Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

Front matter

Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900-1933

Kirsten Leng

=> j P Ä F. — = r signale modern german letters, cultures, and thought

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Women and Sexology: Knowledge, Possibilities, and Problematic Legacies 1

1. The Emergence of Sexology in Early Twentieth-Century Germany 43

Index

264 307

321 333 363

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for this opportunity to thank the many people and institutions that helped this book come into being. At the University of Michigan, I thank Kathleen Canning, Scott Spector, Geoff Eley, and Elizabeth Wingrove, whose insights have enriched my work, and whose encouragement and support have been invaluable. I thank them for their thoughtful and lively engagement with my arguments, and for modeling interdisciplinary scholarship. I benefited enormously from the breadth of their knowledge, their strong commitment to feminist scholarship, and their theoretical and empirical rigor.

I couldn’t have asked for a better postdoctoral landing ground than the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University (SPAN). Steve Epstein and Héctor Carrillo provided an exciting and nurturing intellectual environment that enabled me to move between the worlds of modern European history, gender and sexuality studies, and science and technology studies. I am grateful to them for the x Acknowledgments opportunities they afforded me to present my work and receive multifaceted and challenging feedback, and for providing support and incredibly helpful and astute advice. My thanks go out to the community brought together by SPAN; special notes of thanks go to Evren Savci, Alex Owen, Tessie Liu, Ken Alder, Tania Munz, Teri Chettiar, and Mary Weismantel for their thoughts and company. The American Council of Learned Societies’ New Faculty Fellowship provided me the chance to write, teach, and present my work at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (IRWGS) at Columbia University under the direction of Alondra Nelson, whom I thank for her continued advice, feedback, and support. Currently, I am grateful for the support, understanding, comradeship, and good humor of my colleagues in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: Kiran Asher, Abbie Boggs, Laura Briggs, Alex Deschamps, Tanisha Ford, Lezlie Frye, Linda Hillenbrand, Miliann Kang, Karen Lederer, Svati Shah, Banu Subramaniam, Mecca Sullivan, and Angie Willey.

This book has benefited from feedback offered by various other communities and readers. I thank the members of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Working Group on Gender and Knowledge beyond the Academy, which convened in 2010-2011, in particular Christine von Oertzen, Maria Rentetzi, and Elizabeth S. Watkins. Over the course of our meetings, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt provided especially pivotal feedback that helped reframe the project. Participants in the Five College Feminist Science and Technology Studies Initiative, and in the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center colloquia, provided helpful thoughts on various chapters. Dagmar Herzog proved an engaging, insightful, and stimulating discussant of a paper I presented at IRWGS that became chapter 7. Melissa Kravetz thoroughly read and gave supportive and friendly critique of chapter 6. Kathleen Kearns read the entire manuscript more than once, and provided indispensable insights. Additionally, I thank audience members at the various conferences where I presented portions of this book, including meetings of the German Studies Association, the American Historical Association, the History of Science Society, the Social

Acknowledgments xi

Science History Association, the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, the Christina Conference on Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki, and the Canadian Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, as well as audiences at Hampshire College, the University of Florida, and Harvard University.

Many institutions supported the research and writing of this project. I am thankful for the recognition and support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Social Science Research Council, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Council for European Studies, the University of Michigan (through its Center for European Studies and International Institute), Northwestern University (through its Faculty Research Grant), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (through a Visiting Fellowship), and the American Council of Learned Societies. I also thank librarians, volunteers, and archivists at institutions in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States; special thanks go to Jens Dobler at the Schwules Museum in Berlin for being on the lookout for rare documents on female homosexuality and same-sex love during the Wilhelmine era, and to the volunteers at the Spinnboden Lesbian archive in Berlin, who allowed me to peruse their undocumented files. At Cornell University Library and Cornell University Press, I am grateful for the help, understanding, and boundless patience of Kizer Walker and Mahinder Kingra, as well as the thorough and generous reports provided by two anonymous readers. Thanks also to Marian Rogers’s and Kate Mertes’s keen eyes.

