Gender & Sexuality

With the introduction of the Weimar Republic came a promise of legal equality for women, including the end of all discrimination against women in the civil service. Unfortunately, the previous socioeconomic structure diminished the impact of women’s new political freedoms. In addition, the advancement of capitalist development created new forms of sex segmentation in the labor market, which pushed more women into low-skilled, low-paying jobs. In response, many women in the middle classes became hostile to the Republic. They began to assert their independence by working, which the Republic saw as desertion of their homes, children, and morality, and a challenging of men’s authority. This desertion sparked the introduction of the phrase “Kinder, kuche, kirche” (children, kitchen, church) representing the places and responsibilities women had. Regardless of this resentment, the vast majority of women still voted for the conservative parties trying to oppress them, a source of conflict and confusion amongst historians today. “Why does she [the German woman] vote for a group that intends to take the ballot from her? Why does she support antifeminism? How are we to account for the fact that in nine cities where the sexes voted separately last autumn, more women than men voted for the Nazis?” (Bridenthal). Their counterintuitive voting allowed the patriarchal ideology to continue to dominate the political spectrum. Finally, in the November Revolution of 1918, women won the right to vote. They voted for the first time in the National Assembly elections two months later. After this vote, hostility towards women in the press dissipated, and society welcomed women into the public sphere. Women began to address workplace rights, sex discrimination, and other major feminist issues such as abortion, voting rights, and more. However, decisions made by courts at this time reinforced women’s role in the patriarchal society.

One significant issue debated during the Weimar Republic was the 1931 campaign against Paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code which punished abortion. The campaign for the abolition of Paragraph 218 became a central focus for the Sex Reform and Communist Women’s Movements. The campaign began after the 19 February 1931 arrest of two physicians and several activists for performing illegal abortions. This campaign justified the right to control one’s own body in terms of social eugenic health and collective welfare. Thousands of women demonstrated in the streets of Berlin and gathered in rallies demanding the right to birth control and abortions. They protested against unemployment, rising prices and taxes, and the Brüning regime’s cutbacks in women’s rights. They also demanded equal pay, social protection for mothers and children, and an end to the prosecution of the two physicians. These activists believed in the separation of sexuality from procreation. They believed in a woman’s right to determine sexual satisfaction and to decide when to bear children.

During this era, women were also working to discover who they were and what they believed their role in society was. In 1931, a psychologist named Alice Ruhle-Gerstel reported on her experiences with an evening class on love stories in Die literarishce Welt. The experiences she had intrigued her as the young women in her class used the romance novels as an alternative for self-help books, while Ruhle-Gerstel herself saw the love stories for their aesthetic pleasures. However, these young women were looking to these novels for personal advice and a sense of education on what their cultural, societal, and personal role should be. According to Ankum, women wanted answers to questions such as: “to marry or not to marry, bringing children into the world or preventing pregnancy, faithfulness in love, demanding faithfulness,” and whether to work (24). With the ongoing technological advances and cultural adjustments after World War I, society changed many factors relating to women and femininity which led to women questioning their future. Society often construed modernity, the growth of technological advances and urbanization, specifically as feminine. Artists and intellectuals would describe the city of Berlin as a woman or in comparison to women. In the 1929 issue of Der Querschnitt, journalist Harold Nicolson described Berlin “as if Berlin were a highly desirable woman, uncultured, crude. But secretly everyone looked upon her as the goal of their desires. Some saw her as hefty, full-breasted, in lace underwear, others as a mere wisp of a thin, with boyish legs in black silk stockings.” (Ankum 42) This tendency shows the view men had of women and how the male desire both elevates and represses woman as an object of allure and a catalyst of danger.

Societal changes and advancements in technology largely affected women. The introduction of household appliances forever changed housework and women’s labor within the household. Women also actively engaged with technology in both the workplace and the home (Ankum 106). At this point in time, women were much more likely to hold a job than the generation before, and were gradually more involved in athletics and contributed to contemporary magazines. The emphasis in magazines and society on health and physical fitness began to become popular (Ankum 113). The increase in technology in the 1920s also led to ideas of human sexuality being modernized by society through changes in the ideas regarding people’s sexuality which changed the discussion and dissemination of various forms of birth control (Ankum 106). This modernized idea of sexuality aided in the women being cast by men in a provocative pose as a “sex-machine locus of her creators’ fear and fascination” (Ankum 128). The overuse of woman as a symbol of desires of the male mass psyche was accentuated by authors, journalists, and artists at the beginning of industrial modernity. Wishful thinking of containment led to the realization that woman and machine refuse to be “man’s perfect creation”. (Ankum 130)

Between the years of 1919 and 1933, a sex reform movement spread through Weimar Germany that transformed traditional ideas of sexual relations and aimed to grant sexual freedom to married men and women. The sex reform movement and the introduction of the “New Woman” in the 1920s came in response to the patriarchy’s growing concern that women would lose interest in heterosexual sex and begin experimenting with female sexuality, gender identity, and homosexual relations.

