Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950
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Overview
Reforming Sex reconstructs the complicated history of a movement that has been romanticized as the harbinger of 1960s sexual radicalism and demonized as a precursor to Nazi racial policy, but mostly buried and obscured by Nazi bookburnings and repression. Relying on a broad range of sources -- from police reports, films and personal interviews to sex manuals unearthed from library basements and secondhand bookstores -- the book analyzes a remarkable mass mobilization during the turbulent and innovative Weimar years of doctors and laypeople for women's right to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education. The book also follows Weimar sex reformers into the Third Reich, to exile around the world, and into both the Eastern and Western zones of postwar Germany, demonstrating not only how deeply rooted eugenics ideology and American and Bolshevik models of modernity were in the Weimar movement, but also the drastic rupture between sex reform notions of social health and National Socialist population policy.Synopsis
Reforming Sex reconstructs the complicated history of a movement that has been romanticized as the harbinger of 1960s sexual radicalism and demonized as a precursor to Nazi racial policy, but mostly buried and obscured by Nazi bookburnings and repression. Relying on a broad range of sources—from police reports, films and personal interviews to sex manuals unearthed from library basements and secondhand bookstores—the book analyzes a remarkable mass mobilization during the turbulent and innovative Weimar years of doctors and laypeople for women's right to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education.