This project received less formal yet integral support from various quarters that deserve acknowledgment. I am incredibly grateful to Christiane Leidinger, who shared with me her voluminous knowledge on Johanna Elberskirchen. Marti Lybeck and Kirsten McGuire also shared their expertise on early twentieth-century German gender politics at a critical stage. Likewise, the members of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in Berlin shared rare, painstakingly acquired research documents, as well as their encyclopedic knowledge of Wilhelmine-era sexology. In particular, I thank Ralf Dose for facilitating my visits and sharing his knowledge,

Xii Acknowledgments and Andreas Pretzel for alerting me to the existence of Mathilde Vaerting.

Last but certainly not least, I thank my friends and family for their companionship and encouragement over this long process: Marianna Ritchey, Kimberlee Pérez, April Trask, Melissa Kravetz, the Roys (Elissa, Donald, Nicolas, Sebastian, and Alexandre), Huxley, Rosa and Rue, and James and Ruth Styles. My grandmother, Ruth, gave me the invaluable life lesson to “knock ’em down as they come”; I am grateful to her for that mantra. This book could not have been completed without the support and love of my parents, Christine and Siegfried Leng, and especially my partner, Kevin Young. What can I say to thank people who have proven remarkable intellectual interlocutors, who have been willing to discuss the finer points of Wilhelmine-era German grammar and syntax and the idiosyncrasies of sexological terminology, and who have cooked and cared for and comforted me? Words fail. Above all, I’m grateful to Kevin, who not only inspires me every day with his love of researching and writing, but also reminds me of how lucky we are to participate in the process of producing knowledge.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my son, Max, who passed away during the final stages of finishing this project. Although his existence was cruelly brief, he nonetheless proved the greatest teacher I have known. I thank him forever for his gifts of love and pure possibility.

Portions of this book originally appeared in different form in the following: “An ‘Elusive’ Phenomenon: Feminism, Sexual Science, and the Female Sex Drive, 1880-1914,” special issue, Centaurus: An International Journal of the History of Science and Its Cultural Aspects 55, no. 2 (2013): 131-152; “Permutations of the Third Sex: Sexology, Subjectivity, and Anti-Maternalist Feminism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 1 (2014): 227-254; “The Personal Is Scientific: Women, Gender, and the Production of Sexological Knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900-1931,” History of Psychology 18, no. 3 (2015): 238-251. Copyright © 2015 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission.

Introduction

Women and Sexology: Knowledge, Possibilities, and Problematic Legacies

The decades bookending the beginning of the twentieth century constituted a volatile and decisive period in German history. During this time, Germany transformed from an empire into a fractured republic, and in the process became a laboratory for experiments in democracy, the arts, and sexual expression—until these were dramatically foreclosed by fascism.

In this era of incredible transformation, perhaps nowhere was change sought more urgently than in the realms of sex, gender, and sexuality. Men and women reflecting a range of standpoints publicly debated the true nature of sexual drives and desires, the limits and boundaries of gender, and the implications of new understandings of sex and gender for the reform and regulation of sexual life. Within these debates, science came to play a pivotal role. For many, science held the promise of objectively establishing truths about bodies, minds, and desires that would provide a firm foundation for lasting social and political change. As such, science offered a language of both norms and possibilities.

The centrality of science in these debates precipitated an explosion of research into and theories about sex, gender, and sexuality in fields including (but not limited to) biology, anthropology, psychology, embryology, gynecology, and, later, endocrinology. By the first decade of the twentieth century, knowledge from these disparate disciplines had coalesced to form the unique field of Sexualwissenschaft, or sexology, and Germany quickly became established as the vanguard of sexual scientific research and writing. The knowledge produced during this period had long-term consequences: in fact, it helped forge the sexual identity categories and attitudes toward sex that shaped the twentieth (and arguably the twenty-first) century.

In the early years of the twentieth century, however, sexual categories lacked firm contours, taxonomies were still malleable, and the evaluation of sexual identities and desires remained contested. As a field in formation—one that involved an eclectic group of individuals and incorporated information from a wide range of disciplines—consensus on many issues did not exist. As knowledge proliferated, truth claims were rendered up for grabs. It took concerted effort to try and establish orthodoxy within the field (which was never truly achieved), and for the field to achieve a patina of expertise. These efforts involved not only establishing institutions, but also attempting to sideline unruly voices—particularly those of “amateur” women.

