” Vital Speeches of the Day 5/20 (1938/9): 623–8.

26 On left-wing youth’s involvement in combating fascism, see Eve Rosenhaft,

Beating the

Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. pp. 193–6; Sandra Souto Kustrin, “Taking the

Street: Workers, Youth Organizations and Political Conﬂict in the Spanish Second

Republic,” European History Quarterly 34/2 (2004): 131–56.

27 See Sven Reichardt,

Faschistische Kampfbünde. Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen

Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002); Jens Petersen, “Jugend

und Jugendprotest im faschistischen Italien,” in Dowe, Jugendprotest; Tracy Koon, Believe,

Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1985).

28 Quoted in Radkau, “Die singende und die tote Jugend,” in Koebner, Janz, and Trommler,

Mythos Jugend.

29 Ibid, pp. 135–6.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Christina Benninghaus and Kerstin Kohtz, eds, “Sag mir, wo die Mädchen sind . . .”: Beiträge

zur Geschlechtergeschichte der Jugend (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999). Innovative collection explor-

ing the social history of girlhood and developing gendered perspectives on the history of

youth in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction,

1909–1944 (Oxford: Berg, 1996). Sheds light on futurist ideas and practices and on the

cooperation between futurism and early fascism.

the cult of youth 81

Commission Internationale d’Histoire des Mouvements Sociaux et des Structures Sociales, ed.,

La Jeunesse et ses mouvements. Inﬂuence sur l’évolution des sociétés aux XIX et XX siècles (Paris:

Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque, 1992). Essays in French or

English on a wide range of western and eastern European countries.

Dieter Dowe, ed., Jugendprotest und Generationenkonﬂikt in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert:

Deutschland, England, Frankreich und Italien im Vergleich (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft,

1986). Excellent contributions in English, German, French, and Italian on demographic,

economic, political, and cultural dimensions of youth protest, youth subcultures, and gen-

erational conﬂict in Europe from the late nineteenth century until the 1980s.

John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present

(New York: Academic Press, 1981). Good introduction concerned mainly with traditions

of masculine youth.

Journal of Contemporary History 5/1 (1970), special issue on “Generations in Conﬂict.”

Focuses on youth movements and student politics; articles on interwar France, Britain, and

Germany.

Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Frank Trommler, eds, “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit”:

Der Mythos Jugend (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985). Explorations of the cult of youth,

mostly in German-speaking countries but also in Italy and France.

Tracy Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Illuminating account of fascist efforts to organize

young people.

Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1962). Classic study of German youth movements from Wandervogel

origins until 1933.

Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds, A History of Young People in the West, vol. 2:

Stormy Evolution to Modern Times (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1997). Broad thematic

essays on working-class youth, secondary schooling, military experiences, and involvement

in revolutionary movements as well as contributions on fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Wendy Parkins, ed., Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship (Oxford: Berg,

2002). Includes three essays – on the Scouts and Guides, on Italian fascism, and the Spanish

Falange – concerned with “uniforming” in relation to politics, gender, citizenship, and

nationhood in interwar Europe.

Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conﬂict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in

Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Includes essays

analyzing pre-1914 youth movements, generation and gender in Weimar society and politics,

and the impact and legacy of the Hitler Youth and Bund Deutscher Mädel in the Nazi era

and beyond.

Heiko Stoff, Ewige Jugend. Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte

Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). Explores the quest for “youthfulness” and techniques of

“rejuvenation,” ranging from medical interventions to body culture.

Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Major study of the “generational thinking” found in the work of European intellectuals after

1900.

Chapter Six

Sexuality and the Psyche

Lesley A. Hall

During the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century there were radical developments in

Europe concerning ideas about sexuality and the psyche, as well as far-reaching

changes in sexual attitudes and behavior. New concepts arose concerning the nature

of the individual, as well as an increasing belief that issues concerning sex and

sexuality were important both in individual life and within society for reasons extend-

ing well beyond the “natural” purpose of reproduction. While the extent of the

dissemination of new mentalities during this period should not be exaggerated,

by the mid-century substantial and signiﬁcant differences can be perceived.

