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Reflections on Feminism and Monism in the Kaiserreich, 1900–1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Edward Ross Dickinson
Edward Ross Dickinson
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand/Te Whare Wananga o te Upoko o te Ika a Maui
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Extract

The League for the Protection of Motherhood (Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, or BfM) was the largest and most active sex-reform organization in Germany before the First World War. The league was at the center of a broad debate about sexuality, gender roles, the family, and population policy, in which representatives not only of the women's movements but also of the Christian churches, the medical and psychiatric establishments, and the sexology, eugenics, and life-reform (particularly nudist) movements participated. Both this broader debate and the BfM itself have been the subject of intensive study over the past fifteen years. One major interpretive focus of the literature to date has been on the issue of the extent to which the biologistic, social Darwinist, and eugenic ideas prominent in the thinking of many of the leading figures in the BfM were or were not evidence of a turning away from liberal, individualist feminism and toward the political and social Right, or of deeper intellectual affinities between National Socialism and sex reform — a point regarding which there is still considerable disagreement.

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Central European History , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 2001 , pp. 191 - 230
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Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2001

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References

I would like to thank my friends and colleages Geoff Hume-Cook, Sarah Kindon, Pat Moloney, Bernd and Gela Teichgräber, and Richard Weickart for their assistance in the writing of this article.

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