Sex and modernity in the long twentieth century

For many radicals from the 1890s onwards, overthrowing Victorian sexual repression seemed to be a marker of the new modern way of thinking, but until after the First World War, they remained an avant-garde fighting against a hostile culture. In Germany, Helene Stocker espoused the theory that sexual desire was a creative force for humanity. Following the philosophy of monism, she believed that body and soul could not be separated and that to repress the sexual drive therefore harmed the mind. Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist, argued that in ‘exalted individuals’ sexual desire evoked ‘noble feelings, and love of everything which is high and beautiful in life’, although she did see women’s primary role as motherhood. In Britain, Edward Carpenter and Stella Browne challenged conventional principles of middle-class morality. In the pages of their publication, the Adult and the Freewoman, they debated the idea of ‘free unions’, monogamy, masturbation and heterosexuality. Younger feminists were no longer content with the older generation’s rather ethereal ideal of spiritual passion and wanted to explore the concept of female sexual pleasure.54

These radicals often turned to the works of the sexologists to justify their cause. However, the sexologists did not influence popular culture or policy until the inter-war years. Many of their works were censored or were so expensive they had a limited circulation, and Anne-Marie Sohn has found that their ideas and terminology did not trickle down to ordinary people.55 Nonetheless, for those in avant-garde circles the sexologists pioneered the open discussion of sex, especially female sexuality. But sexology could be problematic as well as inspiring for women.

Sexologists decisively rejected religious assumptions about sexuality and instead studied sex scientifically. By categorising anatomical variations and by insisting on the centrality of sexual selection to evolution, Darwin strongly influenced many sexologists. They were also influenced by Geddes and Thompson, two biologists who went even further than Darwin to posit males and females as fundamentally different, the former active, the latter passive. This focus on biological categorisation also paralleled contemporary efforts to categorise human anatomy by race. But feminists also used Darwinian ideas for their own ends. Some English feminists argued that women should use their sexual power to select men of a higher morality and therefore improve the human race. Helene Stocker ‘welcomed’ Darwinism as a refutation of the doctrine of original sin. ‘If sexual desire was necessary and hereditary, then how could it be sinful?’ Sexologists differentiated between the drive for procreation and what they variously categorised as the drive for pleasure or relationships.56 As a result, they could acknowledge women’s sexual desires went beyond the need for a child. They argued that female sexual satisfaction was necessary within marriage, and some even raised the possibility that women could be sexually satisfied beyond marriage. However, their ideas on female sexual desire could also be highly problematic.

The most sophisticated formulation of sexual desire came from Freud who strongly distinguished between the sexual drive and its object. He is notorious for first believing in the widespread incidence of childhood sexual abuse and then denying it. But by claiming that children fantasised about sex with their parents, Freud developed the theory of infantile sexual desire and the idea of the unconscious. He believed that children experienced a diffuse, ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexual desire that did not have a particular object. This desire gained an object through attachments to parents, especially to the mother. But children had to learn that these attachments were incestuous and forbidden, and therefore had to be transferred, when adult, to persons of the opposite sex. While it was fairly straightforward for a male to transfer his desire from his mother to an adult woman, the path to adult heterosexuality was much more difficult and circuitous for a woman. Freud believed that girls first experienced sexual arousal through the clitoris. However, this was a ‘masculine’ form of desire, improperly active. To reach maturity, a female not only had to transfer her desire from her mother to her father, and then to adult men, she also had to abandon clitoral eroticism for vaginal eroticism. In fact, he claimed to have discovered the vaginal orgasm in 1905.57

Most sexologists regarded sexual desire in much more biological terms, concentrating on the alleged differences between active masculinity and passive femininity. Sheila Jeffreys argues that sexologists used pseudo-scientific ideas to argue that it was ‘normal’ for women to want to be dominated and to experience pain during sex with men. Some sexologists failed to see marital rape as rape, instead, categorising rapists as perverted, psychopathological deviants, different from normal men. They also ratified the idea that adult women could not be raped, that they secretly wanted to be sexually assaulted. However, French sexologists criticised marital rape, at least on the wedding night; they warned husbands not to deflower their wives violently, concerned wives would fear sex during their married life.58 It must also be recognised that sexologists acknowledged and categorised male masochism, although they saw it as a perversion, not as an extension of ‘normal’ desire.