This aspect of building the field of sexology was flagged as early as May 1914, as a short article in the German sex reform journal The New Generation reveals. In “New Foundations for Sexology,” the unattributed author (likely the controversial feminist, pacifist, and sex reformer Helene Stöcker) noted that it was “strange” (seltsam) that at the beginning of the twentieth century, after fifty years of the women’s movement and almost ten years of the sex reform movement, women were not playing more important and prominent roles in the expansion and consolidation of sexology, particularly in the creation of knowledge about women’s bodies and sexualities.! In the midst of chronicling the latest innovations

1. Helene Stocker likely wrote the article because she edited The New Generation and as editor claimed responsibility for the “general part” of the publication.

in the scientific study of sex and celebrating them as evidence of the public’s growing interest in sexual “problems,” the author noted that women figured in new journals such as the Archive for Women’s Studies (Frauenkunde) and Eugenics and the Journal for Sexual Science almost exclusively as “object[s]” of research, and were rarely considered as “subjects”—that is, as independent, self-determining agents capable of producing knowledge about their own sexual realities.”

Although the author magnanimously conceded that this “onesidedness” was likely unintentional and ought to correct itself in time, the insertion of this critique into an otherwise purely informational text is illuminating.’ It indicates that the content, direction, and sociopolitical implications of sexology were highly contested, especially along gendered lines. As many scholars have shown, conservative male sexologists in Germany and beyond actively used science to militate against women’s rights claims. They mobilized research on the size and weight of women’s brains, their reproductive functions, and their nervous systems to refute feminist demands for access to education, suffrage rights, and reforms to marriage and family law.* For many male sexologists, women were precisely objects to be studied, managed, and contained.

But these men did not monopolize sexual scientific knowledge. The fact that the author of “New Foundations for Sexology” believed that the elision and objectification of women would be “corrected” in time suggests that women had already made

2. “Neugriindung zur Sexualwissenschaft,” Die neue Generation 5 (May 1914): 287-289.

4. See, for example, Lillian Faderman, “The Morbidifcation of Love between Women by 19th Century Sexologists,” Journal of Homosexuality 4 (1978): 73-90; Janet Sayers, Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives (London: Tavistock, 1982); Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Margaret Jackson, The Real Facts of Life: Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality, c. 1850-1940 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994); Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex, and Morality (London: Penguin Books, 1995; London: I. B. Tauris, 2001). Citations from Bland refer to the I. B. Tauris edition.

important contributions to sexology that were worthy of acknowledgment. Furthermore, the author’s demand for a continued role for women within sexology reveals that certain women were invested, epistemologically and politically, in the creation of scientific knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality. Yet 100 years after the publication of this warning against women’s exclusion and marginalization from sexology, women remain largely peripheral to prevailing understandings of sexology, and to narratives about its history.

In Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900-1933, I seek to correct course by bringing women from the margins to the center of analysis. In what follows, I examine German-speaking women’s overlooked contributions to the rethinking of sex, gender, and sexuality taking place within sexology between 1900 and 1933. In so doing, I demonstrate that women not only played active roles in the creation of sexual scientific knowledge, but also made significant and influential interventions in the field that are worthy of rediscovery and engagement. Collectively, I refer to these women as women sexologists and as female sexual theorists, both to disrupt assumptions regarding sexological authorship and expertise, and to acknowledge the sustained intellectual energy these women dedicated to exploring, analyzing, and theorizing sexual subjectivity, desire, behavior, and relationships. Their sustained attention, focused textual output, intertextual and interpersonal connections to male sexologists, and international influence distinguish them from other feminist or female authors who wrote about sex at this time.

Of the nine women whose work I discuss, six were born and lived in Germany—namely, Ruth Bré, Henriette Fürth, Johanna Elberskirchen, Anna Ruling, Helene Stocker, and Mathilde Vaerting; the others—Rosa Mayreder, Grete Meisel-Hess, and Sofie Lazarsfeld—were Austrian. Although this study focuses on developments within Germany, the close cultural, intellectual, and political ties between Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century allow for an examination of sexual theorizing taking place among Austrian women as well. At this time, ideas and individuals traveled frequently back and forth across relatively recently created territorial borders.° Moreover, evidence of interpersonal and organizational interconnection, as well as intellectual influence, exists among some of the women in this book. Mayreder and Meisel- Hess, for example, collaborated with like-minded reformers and intellectuals in Germany: they were active members of German sex reform movements like the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, and their writing exercised considerable influence among German feminists, sex reformers, and sexologists. Meisel-Hess in fact moved to Berlin in 1908.° Even Sofie Lazarsfeld, who did not play a central role in any of the organizations

