Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
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88 lesley a. hall
attracted a number of researchers. For several decades investigations proceeded on
the assumption that there were “male” and “female” hormones peculiar to each
gender, and that increasing or decreasing these in the individual would rejuvenate
sexual desires, change inverted orientation, and provide a simple fix for these complex
problems. A number of treatments supposed to restore youthful vigor, especially in
the sexual realm, were being practiced during the interwar period. Russian physiolo-
gist Serge Voronoff’s “monkey-gland” operations (transplanting the testicles of
monkeys and other animals into humans) in Algiers, and Viennese physiologist Eugen
Steinach’s rejuvenation operations through ligation of the vas deferens, attracted a
worldwide clientele. On a more sober level an international cadre of researchers
pursued research into the secretions of the gonads, finally reaching the startling and
counterintuitive conclusion that both men and women had testosterone and estrogen
circulating in their systems, though in different proportions. This seemed to hold
out (what turned out to be chimerical) possibilities for the readjustment of homo-
sexual desires. This research on the sexual hormones did however eventually lead to
the discovery of hormonal contraceptives several decades later.
15
These projects of research and investigation were largely undertaken by individuals
who were also committed to the reform of existing laws and attitudes. Besides locally
based organizations such as Hirschfeld’s Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees
(founded in 1897) and the British Society for the Study of Sexual Psychology
(founded in 1913), there were numerous international initiatives. Besides those spe-
cifically dedicated to particular aspects of the struggle, such as the prevention of
venereal diseases or the promotion of birth control, a broadly based World League
for Sexual Reform was officially inaugurated at a 1928 congress in Copenhagen, but
dated its existence from the 1921 Berlin First International Conference for Sexual
Reform on the Basis of Sexual Science. Subsequent congresses were held in London
in 1929, Vienna in 1930, and Brno in 1932; a projected Moscow congress was
deferred, and then never occurred. There were several vigorous national sections.
Because of the spottiness of surviving resources (the central records were destroyed
during the Nazi attack on Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute) relatively little is known about
the League, its activities, connections, and influence, though it is suggested that
political differences caused its break-up after Hirschfeld’s death. There was also Albert
Moll’s Internationale Gesellschaft für Sexualfortschung (INGESE), which held two
conferences, in Berlin in 1926 and in London in 1930, and claimed (somewhat inac-
curately) to be “purely scientific” in its ethos. Sex reform was, however, but one of
the victims of the political upheavals in Europe during the 1930s and the subsequent
outbreak of war, and sex research was also seriously affected.
16
New Solutions to Ancient Afflictions
While sexologists were evolving new ways of thinking about sex, doctors and govern-
ments were struggling with an age-old threat to public health. Throughout the latter
decades of the nineteenth century the sexually transmitted diseases had come to seem
an ever greater menace to the wellbeing of individuals and society. The long-term
results of syphilitic infection in physical and mental debility were becoming more
apparent, as were its congenital effects. As the result of the rise of bacteriology and
the identification of the gonococcus as the causative organism in gonorrhea, this no
sexuality and the psyche 89
longer seemed like a mild affliction largely affecting young men (in some European
cultures the first dose of “clap” was considered a male rite of passage well into the
twentieth century), but was implicated in a large number of cases of hitherto inex-
plicable infertility, and also responsible for neonatal blindness. Existing treatments
might eradicate symptoms, but did not “cure” either disease: gonorrhea tends to be
a self-limiting condition, and the early stages of syphilis usually remit with or without
treatment. The use of mercury, the standard specific for syphilis, produced its own
short and long-term effects on health. The outlook became even more pessimistic in
the first decade of the twentieth century, with the identification of the spirochete as
the microbiological cause of syphilis, and the development of the diagnostic Wasserman
test in 1905, which revealed the extent of unsuspected infection within the popula-
tion and the syphilitic origin of many of the later manifestations.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century the traditional solution to venereal
disease control by the medical policing of prostitutes was being increasingly criticized.
