Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950

by Atina Grossmann

Reforming Sex 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 right to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education.

Genres: Germany, History, Gender and Sexuality, Feminism, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 1995

Reviews

[Emily]

So far, so awesome. Is there any greater pleasure than actually ENJOYING assigned reading? My loophole in obedience to keeping the Sabbath day holy is if I really enjoy reading a book and would conceivably read it without being told to, it is ok for Sunday. Because that can't be work, if you're loving it, right? For all you fans of the reproductive rights history, this book is great. All two of you. What I like about it thus far:

1) I tend to hear an awful lot about Margaret Sanger and her American birth control buddies. I also know a fair amount about the French and British story of the fight for birth control and sex education. But who ever hears about Germany?
2) What one DOES generally hear about Germany tends to get swallowed up in the Nazi story, as though eugenic thought necessarily led to the final solution, whereas in fact every western nation figured eugenics into their discussion of family planning. She does a really great job of treating the reproductive reform movement as its own phenomenon rather than a prelude to the Holocaust when things are really never that simple.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book. Atina Grossman documents the post-WWI German birth control movement in great detail. Many acronyms are invoked as lay leagues devoted to providing their members with birth control devices compete and collaborate with health insurance clinics, public clinics, and the women's branches of political organizations to provide women with birth control and education (delivered by doctors, not traditional healers and midwives. They are not organized and are officially swept away by the tides of modernity). Conferences are held, pamphlets are published, and abortion is almost legalized by popular demand until the socialists flub it. A few months later, the Nazis come in. Most doctors flee, and the movement disappears until after the war, when the few survivors who aren't stranded in lonely exile, and didn't beef it politically by allying with the Communists, come back to try to create universal access to birth control and abortion again.