5. Acknowledging the links and parallels between German and Austrian female sexual theorists reminds us not only that the sense of “Germanness” was transnational in the early twentieth century, but also that a sense of European interconnectedness was particularly pronounced among political, economic, cultural, and intellectual elites especially before the First World War, as Ute Frevert has pointed out. See Ute Frevert, “Europeanizing Germany’s Twentieth Century,” History and Memory 17 (Spring/Summer 2005): 87-116. Moreover, it prompts the question raised by David Blackbourn: “What did it mean around 1900 to be a German who was also a Pfalzer and a (reluctant) Bavarian, the more so when you lived on the French border, probably had family members who had settled in the Banat two centuries earlier, and had an uncle in Milwaukee?” “German” characterizes a broader linguistic and cultural community that included Austrians, German-speaking Swiss, and “ethnically” German inhabitants of Russia, Italy, France, and Hungary, and even extended in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century beyond Europe to Africa and North America as a result of imperialism and emigration. David Blackbourn, “Europeanizing German History: Comment on the Eighteenth Annual Lecture of the GHI, November 18, 2004,” GHI Bulletin 36 (Spring 2005): 26. It is also important to acknowledge that, at the time this book begins, Germany had only been an independent, sovereign state for approximately three decades. Before that, the states comprising what became Germany had been part of the German Confederation, a loose association of German states established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Austria too had been a member of the German Confederation. Within the confederation, Austria and the powerful state of Prussia had fought each other for supremacy over the German territories within the confederation—a struggle that was decided in Prussia’s favor following the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and resolved when southern German states joined with Prussia and other northern German states in 1871 to form the new empire. Yet a sense of “greater Germany,” or a kind of transnational “Germanness,” first stirred in the nationalist revolutionary fervor around 1848, persisted after 1866 and 1871. Fruitful cultural and interpersonal exchange and political collaboration, particularly between major metropolises like Berlin and Vienna, certainly continued throughout the early twentieth century.

6. Conversely, psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, born in the southern German city of Mannheim, made his career in Austrian asylums and universities.

that brought together many of the figures in this book, led education courses and gave lectures on individual psychology in Berlin during the early 1930s.

Several of these women, such as feminist intellectuals Stocker, Mayreder, and Meisel-Hess, are well-known figures in German and Austrian women’s history, while others, like writer-activists Elberskirchen, Ruling, Vaerting, and Lazarsfeld, are only now being rediscovered. Regardless of their relative fame, these women were remarkably productive sexual theorists and researchers who wrote on a range of topics including sexual instincts and desires, homosexual subjectivity, gender expression, sexual difference, and motherhood. Some of these women, like the prolific Johanna Elberskirchen, wrote on almost all of these themes, whereas others like Grete Meisel-Hess focused on particular issues, in Meisel-Hess’s case heterosexual desire, maternal welfare, and racial hygiene.

The women sexologists studied in this book did not necessarily all share a common sexual politics, and especially disagreed on the meaning of sexual freedom: borrowing from Isaiah Berlin’s famous formulation, some envisioned sexual freedom in “positive” terms, as a freedom to have and enjoy sex, while others treated it in “negative” terms, as a freedom from sexual obligations.’ The personal and political motivations underlying their investments in sexual knowledge also varied significantly. Whereas Helene Stöcker lived in a common-law relationship with her long-term partner Bruno Springer, Henriette Firth was a mother of eight who went on to have a career in Frankfurt’s municipal politics. Rosa Mayreder was married but took on numerous lovers over the course of her life, and was an important intellectual within avant-garde Viennese circles. Johanna Elberskirchen, an active social democrat, lived openly as a lesbian, an extremely rare and courageous move for a woman of her time.

7. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166-217.