While many of these attacks were driven by moral and religious objections to making
vice “safe” for sinners, there was also a recognition that the system was not working.
Even if inspections could have reliably identified infected women, these only took
place at intervals, providing significant windows of opportunity for the women to
become infected and to infect clients. However, accounts of inspection in practice
suggest that any symptom not flagrantly apparent to the naked eye would have eluded
the fast and seldom efficient examinations (often undertaken with scant attention
to the possibilities of cross-infection), while women with non-venereal discharges
might find themselves incarcerated for treatment. Prostitutes and brothel-keepers also
had traditional methods of concealing signs of infection. In addition, there was also
growing awareness that there were even more “clandestine” and part-time prostitutes
operating outside brothels and licensed houses, not subject to even minimal medical
inspection.
What to do about this pressing problem was not, however, immediately clear,
although there were two major international medical conferences on VD in
Brussels in 1899 and 1902. The moral reform of society through the censorship of
obscenity, better sex education, and similar methods was at best a long-term approach
to an urgent problem. Some authorities advocated premarital health certificates to
ensure that men who had been careless in their bachelor days did not carry disease
to their wives and offspring: this raised anxieties about what happened if the
groom could not obtain a clean bill of health. The importance of greater awareness
of the dangers of infection was emphasized, but actually making European
populations aware of this threat tended to fall foul of existing obscenity legislation.
Propaganda works such as Brieux’s play Les Avariés (Damaged Goods) were
extensively translated but did not always gain exposure to wide, rather than select
and already converted, audiences.
There was a huge leap forward in 1909 when German pharmacological researcher
Paul Ehrlich unveiled in Berlin his “magic bullet,” the arsphenamine compound sal-
varsan 606. However, while this held out promises of a new therapeutic dawn, there
were significant issues over best practice of administration. The drug was periodically
injected until a negative Wasserman was obtained (this normally took about two
years), but some specialists suggested variations, differences of dosage, intermitting
other drugs, and there was no standard opinion. The drug was highly toxic and
90 lesley a. hall
produced undesirable side-effects. Bringing the remedy to the patient also presented
difficulties.
Many countries retained systems of regulation long after any plausible argument
could be made for the public health benefits involved. France did not shut down its
brothels until after World War II, and regulated prostitution was not abolished in
Italy until 1959. Systems introduced for ensuring that the infected availed themselves
of treatment also differed. The Lex Veneris passed in Sweden in 1918 was stringent,
involving compulsion in certain cases, indeed might be considered as regulation
applied to the entire population, whereas the “British system,” established in 1917,
relied on providing accessible clinics for free, confidential, expert treatment (an ideal
somewhat compromised in practice). In the Netherlands the brothels were abolished
in 1911, while alongside VD clinics advice centers provided ethical-religious, rather
than medical or sanitary, instruction. In Germany, although medical pressure groups
were active from the 1900s, new regulations based on a public health rather than
medico-moral policing model were not fully implemented until 1927.
The outbreak of World War I caused substantial attention to be paid to the problem
of venereal infections among serving troops. Some combatant nations stuck to the
traditional expedient of military brothels with regularly inspected prostitutes. Others
struggled to find other solutions, from lectures of moral exhortation to the troops, to
the provision of early treatment facilities, to the issue of prophylactic packs (these
might contain condoms, but at this period often consisted of chemical disinfectants).
One by-product of the prewar developments in the understanding of syphilis meant
that serving soldiers and sailors were more likely to be diagnosed and reliably treated
than in any other era of history, and while a major explosion in infection might have
been expected after the end of the war, this was far less than anticipated. In most
European countries venereal disease rates declined during the interwar period.
This did not mean that VD disappeared as a subject of concern. Clinics and advice
centers were established. Medical and social purity and hygiene organizations mounted
extensive campaigns of public education and information, through exhibitions, lec-
tures, campaigns for sex education of children, posters, and the deployment of new
media such as film and radio. The level of acceptance and openness differed widely.