In many parts of Europe, alongside decline in traditional family and community

controls over sexual life, there was growing interest in interventions that were

not just about regulation or punishment of the illicit, but promoting and

improving “good” sex within licit relationships, through measures such as the provi-

sion of birth control, scientiﬁcally sound and healthy sex education, and marriage

guidance.

The historian’s understanding of these processes and phenomena is still very

partial. Only within the last thirty years or so has sexuality come to be perceived as

a legitimate topic for historical investigation, although there were some earlier studies

(and early sexologists drew heavily on history as well as anthropology and the life

sciences). Besides this issue of the general scholarly acceptability of the subject, there

are signiﬁcant problems of sources and methodology. It can often be difﬁcult to

uncover evidence for many aspects of sexual beliefs and activities, while the exact

relationship between, for example, codes of law or prescriptive texts dealing with

sexual behavior, and what people might actually have been doing, is far harder to

establish than merely recording or analyzing what these codes or texts said. Compared

to earlier periods the twentieth century has been relatively less studied, and there is

little in the way of synthetic studies (there are a number of overviews of what might

be described as the modernization of western sexuality, but these usually include

North America). Initial research was strongly driven by the concerns of the women’s

and gay liberation movements of the 1970s, and this had a signiﬁcant impact on the

topics so far addressed.

Certain countries or regions have had much more work done on them (the general

availability of the scholarship that exists to an Anglophone audience also presents a

problem). There are already signiﬁcant and sophisticated debates on changing sexual

mores in the UK and Germany, and on Russia both before and after the establish-

ment of the USSR, but there are entire countries and important regions for which

our knowledge remains extremely scanty for substantial periods of historical time.

What is apparent is that generalization is very difﬁcult and even relatively similar

nations may present quite distinct patterns. For example, although the Nordic coun-

tries are often regarded as a homogenous entity, recent work demonstrates that there

were in fact considerable variations between them. The invocation by the historian

Peter Baldwin of a particular “Scandinavian” approach to the control of sexually

transmitted and other contagious diseases is increasingly being demonstrated to be

about speciﬁcally Swedish solutions.

Even within discrete political entities there were

local and regional differences of attitude and approach: Roger Davidson’s work on

Scotland reveals rather different traditions and practices of medico-moral policing

from those of England.

Attitudes and practices were inﬂected by numerous other factors. The rural–urban

divide was one of these: well into the twentieth century commentators remarked on

the persistence in rural communities of the acceptance of premarital sex resulting in

marriage when pregnancy occurred. There were also differences between the kinds

of sexual opportunities offered by large metropolises with a long historical tradition

of license, such as Berlin, Paris, Budapest, and even London, and smaller, less cos-

mopolitan cities and towns. There were also signiﬁcantly different perspectives on

local moral climates between those who visited and those who lived there: northern

Europeans tended to depict the countries around the Mediterranean, especially Italy,

as laid-back paradises of (in particular homoerotic) hedonism, which was not the

perception of the natives.

While a division of Europe into regions of similar traditions and practices is pos-

sible (the Mediterranean, central and eastern Europe, the northwest, the Balkans,

etc.), any society within these groupings shows internal variations of considerable

signiﬁcance, such as the north–south divide in Italy. These areas bear some relation-

ship to speciﬁc religious afﬁliations – the Catholic Mediterranean, the Protestant

northwest, the Orthodox nations of eastern Europe, the inﬂuence of Islam in the

Balkans – but these are far from co-terminus, with coexisting groups, or substantial

minorities, of different faiths, within most parts of Europe. There were perceptible

differences of sexual culture in the various societies falling within one or other of

these broad religious divisions. Among Catholic nations, Ireland, for example, was

more similar in many respects to mainland Protestant Britain than to the Mediterranean

countries,

while the differences between the various forms of Protestantism could

be almost as great as that between Catholicism and Protestantism. Religion remained

a signiﬁcant factor in most societies throughout the period in question, even if its

impact was not usually manifested quite so formally as in the “pillarization” system

in the Netherlands. State support was provided for education, social welfare, etc., on

the basis of speciﬁc confessional afﬁliation, following a coalition, representing both

parties, overturning liberal secularist control of the Dutch government in the late

nineteenth century. In spite of their theological differences both churches took a

fairly similar (repressive) attitude to sexual matters.

sexuality and the psyche 83

84 lesley a. hall

Old traditions of honor and shame continued to inﬂuence attitudes and behavior

in many societies, independently of religious culture and belief.