Though they diverged in significant ways, these women shared a number of important demographic similarities. By and large, they were born between the 1850s and 1880s, and belonged to the middle classes broadly defined. Four of these women (Elberskirchen, Meisel-Hess, Stocker, and Vaerting) enjoyed some university education, though they may not have attained a degree; Stöcker was among the first women to receive a PhD in Germany.® Though secular, these women tended to come from Protestant or Jewish confessional backgrounds; Catholics Mayreder and Vaerting are exceptional in this regard. They tended to be involved or affiliated with the “progressive” wing of the women’s movement as well as scientifically oriented sex reform organizations, such as the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitares Komitee), the German Society for the Fight against Venereal Diseases (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekampfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten), and the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform (Bund fiir Mutterschutz und Sexualreform). All would have been considered representative of the generation of “advanced,” “modern,” or “New Women” coming into view around the world around the beginning of the twentieth century.

Certainly, these women were not the only ones writing about sex, gender, and sexuality at this time, nor should their ideas be considered representative of “women’s ideas”—even the women included

8. Women’s access to education at this time can be described as spotty at best. The universities of Baden (Freiburg and Heidelberg) began admitting women as full-time (matriculated) students to all faculties in 1901; Prussia did not begin admitting female students until 1908. Before 1897, women who wished to attend lectures at Prussian universities had to obtain permission from the Prussian minister of education. Between 1897 and 1908, individual professors exercised the right to admit women to their classes. Before gaining the right to study in Germany, many German women of means pursued higher education in Switzerland. Once women became able to attend university, their numbers grew rapidly: according to Richard J. Evans, there were 80 full-time female students at German universities in 1905; by 1910, that number had risen to 1,867; by 1914, that number more than doubled to 4,126. See Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London: Sage Publications, 1976), 19-20. On the history of German women’s education, see James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

in this study held a multiplicity of sometimes radically conflicting views. Nevertheless, all of these women explicitly embraced the transformative implications of sexual science. At a time when sexual norms, ethics, and knowledge were unstable, contested, and quickly changing, these women sexologists saw feminist potential in the scientization of sex. They intervened in the discursive melee to articulate new understandings of female sexuality and same-sex desire, criticize hegemonic expressions of masculinity and male heterosexuality, investigate the effects of war on sexuality, and insist on the fluidity of gender. Their research and theories underwrote empowering representations of autonomous, active, female sexual desire, gender expressions that exceeded the masculine/feminine binary, and new forms of heterosexual relations beyond contractual marriage and prostitution.

Scientific knowledge about sex appealed to women sexologists for a number of reasons. Undoubtedly, science’s growing social authority, derived from its status as a truth discourse, was a major factor. The pace of new discoveries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emboldened scientists to declare that their work would both enlighten and improve humanity. Scientists claimed that the empirical facts they produced about the natural world had implications for the social: specifically, they maintained that their work revealed the illegitimacy of existing power relations based on “backward” traditions and dangerous “superstitions.” During the early years of Germany’s existence as a unified nation-state, scientists were often among the loudest challengers to established social and political powers. Physician, biologist, and anthropologist Rudolf Virchow, for example, played a leading role in advancing policies aimed at diminishing the authority of the Catholic Church following Germany’s unification as part of what has become known as the “culture wars” (Kulturkampf).’? Over time, science came to inform a new, modern

9. Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti- Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 40-41.

politics of legitimacy among new social actors vying for greater power and authority.

Power and authority were certainly in short supply for German women at the beginning of the twentieth century, regardless of their class position. Although the Imperial Civil Code of 1900 defined women as legal persons and freed them from the guardianship of their husbands, the Code only really addressed women as wives and mothers, thanks in part to its premise that the family constituted the fundamental unit of the state and society.'? Despite being legal persons in their own right after 1900, and despite gaining control over their own wages earned from work outside of the home (which would of course have been less than their husbands’, even when performing the same job), German women continued in many ways to occupy the status of legal minors. Legal power over children and property remained in husbands’ hands, and the rules surrounding divorce were tightened.'! And of course, until the Revolution of 1918, German women did not have the right to vote in national elections or run for office. Their subordinate legal status, their economic precariousness and dependence, their tenuous access to education and the professions, and their exclusion from formal political life made even middle-class women vulnerable as actors in the public sphere. Understanding their political and legal position alone gives us some sense of how hard women, above all feminist women, had to work to have their voices heard and make them matter; how difficult the task of changing dominant views