The Soviet regime in Russia inaugurated a poster campaign aimed at presenting the
subject in vivid and simple terms to the populace. The National Council for
Combatting Venereal Disease of the UK, however, found its film shows often fell
foul of local councils’ restrictive policies on cinematic displays. The Spanish govern-
ment’s Antivenereal Executive Committee produced a fictionalized documentary, La
Terrible Lección, in 1928, aimed at enlightening the public and encouraging them to
seek treatment, but there is little evidence about the context within which this was
shown or responses to it. In spite of medical support for a public health approach
from the 1920s onwards, regulation was not abolished by the Second Republic until
1935. Some countries, including Spain and Italy, issued prophylaxis – which might
consist of condoms, otherwise anathema in these Catholic societies – to their armed
forces. There was appearing (though far from universally) a concept of the responsible
citizen who, if he did indulge in promiscuous sex, took precautions to avoid infec-
tion. A medical breakthrough in the treatment of gonorrhea came in 1935 with the
introduction of the first antibiotics, the sulphonamides, effective against an ailment
previously treated by time- and labor-intensive local applications.
sexuality and the psyche 91
Rates of venereal infection soared once more with the outbreak of World War II,
a phenomenon also affecting neutral countries. On the whole, the approach was
increasingly about exhorting and enabling members of the fighting forces to use
prophylactics or avail themselves of opportunities for early treatment: this might
involve the direction of limited supplies of rubber to condom manufacturers. A sig-
nificant medical advance was the Allied development of mass production of penicillin,
which could cure syphilis within weeks rather than the long months required by
salvarsan: however, at first, syphilis came very low on the list of priorities for its
allocation.
By 1945, though the rate of venereal disease infection remained high, there was
an optimism that in the light of these new therapeutic developments, syphilis and
gonorrhea were “dying diseases.”
17
Birth and Breeding
During this period the population of Europe was declining overall. The pattern
was not uniform and there were significant differences both between and within the
various nations. The extent to which the drop in family size was because of the use
of contraceptives is a matter of considerable debate, but the most recent research
indicates that practices varied widely, between couples using relatively effective
methods of birth control (either withdrawal or appliances) at one end of the spectrum
and those practicing complete or partial abstention from sexual relations at the other.
Contraceptive appliances available at the beginning of the twentieth century consisted
of condoms (although the vulcanization of rubber in the 1840s had made these
cheaper to produce and more accessible, until the advent of the latex process in the
1930s they remained thick and awkward), spermicidal pessaries and ointments, and
female occlusive pessaries such as the “Dutch cap,” invented by the German physician
Wilhelm Mensinga, but widely publicized by the Dutch birth control campaigner
Dr Aletta Jacobs, and many variants on the basic principle of excluding sperm from
the uterus by blocking off the cervix. Early versions of the intra-uterine device were
expensive and required initial fitting (and often ongoing checks) by a doctor and
thus, although the most reliable form of contraception available at the time, were
available only to a very limited section of the public. There was a pervasive belief in
a “safe period,” but until the relationship between menstruation and ovulation was
established by the independent researches of Kyusake Ogino in Japan and Hermann
Knaus in Austria in 1929, the calculations were made on the basis of wildly mislead-
ing assumptions. Abortion was widely practiced among women in probably all
European countries, but actual statistics for this secret and private undertaking are
hard to ascertain.
The neo-Malthusian case for family limitation on economic grounds had been
around since the early nineteenth century, and there were Malthusian organizations
in a number of countries, though these were seldom large. By the early twentieth
century there was also a case being made for the benefits of spacing pregnancies to
maternal and infant welfare. However, artificial contraception was not always regarded
with approval: those such as the German feminist and socialist Helene Stöcker and
her Bund für Mutterschutz, who advocated not only restriction of births but the
lifting of penalties on the unmarried mother, were in a small radical minority.
