City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Reforming sex, the German movement for birth control and abortion reform, 1920-1950, Atina Grossmann

eng

Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-285) and index

illustrationsplates

index present

non fiction

Reforming sex

bibliography

Atina Grossmann

the German movement for birth control and abortion reform, 1920-1950

In Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920 to 1950, Atina Grossmann 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 rights to abortion and public access to birth control and sex educationReforming Sex takes on questions of international context and comparison as well as continuity and discontinuity in twentieth century German history in a manner that other studies have not. The book follows Weimar sex reformers into the Third Reich, to exile around the world, and into both the Eastern and Western zones of postwar Germany. It demonstrates how deeply rooted eugenics ideology and American and Bolshevik models of modernity were in the Weimar movement. It also examines the drastic rupture between sex reform notions of social health and National Socialist population policy. The story of German sex reform provides a new perspective on post-World War II family planning programs; it sheds light on the long and lively background to current controversies about abortion, the role of doctors and the state in determining women's right to control their own bodies, and the possibilities for reforming and transforming sexual relations between men and women

1. Introduction: New Women and Families in the New Germany -- 2. "Prevent: Don't Abort": The Medicalization and Politicization of Sexuality -- 3. Birth Control, Marriage, and Sex Counseling Clinics: The Administration of Sex Reform -- 4. "Your Body Belongs to You": Abortion and the 1931 Campaign Against Paragraph 218 -- 5. Forbidden Love: Sex Reform and the Crisis of the Republic, 1931 to 1933 -- 6. Continuity and Discontinuity: Gleichschaltung and the Destruction of the Sex Reform Movement -- 7. Weimar Sex Reform in Exile -- 8. No Zero Hour: Abortion and Birth Control in Postwar Germany