While sexologists asserted the existence of female desire, many of them feared it could not be controlled. Continental thinkers such as Cesare Lombroso were more likely than their English counterparts to believe that sexual perversions were embedded in the female body. He regarded prostitutes as degenerate specimens. ‘Normal’ women, he believed, should be passive sexually, because if women expressed active sexual desire, they could lose control and endanger the social order. Lombroso also equated racial and sexological thinking, regarding prostitutes as atavistic throwbacks resembling ‘primitive’ races. French thinkers feared the ‘New Women’ who appeared around the fin-de-siecle, asserting their right to a public life and private pleasure. Newly discovering the ‘unconscious forces working in the human mind’, these sexologists believed that women lacked a ‘rational, autonomous self’. Otto Weininger, an Austrian writer, similarly believed that men were more evolved and spiritual than women, while women were totally shaped by their sexual organs. Men risked being dragged down into the mire of material life if they engaged in sexual love for women. Weininger’s misogynist, self-hating anti-Semitism was meant to justify the hostility many men felt for the fin-de-siecle New Woman. Yet some sex radicals and feminists found that his unflinching exploration of sexual passion explained why conventional morality was so destructive for women as well. He declared that ‘the sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence’, because men did not love women’s true selves, but only projected onto them their own fantasies.59

Sexology’s implications for lesbianism were also ambiguous. Some sexologists categorised homosexuals as gender inverts whose sexual desire could be explained by the idea that they had been born with the wrongly sexed body. Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, two English sexologists, initially believed that heredity determined the inclinations of ‘mannish’ lesbians; they were ‘inverts’ who were born with masculine elements to their personality. Some sexologists initially hypothesised that lesbians were mannish women with enlarged clitorises. However, the Russian Dr Earnovski found that the lesbians he examined exhibited ‘normal’ personalities and anatomy. Homosexual desires could also be seen as a variation of the ‘normal’ sexual drive, whether benign or perverse. Through the early 1900s the ‘official’ British medical profession held to the degeneracy theory: homosexuality was ‘an acquired and depraved manifestation of the sexual passions’. However, other sexologists, such as Ellis, argued that homosexuality was a natural variation rather than a sickness or perversion. Ehey often recognised the bisexuality of sexual desire, but more often, they regarded homosexuality as a separate identity or innate form of desire. Sheila Jeffreys argues that sexology stigmatised lesbians by stereotyping them as mannish and perverse. Eheir theories stigmatised the passionate friendships among girls and women which previously had not necessary been seen as sexual. Some sexologists accused feminists of stimulating artificial lesbian desires among women who would normally want to marry and have children. Even some feminist sex radicals believed that the repression of heterosexual desire would lead to ‘substitute homosexuality’.60 By the turn of the century, lesbianism was illegal in both Austria and Finland.

Sexology also had positive connotations for lesbians, however. In Germany, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld joined forces with feminist sex radical Helene Stocker to protest against unsuccessful German efforts to criminalise lesbianism. Using the case-study method, Ellis and Carpenter also found that many lesbians did not fit within the mannish stereotype and even those who did had many admirable qualities. Sexological discussions also made it possible for some lesbians to recognise and create their own identities. In Germany, several turn-of-the century novelists combined sexological theories of inversion with their own experiences to portray their erotic experiences with other women.61

Many sexologists were also very involved in the new field of eugenics, the pseudoscience of human breeding. While eugenics is now closely associated with its most evil consequence, the Nazi regime, until the 1930s eugenicist thinking was common not only among conservative racists but also among many socialists, liberals and even feminists. Some socialists argued that birth control would enable the working class to improve their own condition, and pointed out that poor maternal health and infant mortality endangered the ‘race’. Some feminists believed that eugenics could give more power to women who could use birth control to experience sexual fulfilment and also to choose the most fit mate, and the most healthy time, to procreate. As Swedish feminist Ellen Key declared: ‘Freedom for love’s selection, under conditions favourable to the race; limitation of the freedom, not of love, but of procreation, when the conditions are unfavourable to the race.’ These feminists also argued that the state should support unmarried mothers, out of concern that their children would die as infants or grow up to be stunted.62 However, such feminists often conflicted with mainstream eugenicists, who believed that individual control of reproduction must be subordinate to the state.