92 lesley a. hall
Movements for birth control had a complex relationship with pronatalist attitudes.
Many states, or influential groups within them, were profoundly concerned about
the perceptible decline in population. In some nations these anxieties were quantita-
tive, whereas in others there was also a concern over the quality of the population
and fears that the “fit” members of society were not breeding enough, while the
“unfit” were over-breeding. These distinctions tend to map to a considerable extent
to Catholic and Protestant nations respectively, though it would be useful to have
further studies of regional attitudes in Germany or Switzerland. Eugenics, the idea
that it was possible to improve the standard of the population by attempting control
over the quality of offspring through selective breeding, is often supposed to have
reached its logical culmination in the excesses of the German Third Reich. However,
the idea appealed across the political spectrum, being embraced by Spanish anarchists
and Russian Bolsheviks as well as German and Italian fascists, British liberals, and
Scandinavian social democrats. Its attractions owed much to its association with
modernity and the promises of applied science. What “eugenics” meant in any par-
ticular context and at any given moment varied enormously. Particularly in the earlier
years of the century, there was a blurring between strictly hereditary (genetic) and
congenital disorders (first among which was syphilis). In certain cultures there was
an explicit or implicit Lamarckian spin (i.e., a persistence of the idea that acquired
characteristics could be transmitted across generations) to eugenic beliefs, leading to
programs based on the possibility of improving the stock of the nation through
environmental and educational strategies. There was also often a simplistic belief in
the hereditability of specific qualities, as opposed to physical or mental conditions,
both good and bad, and in the mechanism by which genetic factors were transmitted,
even after the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s studies had revealed the complexity
of the process. In several European countries programs of sterilization of the “unfit”
were put in motion (and persisted well beyond 1945).
Governmental attitudes towards the practice of contraception differed, though
none regarded it with enthusiasm. Several nations (e.g., France and Italy during the
1920s) outlawed the dissemination of devices and propaganda completely (French
neo-Malthusians were imprisoned), and it was seriously restricted under the Dutch
laws of 1911. Sale of birth control devices was not illegal in the UK, but advertising
could fall foul of the obscenity laws, which were vague enough that no one knew
precisely where the boundary between the obscene and non-obscene lay. During the
interwar period movements for the advocacy of contraception and provision of facili-
ties developed in several countries, though the rise of advice centers and clinics in
Weimar Germany was brought to an abrupt halt by the Nazis. There were also dis-
cussions about legalizing abortion, and in some countries this took place, though
usually hedged about with restrictions. The Soviet Republic introduced relatively
accessible abortions in the 1920s, but this measure (like other sexual reforms of
the early revolutionary period) was severely restricted during the 1930s. Legislation
against contraception perhaps suggests that, at least in the perception of govern-
ments, it was being widely employed. In 1930 the pope issued the encyclical Casti
Connubii, hardening Catholic teachings on the matter by explicit condemnations of
birth control and abortion, and also artificial insemination.
Although medical and other authorities spoke out about the dangers to health of
coitus interruptus (withdrawal), it is probable that this, and the condom (the most
sexuality and the psyche 93
widely available device, since it was also sold as a prophylactic against VD), remained
the most significant forms of contraception. The growing birth control organizations
in the UK and 1920s Germany advocated female pessaries, as more reliable and less
obtrusive, but for full effectiveness these needed to be fitted by a medical specialist,
and presented other problems, both practical and emotional. In theory Ogino and
Knaus’s discoveries made the calculation of a safe period more accurate, but the
rhythm method was still unreliable enough to be known as “Vatican roulette” (it was
the only method acceptable for Catholics).