The sex reform movement encouraged sexual exploration by advocating for working class women’s access to birth control and reform laws prohibiting abortion, namely, Paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code. Proponents of the movement advocated for legalized abortion, contraception, sex education, eugenic health, and women’s right to sexual satisfaction. Sex counseling centers run by municipal health departments, health insurance services, and Communist and Social Democratic welfare organizations provided information and advice on medical contraception and sexual technique as well as access to birth control. The centers were staffed by physicians sympathetic to the anti-contraception and anti-abortion politics. Since all the physicians were male, men of science dominated the movement. Proponents of the sex reform movement regarded sexual pleasure as a right for women, but only as a part of the woman’s duties in the service of family harmony and procreation. In this way, women’s sexual freedom was controlled by its service for men. According to Atina Grossmann, “Sexual satisfaction for women, but satisfaction proclaimed and defined mainly by men; the right to contraception and abortion, but only when ‘necessary’; active sexuality justified because it was healthy and potentially procreative; orgasm as a eugenic measure” (qtd. in Snitow, page 155). Proponents of the movement sought to control and channel the “New Woman” with a vision of rationalization of dangerous erotic impulses in a way that disciplined women. As Th. H. Van de Velde notes, “The husband is the sexual educator and guide through whom the woman is educated to full proficiency in love” (qtd. in Snitow, page 162). The image of the “New Woman” was a flapper, a young stenotypist, and a working mother. As described by Atina Grossmann, “The New Woman symbolized the social and demographic changes with which the Sex Reform movement was not concerned” (qtd. in Snitow, page 156). She was an intellectual and had a style inspired by Marlene Dietrich - a short haircut and suit. Sex became a business and focused on procreation for the improvement of Germany during a recession. Standards for healthy sex and orgasming stabilized heteronormative family life by enticing women into having more sex through the proposition of more enjoyable orgasms.

The sex reform movement also sought to emphasize sexual freedom for the LGBTQ+ community. In 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the first Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin, which aimed to educate the German public on sex and the spectrum of sexualities. Hirschfeld was a German-Jewish physician and sexologist who practiced his studies in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He campaigned for the social and political recognition of gay, bisexual, and transgender men and women (Kennedy, Hubert C, 122). Hirschfeld co-founded the field of sexology, was chairman of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee— the first organization to advocate rights for the queer community— and was one of the most prominent sex researchers in Germany. He attempted to provide a place for queer men and women in nature and society by challenging borders between male and female in an age where people still made inflexible distinctions between sexes and their natural attributes. Hirschfeld was controversial amongst scholars and mainstream media because he was interested in people who society deemed sexually deviant (Does 7). In 1921, the Munich police sparked a resistance movement by shutting down Café Zehner. The raid was one of many against cafés and bars that had become informal gathering spots for gay men in Munich in the years after World War I. The closing of this particular cafe inspired four men to found the Munich Friendship League, a political group dedicated to the fight for equal rights for people with same-sex orientation. Richard Linsert, the group’s leader, also became an important leader of the queer movement. He fought to establish the Munich Friendship League and inspired thousands of men in the years after the war to found the Friendship magazine. The Friendship magazine was a means of organization for the friendship leagues like Linsert’s that were formed after the war (Marhoefer 20). Nevertheless, the queer movement still faced opposition and internal problems. As soon as Friendship hit street kiosks, conservative forces within the government tried to censor it, putting the magazine’s staff on trial for violating obscenity laws (39). In 1933, the Nazis destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute in Berlin, thereby bringing his work to an abrupt and brutal end. Hirschfeld had been on a world tour at the time and never returned to Germany. He died in 1935 while in exile in Nice (Does 14).

The Sex Reform movement began to lose momentum in 1933 and there was a sharp decline in the social acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community due to the rise of the Nazi party, their persecution of reform supporters, and their deeming of sexual reform as degenerate. In adherence to the Nazi party’s mission to racially and culturally “purify” Germany, thousands of LGBTQ+ individuals were arrested by the Nazi party, most of whom were gay men. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates The Nazi party arrected 100,000 gay men and up to 15,000 were placed in concentration camps (Mullen). Similar to the gold star badge worn by Jews, gay men were forced by the Nazis to wear a large pink triangle to identify themselves. Lesbians wore a black triangle. These symbols were used as signifiers of their sexuality and were meant to bring the individuals who wore them social shame, as they were deemed outcasts by the Nazi party. The following image is a group of homosexual prisoners wearing their pink triangle badges in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany in 1938:

The Nazi Party deemed queer individuals “the lowest caste” and treated them especially harsh (Pierre Seel, 26). An estimated 65% of gay men in concentration camps died between 1933 and 1945. Even after the end of World War II, Nazi anti-gay laws remained in place in Germany, and many LGBTQ+ individuals remained imprisoned until 1970.

During the 20th century, intermarriage (marriage between men and women of different social, racial, and religious groups) became more common. According to the 1939 German census in 1914 “only 21.5% of Jews were in a mixed marriage; by 1932, this had surged to 65.1%”(Ritter and Niehuss 3). However after 1933, when the Nazi party came to power, intermarriage rates plummeted. By 1939 “only 20.6% of new marriages involving Jews were mixed” (3). In Nazi Germany, intermarriages were considered “a major threat to the racial purity of the German people” (6). Overall the sex reform movement saw an increase in sexual exploration, but as the Nazi party came to power there was a sharp decline in any sexual relationship deamed unacceptable by the party.