In Germany and Britain, eugenicists feared that the ‘unfit’, i. e. the poor and the working class, would reproduce too much, swamping the ‘fit’ middle classes. They argued that middle-class women failed in their eugenic duty by having too few children and using birth control, not for eugenic reasons, but for fulfilment. They argued that women must subordinate their own needs for an education and a career to fulfil their primary purpose of motherhood. Unmarried mothers and prostitutes were defined as unfit and feeble-minded and were confined to reformatory institutions or hospitals. In Italy and France, eugenicists believed that population increase was necessary, even among the working class. French eugenicists focused their ire on women, whom they blamed for using birth control and abortion instead of having large families.

Eugenicists’ racial theories about degeneration also influenced laws about concubinage in colonial settings. In the Dutch colonies, for instance, authorities had tolerated concubinage for centuries, because they believed that white men needed a sexual outlet, but did not want the presence of white women to interfere with the colonial mission. However, the resulting mixed-race population undermined theories of racial difference and superiority. Around 1900, colonial authorities began to ban concubinage and encouraged white women to settle in Indonesia and marry white men. White women were therefore given the responsibility to control the sexual drives of white men and to preserve the ‘race’. Of course, tensions remained because such controls could never be effective.63

After the First World War, these radical ideas about sexology, eugenics, birth control and homosexuality moved from the fringes to the centre of society. The war had disrupted sexual relations and sexual ideas as women took over men’s jobs and experienced a new freedom from dependency and chaperonage. Young women found soldiers alluring, and illegitimacy rates shot up after a long decline. But above all, the mass carnage of the battlefields traumatised society, increasing eugenic fears about a loss of population and the fragility of masculinity. A language of blood and nation began to replace the old religious rhetoric of sin and damnation. The French denounced birth-control advocates as complicit with Germans in destroying their population, and French novelists used the female vampire as a metaphor for the war that had sucked out men’s lifeblood. In turn, the Germans personified France as a blood-drenched prostitute when French troops occupied the Ruhr after the war. Racial anxieties also intensified when the French used Senegalese troops in the war, resurrecting the myth of the black rapist - or the reality of mixed-race children.64 After the war, the image of the ‘New Woman’ fascinated and horrified readers, as in the bestselling novel La Gargonne, published by Victor Marguerite in 1922, which portrayed a wild young woman who smoked, drank and had affairs with both men and women. Her short skirts and bobbed hair made modernity, and sexual freedom, boldly visible.

In the 1920s, it was often unclear whether lesbianism was just another sexual variation for adventurous sexual women, or a distinct sexual identity. La Gargonne shocked moralists because she was from the grand bourgeois, not a bohemian or working-class woman who could be dismissed as inherently immoral. French writers feared that, like ‘La Gargonne’, any woman could give into her desires and have sex with a woman. But French female poets, writers, artists and film-makers began to depict lesbian desire from their own perspective after the war, following the pre-war lead of Natalie Barney and Renee Vivien. These women, such as Germaine Dulac and Marie Laurencin, formed an avant-garde, international coterie in inter-war Paris. In Germany, working-class and middle-class women began to form a much more extensive subculture, especially in Berlin. Several lesbian magazines were published in which women could recount their experiences, justify their desires and publicise new meeting places. A network of bars sprang up, where women, some with cropped hair and masculine suits, could dance and flirt with each other. Lesbians also formed social, cultural and political clubs. However, these women often faced suspicion and hostility from neighbours and family; conservatives (and even some socialists) reacted with horror at what they perceived as sexual decadence.65