Changing Lives
The extent to which patterns of social behavior around sex changed during this period
should not be exaggerated. Manifestations running counter to traditional and con-
ventional expectations were much more likely to be noticed and discussed, while for
most life went on much as it always had. Two world wars had significant repercus-
sions on sexual life, but it is debatable whether phenomena occurring during times
of wide-reaching upheaval were enduring. After the wars were over, many just wanted
to turn back to the status quo, not that this was always possible.
One particular concern aroused by the war periods was the entry of women into
the workforce, particularly in occupations previously undertaken by men. While this
was perceived as particularly disruptive of gender norms, in most European societies
throughout this period women were entering the employment market in greater or
lesser numbers (except when specific regimes tried to return women to the home),
but certainly to a previously unknown degree. These women were often regarded as
a dangerous and disruptive force, violating the previously clear (or assumed to be
clear) boundaries between the good woman and the prostitute. This is not perhaps
surprising when many occupations previously available to women had been associated
with clandestine prostitution, or the necessity to resort to seasonal prostitution. Social
purity organizations noted that working women were frequently vulnerable to sexual
harassment by the men with whom they worked. Being an earner, if only for a short
period before marriage, did have an impact on women and existing sexual mores.
Having money of their own might give them some independence from their families
(though the vast majority continued to live at home until marriage), and at least
some experience of the world outside domestic confines.
Particularly after World War I, commentators wrote of New Women and flappers
who were both “unfeminine” (with their fashionably short hair and the new styles)
and also sexually transgressive. The extent to which young women were actually
experimenting with premarital sex is very hard to ascertain. There was a decline in
the institutionalized chaperonage of young unmarried women in many societies,
though some groups still continued relatively strict surveillance over marriageable
daughters. However, responsibility for maintaining control over her chastity fell
increasingly on the woman herself and led to the evolution of new codes of manners
to govern interactions between the sexes. Rates of illegitimacy varied widely in dif-
ferent areas of Europe, and there do not seem to have been significant changes during
the first half of the twentieth century, except during the wars and their aftermath.
While there was some rhetoric about “Free Motherhood” – women deliberately
bearing children outside wedlock – in radical circles, both as a protest against the
94 lesley a. hall
oppressive institution of marriage, and also, after World War I, to enable them to
experience maternity if not marriage, this does not seem to have been a demographi-
cally significant element. It was claimed that immoral modern girls knew all about
contraceptives, and thus were evading conception, but given the problems of access
to birth control, and the unreliability of existing devices (experienced even by married
women) this seems unlikely on any large scale. Cornelie Usborne has pointed out
that in Germany most illegal abortions were performed on married, rather than
single, women.
18
If young women were engaging in sexual activity, in many cases this
was probably “petting” rather than full penetrative sex. The extent to which first-born
children were conceived prior to their parents’ marriages suggests the continuation
of old traditions whereby a consummated sexual relationship was associated with
serious courtship intended to lead to marriage, rather than a revolutionary practice
of sexual liberation.
Perhaps the most noteworthy change of sexual mores during the first few decades
of the twentieth century was not about extramarital relationships but about a new
vision of marriage, as an institution both more companionate in nature and more
highly eroticized. This vision was probably most widely disseminated in the works of
the British botanist and sex reformer Marie Stopes, and of the Dutch gynecologist
Theodoor van de Velde. In 1918 Stopes published Married Love, a short guide to
erotic bliss within egalitarian marriage, embedding detailed physiological information
within poetic emotional appeals. The importance of birth control to this vision
was underlined by her issue of Wise Parenthood, a guide to what she considered the
best methods of contraception, later the same year. These, and her subsequent
works pursuing the theme, were translated into many European languages and
enjoyed enormous sales. Van de Velde’s Ideal Marriage was first published in German
in 1926, and an English translation in 1928. Again, it combined detailed instructions
on the best means of performing coitus to the satisfaction of both parties, with ide-
alistic rhetoric on the importance of monogamic marriage, with extensive quotations
from poets and philosophers. Underlying these works was the idea that a sexually
gratifying marriage was not only good for the individuals concerned but of wider
social benefit by improving the health of the wife and stopping the husband from
straying, acquiring venereal diseases, or breaking up other men’s marriages, and also
by modeling a sound and solid relationship for their children.
