Sexuality in the postwar west

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 78, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 144-171

  Herzog, Dagmar ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645159112     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/499798     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London, 2000), 138.
2. For example, see Alkarim Jivani, It's Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington, IN, 1997);
3. Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London, 1996);
4. Stephen Jeffery-Poulter, Peers, Queers, and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present (London, 1991); and the many important writings of Jeffrey Weeks and Simon Watney.
5. For instance, while outstanding work has been done on the celebrated liberalism of Dutch society since the 1960s, very little of it is in English. For the exception that proves the rule, see Harry Oosterhuis, "The Netherlands: Neither Prudish nor Hedonistic," in Eder et al., Sexual Cultures. We know hardly anything about the history of sexuality in Belgium, Finland, Portugal, or Switzerland (and not nearly enough about Denmark or Italy or Spain), even though studies of those countries would not only be of interest in their own right but would also do a great deal to illuminate the somewhat more extensively analyzed cultures of France and West Germany as well. Sustained transnational comparisons remain a desideratum.
6. Contrast the alternative explanation in Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, 1987).
7. Sally Alexander, "The Mysteries and Secrets of Women's Bodies: Sexual Knowledge in the First Half of the Twentieth Century," in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and A. O'Shea (London, 1996);
8. and Susan Pedersen, "National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-Making," Journal of Modern History 63, no. 4 (1991): 647-80.
9. See also in this context the thoughtful essay by Stephen Brooke, "'A New World for Women' ? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s," American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 431-59.
10. See Thomas Etzemüller, "Sozialstaat, Eugenik und Normalisierung in skandinavischen Demokratien," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 43 (2003): 492-510.
11. and "A Struggle for Radical Change? Swedish Students in the 1960s," in Between Marx and Coca Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980, ed. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (New York, 2004);
12. Lena Lennerhed, "Sex Reform in the Welfare State: RFSU, the Swedish Association for Sex Education, in the 1930s and 1940s," in Sexualität, Unterschichtenmilieu und Arbeiter-Innenbewegung, ed. Paul Pasteur, Sonja Niederacher, and Maria Mesner (Vienna, 2003).
13. and "The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sexliberalism in Sweden in the 1960's" (paper delivered at the conference "Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics," Amsterdam University, October 3-4, 2003).
14. Ever in the vanguard, Sweden in 1981 equalized the age of hetero- and homosexual consent at fifteen (although notably in 1990 the Netherlands equalized it at age 12). In 1995, Sweden became the second country in the world (the first had been Denmark in 1989) legally to recognize same-sex couples. For an excellent analysis of the Danish legislation, see Birgitte Søland, "A Queer Nation? The Passage of the Gay and Lesbian Partnership Legislation in Denmark, 1989," Social Politics 5 (Spring 1998): 48-69. The gap between the laws of Western European nations has closed considerably with the passage of European Union legislation in 2003 permitting recognition of same-sex unions across national boundaries.
15. See Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 34-36, 88-95. It would also be useful to think more about how this idea migrated in the 1940s to France and then in the 1960s to England where in the aftermath of the decriminalization of adult homosexual acts the prosecution of youth homosexuality escalated.
16. Note an important parallel here with the liberalization of abortion law in Italy in the 1970s, for there, too, arguing within - and not just against - a Catholic moral framework was imperative for legal reform. Framing the issue as one of social justice more than individual liberties helped substantially in making passage of the law possible. See Rosemary Ruether, "Italy's Third Way' on Abortion Faces a Test," Christianity and Crisis, May 11, 1981;
17. and Beverly Wildung Harrison, "Our Right to Choose," in Women's Consciousness, Women's Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, ed. Barbara Andolsen et al. (San Francisco, 1987).
18. Mario Kramp, "Homosexuelle im besetzten Frankreich 1940-1944/45: Fragmente einer noch zu schreibenden Geschichte," in Nationalsozialistischer Terror gegen Homosexuelle: Verdrängt und ungesühnt, ed. Burkhard Jellonek and Rüdiger Lautmann (Paderborn, 2002);
19. and Michael Sibalis, "Homophobia, Vichy France, and the 'Crime of Homosexuality': The Origins of the Ordinance of August 6, 1942," GLQ 8, no. 3 (2002): 301-18.
20. For good summaries of the problems, see the reviews of The Pink and the Black in Doug Ireland, "The French Act Up," The Nation, April 16, 2001;
21. and Michael Sibalis, "Homosexuality in France," French Politics, Culture and Society 19, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 108-19.
22. For additional and complementary accounts, see Le Bitoux et al., Citoyen.
23. Merrick and Sibalis, Homosexuality in French History and Culture'.
24. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., eds., Homosexuality in Modem France (New York, 1996);
25. Marie-Jo Bonnet, Les relations amoureuses entre les femmes du XVIe au XXe siècle (Paris, 1995);
26. Janine Mossuz-Lavau, Les lois de l'amour (Paris, 1991);
27. and Antony Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780-1980 (London, 1989).