Until 1928, lesbianism remained ‘twilight’ knowledge in Britain. Many women still lived together in passionate friendships without necessarily seeing themselves as lesbians, and one psychologist even accepted these relationships as viable in an era when so many men had died in the war. An effort in 1920-1 to criminalise sexual relations between women in England failed, in part, because members of parliament did not want to publicise lesbianism, believing very few women even knew of its existence. As Laura Doan points out, the 1920s fashions of close-cropped hair, trousers and ties were as popular among heterosexual flappers as among lesbians. However, the 1920s also witnessed an increased hostility to spinsters, who came under suspicion as sex-starved creatures who might warp the minds of young people under their care. Ehe trial of Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness in 1928 did much more to publicise the concept of a lesbian identity. Hall drew on, but also modified, sexological discourses from Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, as well as her experiences with women partners, to craft a novelistic plea for tolerance for lesbians as inborn ‘inverts’. Ehe novel sold well, but a conservative newspaper publisher, frustrated that his campaign against flappers and the extension of female suffrage had failed, demanded that it be censored. Ehe Government forced the publishers to withdraw the book from circulation until 1949, but the trial publicised the concept of lesbianism much more widely than ever before. As a result, masculine fashions and female friendships suddenly became stigmatised. However, many lesbians also found Hall’s ideas to be a great revelation and inspiration because it provided them with an identity and a rationale for their desires.66

Heterosexual behaviour had begun to change before the First World War, but these shifts became much more apparent in the 1920s. In pre-war France, the word ‘to flirt’ became widely used to describe seductive wordplay, kissing and caressing. By 1900, an estimated 20 per cent of French women had sex before marriage. In Britain, young people may have indulged in petting as they engaged in the courtship rituals of ‘walking out’ and the ‘monkey rank’. But statistical studies of women’s heterosexual experiences over the generations find a sharp break between the pre - and post-First World War generations. A survey of British women found that 19 per cent of married women born before 1904 had sex before their weddings, while 36 per cent of those born between 1904 and 1914 did. Only 8 per cent of married women born before 1904 had engaged in ‘petting’ before marriage, but 22 per cent of the next generation petted. A German study found that under 40 per cent of women born between 1895

And 1907 who were surveyed had had orgasms at any time in their lives, while 78 per cent of those born between 1907 and 1916 did. However, many women remained sexually unsatisfied in the inter-war years, as these changes percolated slowly through the generations. One French study from 1938 found that half of women were not sexually satisfied in marriage, while half regularly or sometimes experienced sexual satisfaction. In Vienna, Wilhelm Reich pointed out that workers’ sex lives were constrained by their overcrowded housing; families often shared one room, giving no privacy for sex. Marie Stopes, the pioneering writer of marital advice, received thousands of letters from men and women frustrated at sexual ignorance, the difficulties of birth control and their lack of sexual pleasure.67

In response, sexologists argued that both men and women needed to be sexually satisfied to ensure marital happiness and the health of society, and their message finally became much more influential in popular culture during the 1920s and 1930s. The marriage-counselling movement shifted sexual morality away from the old Victorian emphasis on fear of sex imposed by authorities to a new idea of the individual’s selfregulation of sex. This movement also promised to remake and transform heterosexuality with a new emphasis on ‘companionate marriage’. This movement has been criticised as reinforcing ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and downplaying clitoral orgasms, following Freud’s lead. Some of Freud’s followers warned wives that if they persisted in their ‘immature’ clitoral orgasms, they would never be able to have the proper vaginal orgasm. The psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte even underwent surgery to move her clitoris closer to her vagina so that she could have an orgasm in the Freudian way. The idea that ‘frigid’ women also rejected their femininity put pressure on women to conform sexually. The sex-reform movement in the inter-war period, however, was not dominated by Freud’s ideas, and the insistence on a vaginal rather than clitoral orgasm did not become widespread in sex advice until the 1940s. Most sex counsellors believed that a clitoral orgasm was better than leaving a woman unsatisfied. Sex counsellors urged husbands and wives to please each other sexually, insisting that husbands must learn how to bring their wives to orgasm. For instance, Marie Stopes spread information about female sexual pleasure to the masses in her book Married Love (1918). She criticised men for thinking that the male sexual drive was overwhelming and had to be satisfied. Instead, men must recognise when a woman became sexually receptive and learn to please her sexually, including how to stimulate the clitoris. Her ‘romantic’ style did not threaten popular audiences, because she portrayed women as ‘mysterious coy nymphs always alluring and escaping’. The Dutch doctor Theodore van de Velde, whose Ideal Marriage was widely translated and extremely popular, taught men how to please their wives, including how to perform oral sex on women. He instructed couples that their goal should be simultaneous orgasms. Yet he also believed that female sexuality was passive and that men must retain control and skill in order to allow their wives to lose control. He disapproved of women on top in sex as a perversion of natural gender relations.68