As one can see from the immense international correspondence received by Stopes,
this vision was clearly one for which the world was ready and waiting. Anne-Marie
Sohn has revealed through her examination of letters received by the French Abbé
Viollet of the Association de Mariage Chrétien that this ideal was shared by the kind
of devout practicing Catholics who were attracted to his writings. It remained prob-
lematic for many women to whom the idea that sex might be pleasurable for them
was almost literally unthinkable, their highest praise for a husband being: “He bothers
me very seldom.”
19
A subject which has been much less studied by historians than behavior and expec-
tations of women is the question of changing attitudes and behavior of the “normal”
heterosexual male in Europe. Some attention has been given to the effects of war,
and the emasculating effects of injury, physical or mental (“shell-shock”), or the
psychic effects of national defeat.
20
However, there is some evidence that men’s atti-
tudes and behavior were, at least in some parts of Europe, changing, at least partly
sexuality and the psyche 95
in response to the altered position of women and the new power dynamics that
generated. There were occasional, somewhat anecdotal, indications that men were
eschewing prostitutes for non-commercial relationships including some element of
personal emotion. The letters received by such authorities as Stopes and Viollet reveal
how many men longed for a fulfilling marital relationship. Much work, however,
remains to be done more generally on the “normal straight male.”
21
There was an increasing perception of sexuality as an area in which interventions
might be appropriate for the better maintenance of chastity before marriage and good
relations between husband and wife afterwards. Various forms of sex education devel-
oped in different European cultures. Quite often denominational bodies anxious to
preserve marriages were active in this field and in the development of marriage guid-
ance and counseling services. In many cases those involved in these initiatives drew
on ideas deriving from sexology and psychoanalysis.
In the years following 1945 many of the advances of the interwar period towards
new attitudes to sexuality and less traditional forms of behavior seemed to have been
stopped or reversed. However, although the 1950s appeared to manifest a return to
old-established conventions, many of the issues ventilated during the first half of the
century were still seething under the surface, to reemerge in the ferment of the late
1960s. The emphasis on marriage as an individual rather than a family or community
controlled relationship, the decline in family size, and the gradual percolation through
society of ideas about tolerance for difference first voiced decades before, all signified
major differences from fifty years previously.
NOTES
1 Peter Baldwin,
Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
2 Roger Davidson,
Dangerous Liaisons: A Social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-
Century Scotland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).
3 See Bruno P. F. Wanrooij, “Italy: Sexuality, Morality and Public Authority,” in
Sexual
Cultures in Europe: National Histories, Franz Eder, Lesley Hall, and Gert Hekma, eds
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 114–37.
4 See Tony Fahey, “Religion and Sexual Culture in Ireland,” in Eder, Hall, and Hekma,
Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 53–70.
5 See Harry Oosterhuis, “The Netherlands: Neither Prudish Nor Hedonistic,” in Eder,
Hall, and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 71–90.
6 Introduction, Eder, Hall, and Hekma,
Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 1–26.
7 Simon Szreter, “Falling Fertilities and Changing Sexualities,” in Eder, Hall, and Hekma,
Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 159–94.
8 For example, Vern L. Bullough,
Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New
York: Basic Books, 1994); Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (New
York: Twayne, 1996); Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999).
9 See Anita Grossman,
Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion
Law Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 166–88.
10 See Lesley A. Hall, “Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social Purity and
Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Gender and History 16 (2004): 36;
96 lesley a. hall
Natalia Gerodetti, Modernising Sexualities: Towards a Socio-Historical Understanding of
Sexualities in the Swiss Nation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005).
11 Harry Oosterhuis,
Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry and the Making of
Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
12 See Gert Hekma, “Same-Sex Relations among Men in Europe, 1700–1990,” in Eder,
Hall, and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 79–103.