Different ethnic

groups within particular states retained their own traditions. Economic factors also

played their part: Simon Szreter has suggested that the difference between the demo-

graphic patterns of Portugal and the rest of the “Mediterranean” countries was

because its maritime economy affected the status of women obliged to act as heads

of households.

The increasing entry of women into the workplace and their resultant

economic power (even if this only lasted for the few years prior to marriage) was

widely perceived by commentators throughout Europe to be having a deleterious

effect on conventional moral standards. Marriage patterns altered as improvements

in earning opportunities enabled men to get married at younger ages to women of

their own generation, instead of marriage being delayed for both sexes, or older men

marrying women many years their junior once they were securely established in their

professions or ownership of property – changes that had a signiﬁcant impact on power

dynamics within the marital relationship.

While the persistence of all manner of differences must be emphasized, changing

ideas and mores were nonetheless an international phenomenon demonstrating

numerous commonalities, if following a syncopated time scale in different countries

and regions. Certain writers enjoyed wide international inﬂuence, transcending the

culture in which their works were initially written: the Italian criminologist Cesare

Lombroso; the Swedish maternal feminist Ellen Key; the German and Austrian

psychiatrists and sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Otto

Weininger, and Sigmund Freud; the English sexologist Havelock Ellis and writer of

marriage advice Marie Stopes; the Swiss sexologist Auguste Forel; the Spanish

endocrinologist Maranon; the Dutch gynecologist Theodoor van de Velde. Several

studies of the development of a twentieth-century modern sexuality have looked at

the “west” as an entirety when considering these developments,

and in many ways

Europe formed part of an “Atlantic” system of the exchange of ideas and technology

in which North America was also a leading player (and received numerous émigré

European sex researchers and reformers after 1930).

While this process of exchange

might be represented by guardians of traditional morality as contamination from

immoral outside sources, in many cases these ideas were welcomed by individuals

and groups already thinking along similar lines. The rise of mass media of popular

culture, particularly the cinema, also made a signiﬁcant impact.

Historians and the popular imagination have often envisaged World War I as a

“Deluge” irrevocably changing the world in numerous ways, including sexual moral-

ity and the idea of the individual subject. However, the roots of many postwar

changes lay in the ﬁrst decade of the century, or even earlier: certain important strands

can be traced back at least to the Enlightenment. The nineteenth century saw the

rise of neo-Malthusian arguments for the control of population through contracep-

tion (and technical innovations making this more widely available), a social purity

movement strongly contesting the assumption that prostitution was an inevitable

social phenomenon demanded by the “natural” needs of men, and the rise of attempts

to apply science and reason to the analysis and understanding of human sexual life.

In this chapter I provide brief synoptic overviews of four speciﬁc aspects bringing

about “modern” sexuality in Europe during the years 1900–45: the creation of a

sexual science, and the associated or at least overlapping projects for the reform of

sexuality and the psyche 85

laws and attitudes; the new solutions arising to the age-old problem of sexually

transmitted diseases; issues of birth control and breeding; and changing social atti-

tudes and practices.

Making the Modern Sexual Subject

Much of the work on the rise of sexological science and the associated movement

for sexual reforms in law, medicine, and social attitudes has focused on homosexuality

(even before the appearance of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The History of

Sexuality in 1978, which was highly inﬂuential in establishing new terms of debate).

This was, of course, an important element in provoking the consideration of sexual

desires and activities which could not be subsumed to a model of the “normal”

concerned primarily with the reproduction of the species. However, the connection

between sex and reproduction had been queried at a theoretical level by neo-

Malthusians from the early nineteenth century (while restriction of births was prac-

ticed much earlier in some societies, notably France). Furthermore, the expansion of

European empires led to encounters with other cultures with very different concepts

and practices.