Many sex reformers also believed in sexual or moral hygiene, which would modernise sex. They believed that uncontrolled sexual desire could be dangerous, but that properly managed and regulated, sexual pleasure could contribute to marital stability and social productivity. In Germany, social hygiene clinics were opened to counsel men and women for the purposes of eugenic marriage, but they were not very popular, since people preferred more practical information about sexual pleasure and birth control.

Socialists in Berlin and Vienna sometimes warned young people not to indulge too much in irresponsible activity, but instead, to sublimate their desires into healthy outdoor activities. In response, Wilhelm Reich criticised the social-democratic and communist sexual-hygiene movements for not focusing enough on sexual pleasure among working-class young men and women. Ehe movement should not try to regulate and direct sexual activity, he argued, but to teach young people how to enjoy sexual pleasure. However, Reich and his followers did not always acknowledge the difficulties women in particular found in enjoying sexual pleasure and expressed hostility to homosexuality.69

Ehe dramatic drop in family size among the working class also represented a significant change from the pre-First World War generation and helped make sexual pleasure possible, especially for women. Whereas working-class women of the pre-war generation tended to have large families, family size dropped to two or three children, and in many cases in Germany, only one child. Working-class women had relied on abstinence, withdrawal or abortion to control their fertility. Ehe number of abortions in Germany and France had skyrocketed even before the war. After the war, governments in Britain and Germany slowly and reluctantly allowed health clinics to prescribe birth control for married couples, and chemists and mail-order suppliers also sold condoms. In Britain, Marie Stopes’s popular works spread the knowledge and motivation for birth control to a popular audience.70

In Germany, the government forbade the advertisement, but not the sale, of contraceptives. Millions of men had used condoms during the war, and they became cheap and widely available. Doctors and chemists also invented new forms of diaphragms, lUDs (intrauterine devices) and chemical contraceptives, which were distributed in clinics set up by new birth-control leagues. Ehese clinics preferred to give women chemical contraceptives and diaphragms, because condoms meant depending on men, and cervical caps and lUDs required a doctor. In 1926, the Social Democratic Government passed a law diminishing punishments for abortion, which was allowed in cases of ‘medical necessity’. As James Woycke argues, once women had recourse to abortion, they realised that control of fertility was in their own hands so they became more receptive to the barrier means of birth control that were becoming more available.71 Underground abortions were very widely practised especially among working-class women who found it difficult to get a doctor to sign off on the medical necessity clause.