28. Rachel Cooke, "Sex and sensibility," review of Collins, Modern Love, in The Observer, August 17, 2003.
29. Ingrid Bauer, '"Austria's Prestige Dragged into the Dirt'? The 'GI-Brides' and Postwar Austrian Society (1945-1955)," Contemporary Austrian Studies 6 (1998): 41-55.
30. See Herzog, Sex after Fascism.
31. See Fabrice Vergili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford, 2002);
32. as well as Klaus Theweleit's foreword to Ebba D. Drolshagen, Nicht ungeschoren davongekommen: Das Schicksal der Frauen in den besetzen Ländern, die Wehrmachtsoldaten liebten (Hamburg, 1998).
33. Sabine Weissler, "Sexy Sixties," in CheSchahShit, ed. Eckhard Siepmann et al. (Berlin, 1984), 99.
34. Beth Bailey, "Sexual Revolution(s)," in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).
35. Conversation with Sophinette Becker, 2002.
36. Hartwig interviewed by Annette Miersch, in Miersch, Schulmädchen- Report, 8.
37. See Childbirth by Choice Trust, "Great Britain," in Abortion in Law, History and Religion (Toronto, 1995).
38. On how we might usefully rethink the intersections of issues of women's rights and disability rights, see Michael Béruhé, Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child (New York: Vintage, 1996);
39. and Rayna Rapp, Testing the Woman, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York, 1999).
40. For outstanding U.S. models analyzing the imbrications of sexual liberalization and feminism with racism (but also in some instances including attention to the ways in which women of color have at times been able to turn racist policies to their advantage in controlling their fertility), see Rickie Solinger, "The Population Bomb and the Sexual Revolution," in American Sexual Histories, ed. Elizabeth Reis (Malden, MA, 2001);
41. Laura Briggs, "Discourses of 'Forced Sterilization' in Puerto Rico," Differences 10, no. 2 (1998): 30-66;
42. and Johanna Schoen, "Between Choice and Coercion: Women and the Politics of Sterilization in North Carolina, 1929-1975," Journal of Women's History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 132-57.
43. For model work on the intersections of sexuality and racism in the European colonies, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002).
44. Consider in this context the perceptive remarks about the real significance of the much-discussed promiscuity in Berlin's Kommune 1 in Klaus Hartung, "Die Psychoanalyse der Küchenarbeit: Selbstbefreiung, Wohngemeinschaft und Kommune," in Siepmann et al., Che-SchahShit. Note also the obsession with other people's marital infidelities in such otherwise divergent late-sixties West German venues as Bild, Konkret, Eltern and Jasmin.
45. See in this context Meryl Altman, "Everything They Always Wanted You to Know: The Ideology of Popular Sex Literature," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance (London, 1989);
46. and Rebecca Chalker, The Clitoral Truth (New York, 2000).
47. One issue worth considering here is how to explain both the long-term slowness and then the recent frenzied rapidity with which what Barbara Ehrenreich et al. call the "homosexualization" of heterosexual practices has entered mass-market sex advice magazines. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York, 1986). It is striking that information that in the 1990s was still the purview of self-identified queer advice writers like Dan Savage and Susie Bright is now suddenly, in 2004-5, available in the pages of Marie-Claire and Cosmopolitan.
48. In this context see Potts, The Science/Fiction of Sex;
49. and Leonore Tiefer, Sex is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Boulder, CO, 1994).
50. Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, NC, 1994), xiii, xvi, xxi.
51. See also Watney's pathbreaking Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis, 1989).
52. Linda Grant, Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution (London, 1993), 6.
53. Katrin Rohnstock, "Vorwort," in Erotik macht die Hässlichen Schön, ed. Katrin Rohnstock (Berlin, 1995), 9-10.
54. Dietrich Mühlberg, "Sexualität und ostdeutscher Alltag," Mitteilungen aus der kulturwissenschaftlichen Forschung 18, no. 36 (1995): 20.
55. Carmen Beilfuss, " 'Über sieben Brücken musst Du geh'n...': Der schwierige Weg der Liebe in der Marktwirtschaft," in Sexualität und Partnerschaft im Wandel: Jahrestagung 1991 der Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft, Leipziger Texte zur Sexualität, vol. 1, no. 1 (1992), 18-27.
56. For example, see Bert Thinius, "Vom grauen Versteck ins bunte Ghetto," and Kurt Starke, "Die Liebe," in Schwuler Osten, ed. Kurt Starke (Berlin, 1994), 73, 300-301;
57. Uta Kolano, Nackter Osten (Frankfurt/Oder, 1995);
58. Konrad Weller, Das Sexuelle in der deutsch-deutschen Vereinigung: Resümee und Ausblick (Leipzig, 1991);
59. and the discussion in Werner Habermehl, Sexualverhalten der Deutschen: Aktuelle Daten, intime Wahrheiten (Munich, 1993), 26-31.
60. For a western German who largely concurs with this assessment, see Karl Scheithauer, "Männerpositionen," in Stiefbrü der: Was Ostmänner und Westmänner voneinander denken, ed. Katrin Rohnstock (Berlin, 1995), 42.
61. Weller, Das Sexuelle, 133-34.