10. Myra Marx Ferree, Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 37.

11. Section 1354, Part 1, of the Code stated that “the husband takes the decision in all matters affecting married life.” Wives were obligated to transfer their property to their husbands upon marriage, and to submit property accrued during the marriage to their husbands. All legal power over children remained in fathers’ hands, and mothers could not legally represent their children in relationships with third parties; as Section 1634 put it, “If the parents disagree, the father’s opinion takes precedence.” If a widow with children remarried, her new spouse would gain all legal powers over children. Under the Code, the grounds of divorce were tightened and did not allow for divorce by consent for childless couples, or on the grounds of insurmountable dislike. See Evans, Feminist Movement in Germany, 13-14.

about proper sexual roles and relationships really was; and what obstacles women faced in having their ideas about the world and its reformation acknowledged as legitimate, particularly when it came to the controversial topics of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Science was therefore strategically valuable for women. Deploying the language of science enabled women to frankly and publicly participate in debates about sex and sexuality and not comprise their respectability—a precious political commodity for disempowered social actors, and one that, for women, was largely premised upon the presumption of sexual ignorance. Science could help women conjoin claims regarding somatic sexual needs and evolutionary imperatives with demands for economic independence and legally inscribed rights and freedoms. Moreover, couching their claims in what Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal have termed the “moral authority of nature” enabled women to assert that realizing their demands would improve not only individual but also collective well-being."

Yet the appeal of science was not merely strategic or rhetorical: treating sex objectively and rationally, as science claimed to do, further provided women with an alternative to religious frameworks for discussing sex, and broke with the conception of sex as sin. Many women insisted that gaining “objective” knowledge about sex was a necessary precondition for the formation of moral opinions, and for the proper governance of sexual life. As Johanna Elberskirchen put it, “As long as you rely on metaphysical arguments, which are elastic, a willing person with a good understanding of argumentation can confound you. That ends when you appeal to scientific facts, the results of natural history; they cannot be twisted or turned.” In Elberskirchen’s view, “The source of every higher ethic, every higher moral is the laws of life.” '* Many women like Elberskirchen believed that science exposed the integral roles women played in sexual and social life, and revealed that women

12. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

13. Johanna Elberskirchen, “Offener Brief an Fraulein Dr. phil. Ella Mensch,” Frauen Rundschau 5, no. 12 (1904): 382.

14. Ibid.

possessed innate sexual needs and instincts—along with a natural, “biological” right to live as autonomous and self-determining sexual agents. On the basis of its revelations, many women hoped that sexual science would effect a break with the arbitrary authority of the past and resolve long-standing inequalities. By revealing the “laws of life” and replacing ignorance with enlightenment, science could place women’s destiny under their own control, and liberate them by opening up new vistas of existential possibility.

For many women, then, sexology seemed to provide resources to conceive of sexual life in ways that transcended the limitations of the “man-made” world—that is, when it was conducted properly. This last point must be stressed, as some women were highly suspicious of the effects of male bias among sexual scientists. As Elberskirchen put it in her 1903 tract, Feminism and Science, “When scientists critique women, they do so as men, and not scientists.” 1? Women sexologists pitted their supposedly more objective knowledge against what they claimed were male scientists’ self-interested assertions. Mathilde Vaerting for one insisted that men, as the dominant group, could not be objective, as their power blinded them from seeing conditions as they truly were.'® At the same time, women often mobilized their gender as a unique epistemic location from which to produce sexual knowledge. In Feminism and Science, for example, Elberskirchen asserted that her experience as a woman, and her (self-proclaimed) authority as a medical specialist (Medizinerin), made her more objective when it came to women, and thus better able to read and interpret scientific evidence regarding women.”’ Likewise, in Woman’s Experience of the Male (1931), Sofie Lazarsfeld declared that her sexological text brought together “feminine attitude” and “personal experience” with specialist knowledge gained from practical,

15. Johanna Elberskirchen, Feminismus und Wissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Magazine Verlag Jacques Hegner, 1903), 4.

16. See Kirsten Leng, “The Personal Is Scientific? Women, Gender, and the Production of Sexological Knowledge in Germany and Austria, 1900-1931,” History of Psychology 18, no. 3 (2015): 238-251.

17. Elberskirchen, Feminism und Wissenschaft, 22.