Birth control and abortion also became an issue for socialists in revolutionary situations. Soviet Russia legalised abortion, through the first trimester, in 1920. In part, Alexandra Kollontai, a Bolshevik feminist, inspired these ideas through her insistence on female autonomy and free love. However, the Communist Government also faced a chaotic period of civil war in 1920, with millions of unmarried mothers and victims of rape and no resources to care for these children. During the 1920s, the Soviets claimed to be increasing access to contraception to enable women to make decisions about their sex lives and motherhood and to diminish the need for abortion. However, given the shortage of consumer goods, contraceptives were not the highest priority for the Soviet Government. Some Spanish anarchists, very interested in sex reform and eugenics, legalised abortion in Catalonia in the 1930s and promised to set up birth-control clinics to diminish need for abortion. During the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and the hostility of the church and even many feminists to birth control, however, these promises could not be carried out.72

The inter-war period also witnessed a harsh backlash against these advances in contraception. The French legislature banned the distribution of contraceptive information, except condoms, in 1920, in a fit of hysteria about the decline of population after the war. The Government also prosecuted abortionists even more harshly. The birth rate did increase slightly in France in the 1920s, but Frenchwomen’s long tradition of controlling their fertility could not be legislated away. In Italy, the rise of Fascism also led to increasing restrictions on birth control and abortion. The Italian birth-control movement had always been weak, in part because, unlike their northern European counterparts, Italian eugenicists saw large families as a proof of national, even imperial, virility. During the 1920s, Fascists warned that the birth rate was declining and must be reversed. From 1926-7, the Fascist Government of Mussolini heavily censored any birth-control information that might come into the country from foreign sources and punished abortion even more severely than before. However, these and other efforts to raise the birth rate were remarkably unsuccessful, and at least in one instance, women protested at the arrest of their local abortionist. In Soviet Russia, Alexandra Kollontai’s ideas of sexual freedom increasingly came under attack as selfindulgence. In a 1925 interview, Lenin said that ‘lack of restraint in one’s sexual life is bourgeois’.73 By the time Stalin took power, much more conservative ideas about sexuality held sway, as women’s desires were subordinate to the needs of the state, and abortion was outlawed in 1936.

By 1933, the Nazis had destroyed the sex-reform movement in Germany. They had campaigned for years against what they perceived as communist and socialist sexual immorality, depicting sexualised women as symbolically responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War. They blamed Jews for the sexual freedom of the Weimar years and promised to restore the traditional family, thus appealing to conservative and religious elements of public opinion. Upon seizing power, they immediately banned birth-control information and distribution, repealed the medical-necessity clause for abortion, closed down sex-advice clinics and burned Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research. They stigmatised abortion and sex reform as Jewish and communistic. They institutionalised ‘promiscuous’ women and arrested suspected abortionists and their clients. The Nazis, of course, were motivated by a eugenicist agenda, but one very different from that espoused by Weimar sex reformers. Racial hatred motivated them above all. In 1935, the Nazis forbade sex and intermarriage between Jews and Aryans. Neighbours harassed and denounced mixed couples to the police, although only men could be prosecuted for this offence. They put forth the idea that Aryan women were pure and needed to be protected, less they become corrupted and hypersexual. Jewish women, by contrast, were seen as racially promiscuous and dangerously seductive.74

Nazi sexual ideology, however, also differed from traditional conservative, especially religious, sexual morality. They did not intend to repress sex per se, but to ensure that sexual activities served the state and racial purity.75 In 1935, they re-legalised certain forms of abortion to allow ‘or force’ the termination of ‘unfit’ pregnancies in women who were prostitutes, promiscuous, mentally disabled, foreign slave workers or German women impregnated by Jewish or foreign slave-worker men. A powerful strand of thought within Nazi discourse actually regarded ‘Aryan’ sex as healthy. Members of the Schutzstaffeln, the SS, blamed ‘oriental Christians’ for suppressing ‘healthy’ sexual attitudes. For these Nazis, sex did not need to be confined in marriage. As Julia Roos notes, ‘Himmler resented the church’s “moralistic” stance on extramarital sex, which he believed was conducive to the spread of male homosexual relations.’ The Nazis reintroduced state-regulated brothels in 1933 and, eventually, established military brothels. They believed that men needed a sexual outlet, but unlike the Weimar sex reformers, they did not see sex as a vehicle for personal fulfilment. Ehe SS also strengthened the position of single mothers, providing them with more welfare benefits in order to deter them from abortion and to encourage them to ‘present the Fuhrer with a child’. They established secret Lebensborn homes for unmarried mothers. Fathers of illegitimate children gained more custody rights, but Hitler blocked a proposal to allow the SS to take in illegitimate children against the mother’s will, and there is no evidence that these homes were used as places for the SS to ‘mate’ with Aryan women.76