13 See Chandak Sengoopta,
Otto Weininger: Sex, Science and Self in Imperial Vienna
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
14 Sigmund Freud,
Three Lectures on the Theory of Sexuality (first published 1905, English
translation by James Strachey for the Standard Edition 1952) (Pelican Freud Library 7:
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 45, 57n, 59.
15 See Chandak Sengoopta,
Glands of Life: Gonads, Sex, and the Body 1850–1950 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
16 See Ralf Dose, “The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches,” in
Eder, Hall, and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 242–59.
17 This section is largely based on the introduction and chapters 2–8 of Roger Davidson
and Lesley Hall, eds, Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since
1870 (London: Routledge, 2001).
18 Cornelie Usborne, “ ‘Pregnancy is the woman’s active service’: Pronatalism in Germany
during the First World War,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe
1914–1918, Richard Wall and Jay Winter, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), pp. 389–416.
19 Anne-Marie Sohn, “French Catholics between Abstinence and ‘appeasement of lust’,
1930–1950,” in Eder, Hall, and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe, pp. 233–54; Hera
Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lesley A. Hall, “Eyes Tightly Shut, Lying
Rigidly Still and Thinking of England? British Women and Sex from Marie Stopes to
Hite,” in Sexual Pedagogies: Teaching Sex in America, Britain, and Australia, 1879–2000,
Michelle Martin and Claudia Nelson, eds (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 53–71.
20 See Joanna Bourke,
Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War
(London: Reaktion Books, 1996); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, Floods,
Bodies, History and vol. 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1987, 1989).
21 See Lesley A. Hall,
Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900–1950 (Oxford: Polity Press,
1991).
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Anyone interested in pursuing this subject is directed to “SexBiblio: bibliography of the history
of western sexuality,” online at: www.univie.ac.at/Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Sexbibl/search.
html
Edward M. Brecher, The Sex Researchers (London: André Deutsch, 1970). Though written
from a very 1970s sexual liberationist perspective, includes useful short essays on a number
of significant figures.
Vern L. Bullough, Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New York: Basic Books,
1994). Somewhat US-ocentric, but a helpful overview.
Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European
Society since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2001). There is a paucity of current scholarship on
sexuality and the psyche 97
several countries of significant importance to this subject, and more needs to be known
about international initiatives, but this volume provides an overview of attempts to deal with
the issue in a range of European cultures.
Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996). A useful,
broad overview. The perspective is North American, but Europe is included.
Franz Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) and Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in
Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). These two volumes provide
national overviews of (mainly) western Europe, 1800–2000, brief analyses of transnational
phenomena such as the evolution of sexology and international sex reform organizations,
and thematic essays on dangerous sexualities, stigmatized sexualities, and sex and
reproduction.
John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, The European Experience of Declining
Fertility, 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Essays by demographic historians on the question of the fertility decline that formed such
a feature of Europe in the twentieth century.
Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). This elu-
cidates the trajectory of changing sexual attitudes and mores over a broad front, registering
both changes and the (sometimes occluded) continuities, and has a strong awareness of
particular national traditions and idiosyncrasies inflecting specific developments.
Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry and the Making of Sexual
Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). A valuable study on one of the pio-
neers of sexology and his international influence.
George Robb and Nancy Erber, eds, Disorder in the Court: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the
Turn of the Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Illuminates the effect of both specific
legal systems and differing moral concerns on the trials of sexual crimes in the UK, France,
and Germany.
Vernon Rosario, Science and Homosexualities (London: Routledge, 1997). Although much of
the volume is North American in its orientation, several essays address European aspects of
the subject.
Richard Wall and Jay Winter, eds, The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe
1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Essays on the impact of World
War I on families and family life.
Cas Wouters, Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000 (London:
Sage, 2004). An overview of the transformations in courtship behavior during this period,
comparing handbooks of manners from the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and North
America.