Negotiating Crisis and Opportunity: Women, Sex Reform, and the First World War

The First World War represented a crucible for Germany’s burgeoning sex reform movement.  Already fragile coalitions were further divided as individuals re-evaluated their commitments to sex reform objectives in light of other political investments and perceived duties to the nation.  Many reformers, above all physicians like Max Marcuse and Albert Moll, eagerly volunteered their services to the state: they deployed to the warfront to regulate makeshift brothels and inspect for venereal diseases, while on the homefront they advised the state regarding the effects of the war on population quantity and “quality.”  Yet many other reformers moved in the opposite direction, and instead reaffirmed their commitments to international cooperation.  For reformers such as Helene Stöcker, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Rosa Mayreder, as well as colleagues in “enemy” nations such as Briton Edward Carpenter, the project of sex reform had always been—and could only be—a cosmopolitan project that transformed the whole of humanity, irrespective of national borders.  In this paper, I show how the First World War solidified such actors’ beliefs that not only internationalism but also pacifism were essential preconditions for sex reform, and how the war forced them to explicitly embrace “humanity“ as a political object and analytic category.  I trace the actions and examine texts written by the aforementioned reformers, which affirmed their cosmopolitanism, asserted their humanism, and connected the politics of peace to the politics of sex and social improvement.  I also draw attention to the gendered dynamics of such acts and texts, and show that women like Stöcker and Mayreder, convinced of women’s innate pacifism, led the way in initiating international activism and internationalist discourse.  Finally, I consider the legacy of these events for the Weimar Republic and for international sex reform activism during the 1920s.