The ambiguities of Nazi attitudes towards sex and women can also be seen in their policies toward lesbians. Once the Nazis had completely defeated feminism, they did not regard lesbians as much of a threat. In 1935, an effort to criminalise lesbianism was rejected because it would be too difficult to distinguish between lesbians and innocent female friends. The Nazis also believed that lesbianism could be a temporary state and that such women could be reclaimed for marriage. However, they also harassed lesbians. The lesbian subculture of bars, magazines and clubs disappeared, and lesbians had to adopt a protective camouflage of more feminine clothing and even false marriages. More visible lesbians could be sent to the concentration camps as ‘asocial’ when communism or other forms of dissidence brought them to the attention of authorities. However, the Nazis did not persecute lesbians as severely as they did homosexual men, thousands of whom died in the camps. Even then, the Nazis believed that some men who had sex with other men only once or twice could be reclaimed as soldiers.77

In the immediate post-war period, German fears of social chaos and contamination were projected onto women. In the occupied territories, the authorities forced women who worked in restaurants, bars and places of public entertainment to undergo examinations for venereal disease. But women who had been raped by invading Soviet soldiers were allowed to have abortions, a remnant of eugenic policies. Soon after, conservative West Germans tried to repudiate the Nazis by claiming that they were sexually promiscuous and immoral. Their solution was traditional families and sexual repression. The Nazis’ restrictions on abortions were not lifted, and the network of sex-advice and birth-control clinics was not revived. Social scrutiny of young people’s sexual activity was so strict that landladies could be accused of pimping for allowing tenants to have overnight visitors of the opposite sex.78

In the Soviet zones of eastern Europe, sexuality had to serve the state. In East Germany, abortion was recriminalised in 1950, despite women’s protests. In the Soviet Union, the Government instructed doctors to report women who sought abortions in an effort to rebuild the population after the losses of the Second World War. But given the absence of other forms of contraception, which as small consumer goods were in short supply and not a priority for state industries, women in Russia and East Germany relied on abortion as their main form of birth control. The most dramatic example of state control over women’s fertility came in Romania, where all abortion and birth control was banned and women were strictly monitored for pregnancies. However, in most areas of eastern Europe, unlike Romania, birth control was allowed and generous welfare benefits and daycare made it easier for women to work and take care of children. Yet, as Susan Gal notes, ‘interwar communist discussions of sexual liberation and search for pleasure by women were replaced by a communist Puritanism that focused on reproductive sexuality; the existence of same-sex sexuality was simply denied.’ Limitations on consumer goods made it more difficult for women to exert choices over birth control. Magazines did not stress sexual attractiveness and consumerism, and regarded sex as a duty for married women.79

In contrast, in 1950s’ western Europe, the new consumerism was tied to marital adjustment. Freudianism gained greater influence, criticising women for clitoral orgasms and accusing them of penis envy or frigidity if they did not conform. Even in Sweden, where contraception was freely available, school sex-education curricula stressed chastity before marriage and warned that sex was primarily for procreation. General de Gaulle declared that French women must procreate to make France great once again. In Britain, governments feared a perceived expansion of street prostitution. In fact, the number of prostitutes was probably less than in the nineteenth century, but streetwalkers made London’s streets seem seedy and dangerous. In 1959, the Street Offences Act forced many prostitutes off the streets and into ‘commercial prostitution agencies and call-girl rackets’. But during the 1960s, a decline in demand and more economic opportunities for women led to a sharp drop in the number of prostitutes all over Europe. In France, 21 per cent of men born between 1922 and 1925 had their first sex with a prostitute, but only 6 per cent of men born between 1944 and 1951 were initiated by prostitutes, and today, almost no young men are. The same may have been true in Greece and Portugal where in previous generations, young men experienced their sexual initiation at a much younger age than young women of their own class. By the 1970s, young men and women had first sex at similar ages, probably with each other.80