An additional impetus to the destabilization of assumptions about sexual drives

(particularly those of the male) as normal and natural and demanding social conces-

sions such as the institutionalized “Double Standard” of sexual morality (sexual laxity

in the female being severely penalized, whereas the male could sin with impunity),

was the rise of a “social purity” movement in the later nineteenth century. This argued

that far from prostitution being an inevitable social fact, and preferably regulated by

the state for reasons of good social order and public health, it was a manifestation of

a culture fostering immoral behavior which could be changed through a variety of

strategies. Born in the feminist campaign in Britain, led by the charismatic Josephine

Butler, against the Contagious Diseases Acts legalizing the medical examination and

incarceration of infected prostitutes in port and garrison towns, this movement struck

sympathetic chords elsewhere in Europe. If social purity at one level led to campaigns

of censorship and repression, at another it was problematizing topics previously taken

as natural and “the ways things had always been,” and alongside the vigorous sup-

pression of “obscenity,” it advocated disseminating healthy sound scientiﬁc knowl-

edge about the mechanics of sex and reproduction. Thus it was creating new discourses

about sexuality that were not only not restricted to doctors, lawyers, and agents of

government policing, but in many countries were particularly elaborated by women

working with voluntary, extra-governmental agencies.

There has been vigorous debate over Foucault’s claim for a decisive rupture

between acts and identity around 1870, with historians presenting evidence that well

before then men with same-sex desires were conceiving of themselves as individuals

of a particular kind and part of a like-minded group, and also pointing to the role

played by the testimony of “inverts,” “urnings,” “intermediates,” and “members of

the third sex” in generating the deﬁnitions taken up by medicine and science. The

extent to which Foucault dismissed the importance of legal regulation in driving the

conceptualization of homosexuality as an unwilled identity, rather than a voluntary

sin, applied to a much greater extent to France, where private acts were considered

outside the domain of the law under the Code Napoleon (however, there are

86 lesley a. hall

indications that laws against public indecency, corruption of minors, etc., were dis-

proportionately applied to homosexual offenders). In countries such as the UK and

Germany, where there were harsh legal penalties – the Criminal Law Amendment

Act of 1885 and Paragraph 175 of the Prussian Penal Code, which applied to the

whole of Germany following uniﬁcation – there was a signiﬁcant stimulus to make

the case for same-sex desire and activities neither a sin nor a crime. It also provided

the circumstances for high-proﬁle and extensively reported trials, such as those of

Oscar Wilde in London in 1895, and Philip von Eulenberg, a close friend and advisor

of the Kaiser, and other members of his highly placed social circle, in Germany in

1907/8, bringing the entire issue before a far wider audience. It is therefore perhaps

not remarkable that pioneering studies and polemics emerged within these two

societies.

Attempts to explain “contrary sexual instincts” by physiology or psychiatry emerged

in the German-speaking world during the 1860s. During the following decades both

German and French doctors were gathering cases and essaying deﬁnitions over the

whole range of “perversions”: “fetishism” as a category was established by the French

psychologist Alfred Binet in 1887. In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing published the

ﬁrst edition of his compendium Psychopathia Sexualis, which went through numerous

expanded editions and was translated into many different languages before his death

in 1902. It remained an inﬂuential text, widely read by the public, though intended

as a medical textbook. The Dutch historian of sexuality Harry Oosterhuis has recently

made a persuasive case that its reputation as a mere catalog of stigmatization is

ill-deserved. In Stepchildren of Nature he argues that Krafft-Ebing’s detailed case

histories provided a voice for (in particular) the “male inverts” who consulted him,

and that their accounts had a substantial impact on his ideas – for example, he was

involved in the campaign to repeal Paragraph 175.

Meanwhile, in Britain, John

Addington Symonds published A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern

Ethics for private circulation, and collaborated with the medically qualiﬁed Havelock

Ellis to produce a substantial volume on Sexual Inversion (Symonds’ name was

withdrawn by his executors following his early death, and the volume as published

was prosecuted for obscenity in 1898, leading Ellis to publish further volumes of his

magnum opus, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, outside the UK). Ellis’s friend and

colleague Edward Carpenter also addressed the issue of “Homogenic Love,” from

the point of view of radical utopian socialism, and published a book-length study,

The Intermediate Sex, in 1909, as well as other inﬂuential works.

In 1897 Magnus Hirschfeld founded in Berlin the ﬁrst organization to campaign

for the rights of the homosexual. Hirschfeld remained a signiﬁcant and inﬂuential

ﬁgure on the entire European sex research and reform scene, combining research

and theorizing about sex with activism, until his death in 1935. In 1919 he estab-

lished a major research institute in Berlin, which attracted international renown. It

was closed, its important collections broken up and destroyed, and Hirschfeld burnt

in efﬁgy by the Nazis in 1933. Hirschfeld’s theories were based on a concept of

inborn “intermediacy,” in which masculine and feminine characteristics were com-

bined. Though this was a popular way of conceptualizing homosexuality, a number

of other activists at this date, such as Adolf Brand and his group around the journal

Der Eigen, constructed a model of the homosexual as hyper-masculine rather than

effeminate.

Otto Weininger, in his inﬂuential work Sex and Character (1903,

sexuality and the psyche 87

English translation 1906), posited the theory that all individuals, male or female,

were in fact made up of differing proportions of male or female characteristics, which

he elaborated to advocate marriages between individuals whose balances would add

up to one man and one woman.

There were some discussions of same-sex relations between women in sexological

works, but usually on the basis of far more scanty materials and case histories. In

most European countries there was no legislation against sexual acts between women

(which might not even count as adultery for the purposes of divorce), and most cases

which came to the attention of the courts related to the speciﬁc subgroup of “passing

women” living as men and married to women. “Romantic friendships” and “Boston

marriages” between women were often regarded with approval, or at least without

explicit condemnation, partly, no doubt, because of the pervasive belief that sex in

the absence of a penis was not a possibility. Historians have, however, uncovered

numerous instances of women who did experience erotic emotions towards other

women (though the extent to which these were in any sense consummated remains

a matter of speculation). Whereas there were developed homosexual male subcultures

in many European urban centers, and networks of male prostitution, female homo-

sexuality was much more associated with private spaces, such as the notorious salon

of Natalie Barney in interwar Paris, although there were increasingly some bars and

clubs in major cities catering to this clientele. Texts such as Radclyffe Hall’s novel

The Well of Loneliness (1928) therefore constituted important moments for the dis-

semination of ideas of lesbian identity and the existence of female homosexuality.

Much analysis of homosexuality during this period was trying to explain why

those with same-sex desires did not conform to the “natural” direction of sexual

desire. Sigmund Freud, however, while seeing libido as the basic driving force of the

human personality, was perhaps the ﬁrst person to consider that “the exclusive sexual

interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating” rather than

“a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.”

He claimed that “the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered

together.”

His arguments for the underlying sexual basis for human emotions and

activities, and his theories generally, attracted a wide and international group of

disciples, though dissenters also appeared from an early stage of the evolution of

psychoanalysis, from C. G. Jung who contested the overarching importance of sexual

instincts, to left-wing radicals such as Wilhelm Stekel and Wilhelm Reich, who

combined their belief in unconscious drives with political activism, and saw economic

and social factors as signiﬁcant in the formation of the psyche. The rise, development,

and internal politics of psychoanalysis, as well as Freud himself, have been the

subject of a vast literature. Less attention has been so far given to the various other

theorists and movements gathered under the contemporary heading of the “New

Psychology.”

An entirely different approach to the problems of human sexuality looked to the

chemicals secreted by the glands rather than the recesses of the human psyche for

an understanding of, and solutions to, problems of sexual desire and functioning.

Beginning with the “rejuvenation” experiments undertaken by the eminent Franco-

American physiologist Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard in France during the 1890s,

and given contemporary discoveries on the role of the adrenals and the thyroid gland

on bodily functioning, the potential for a biochemical solution to all sex difﬁculties