Above all, the liberation movements of the 1960s challenged conventional sexual mores. In Germany, radicals inspired by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse declared that Nazism had been caused, in part, by a bourgeois family structure which repressed natural sexual drives and therefore encouraged sado-masochistic impulses. They declared that Nazi influence could only be purged by overthrowing post-war restrictions on sex and experimenting with free sex and non-monogamy. Klaus Theweleit’s historical volumes on Male Fantasies came out of this milieu. He hypothesised that German veterans after the First World War were engulfed by fears of fluid, threatening female sexuality, so in response, they yearned for hard masculine authority.81

The feminist movement was reborn in the tumult of the 1960s. As early as 1965, students began to agitate against regulations forbidding men to visit female students in their dorms, and, during 1968, the slogan ‘make love not war’ pervaded the student revolution. In part the student movement inspired women to demand their own liberation, but feminists also reacted with frustration against masculine claims for sexual freedom that ended up oppressing women. In France, restrictions on sex eroded as the women’s movement established family-planning clinics and women rejected the pro-natalist message. By 1967, the Government gave in and legalised contraception. By the early 1970s, abortion began to be legalised all across Europe, in France in 1975, and in Italy in 1978, both cases demonstrating the erosion of the Catholic church’s control over sexuality. Britain and West Germany, however, required social or medical reasons for abortions. By 1972, East Germans legalised abortions for much the same reasons as western governments: pressure from women who wanted to control their fertility.82 Ehe pill finally provided relatively safe and extremely effective contraception, as governments gradually made it available to single women.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, sections of the feminist movement also began to link pornography and sexual violence as oppressive to women. Feminists first protested against the Freudian emphasis on the vaginal orgasm. Ehey even critiqued penetration, instead demanding clitoral orgasm.83 Feminists also refuted the neo-Freudian idea that the rape of women and the sexual abuse of children were fantasies or individual perversions, arguing that sexual violence stemmed from structures of male domination.

Ehe lesbian movement had its roots in both the gay-liberation movement and the feminist movement. A few lesbian clubs had sprung up in London, and the British magazine Arena 3 started in 1963 and helped create a network of lesbians who had faced social isolation and employment discrimination.84 By the late 1960s, lesbians could also join in the much more open and flamboyant Gay Liberation Front, but by the 1970s and 1980s lesbian separatism challenged this alliance. They proclaimed that rejecting men and having sex with women was a political act. Sheila Jeffreys’ book, The Spinster and her Enemies, came out of this particularly historical moment, trying to trace back the lesbian heritage to the social-purity feminists of the late nineteenth century. But other feminists began to resist the message that sexual images were necessarily oppressive to women and equated the contemporary religious right with the late nineteenth-century social-purity movement. They warned that repressions on sexual expression could backfire and oppress women once again, and they also questioned the equation of celibacy with lesbian feminism, arguing that lesbianism was a sexual, not a political choice.

Between 1975 and 1989, the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain and the end of the Cold War in eastern Europe transformed sexual cultures in similar ways. In most areas, women were able to fight back against the Catholic church’s attempt to reimpose strictures on abortion. The puritanical attitudes of the Franco dictatorship and of eastern Europe Communism disappeared under the onslaught of consumer society, but also brought widespread pornography and sexualised advertising. Women in eastern Europe reacted with ambivalence. Some welcomed the new focus on sexualised femininity as pleasurable and adventurous, whereas other women, especially older women and working-class women, found these sexualised images demeaning or laughable.85

In western Europe, to a much greater extent than in the USA, sexual cultures have been shaped by a secular society, where cohabitation is common and same-sex partnerships legally recognised. Europeans increasingly began to believe that sex should be a matter of the private rights of the individual and that the government should not interfere. But Europe shares with the USA a media culture saturated with sexuality. While eighteenth-century people regarded female sexual desire in terms of fertility, twentieth-century people associated sex with consumption.