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ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS MISOGYNIST SEXOLOGY IN FIN DE SIECLE VIENNA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

RALPH LECK
RALPH LECK*
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Independent scholar E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

As the foundational contributions of the fin de siècle sexual science movement to research on sexuality continue to be fleshed out, new avenues of understanding this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive intersection of early sexual science and strains of first-wave feminism in Vienna and charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The first section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inflection of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of first-wave feminism and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists’ encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 33 - 60
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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4 First-wave feminists generally assumed the existence of a reproductive nature in all women: woman as mother, nurturer, wife, and teacher of the young. For a case study of how feminists found it difficult to free themselves from the “concept of nature as a yardstick,” see Meyer-Renschhausen, Elisabeth, Weiblich Kultur und soziale Arbeit: Eine Geschichte der Frauenbewegung am Beispiel Bremens 1810–1927 (Köln, 1989), 39Google Scholar. On feminist radicalism as a paradoxical conservation of the naturalized category Weiblichkeit see Greven-Aschoff, Barbara, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933 (Göttingen, 1981), 37–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. By proposing the historical character of gender relations, socialist feminists came closest to rejecting what Klara Zetkin called the traditional vision of “woman as only her sexual essence.” But even Zetkin was unable to free herself from essentialist expressions such as “the special nature and special tasks of women” and the “female Full-Human . . . as mother, spouse, and citizen.” Zetkin, Klara, “Nicht Haussklavin, nicht Mannweib, weiblicher Vollmensch,” Die Gleichheit 8/2 (19 Jan. 1898), 1–2Google Scholar.

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6 On the birth of modern criminology in Germany see Wetzell, Richard, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar. Wetzell, however, offers no history of the development of sexual criminology in Germany. The key contributions of Johann Ludwig Casper and Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, for instance, are unreferenced. The reason for this might be chronological. Casper and Ulrichs's contributions to the development of sexual criminology pre-date 1880. Yet chronology is not an adequate or satisfactory explanation. For instance, Wetzell placed Cesare Lombroso at the plinth of his study but failed to examine Lombroso, Cesare and Ferrero's, GuglielmoCriminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, trans. Rafter, Nicole and Gibson, Mary (Durham, 2004; first published 1893)Google Scholar. My narrative is an addendum to Wetzell's work. On German criminology and the discourse of the natural sexual difference, see Uhl, Karsten, Das “verbrecherische Weib”: Geschlecht, Verbrechen und Strafen im kriminologischen Diskurs 1800–1945 (Berlin, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Baumann, Imanuel, Dem Verbrechen auf der Spur: Eine Geschichte der Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik in Deutschland, 1880 bis 1980 (Göttingen, 2006)Google Scholar.

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9 See Kennedy, Hubert, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston, 1988)Google Scholar.

10 On Ulrichs's enormous contribution to the development of sexual criminology and sexual science see Greenberg, David, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar; Hirschfeld, Magnus, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 2001; first published 1914)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keilson-Lauritz, Marita, Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte (Berlin, 1997)Google Scholar; Mondimore, Francis, A Natural History of Homosexuality (Baltimore, 1996)Google Scholar; and Rosario, Vernon, ed., Science and Sexualities (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

11 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie (Stuttgart, 1886), vGoogle Scholar.

12 If one's disposition toward homosexuality is used to measure whether sexual science functioned as a politics of control or liberation, then Krafft-Ebing's case facilitates no simple conclusion. First, Krafft-Ebing's views on homosexuality changed over time. The first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) stigmatized homosexuality and did not call for decriminalization. Several years later, however, he came out in favor of decriminalization. See Krafft-Ebing, Dr, “Absatz 175 des deutschen Strafgesetzbuches und die Urningsliebe,” Zeitschrift für die Strafrechtswissenschaft 12 (1892), 34–54Google Scholar. By 1892, stigmatizing discourse coexisted with support for decriminalization. Second, the civic impact of sexual science may be independent of authorial intention. By producing a taxonomy of sexual diversity, sexual scientists placed sexual variety into public knowledge and this, Harry Oosterhuis argues, had a therapeutic impact on sexual minorities. Following this line of thought, Oosterhuis challenged Foucauldian shibboleths. “Whereas Foucault, Szasz, and other scholars consider the emergence of the science of sexuality as a deplorable medical colonization, replacing religious and judicial authority with a new form of moral tyranny, contemporaries . . . did not experience it as such.” Oosterhuis, Harry, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000), 10Google Scholar.

13 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, “Vorwort zur ersten Auflage,” in Moll, Albert, Die konträre Sexualempfindung (Berlin, 1899; first published 1891), iiiGoogle Scholar.

14 Moll's views, like those of Krafft-Ebing, changed over time. See his more sympathetic treatment of homosexuality: Moll, Albert, Berühmte Homosexuelle (Wiesbaden, 1910)Google Scholar.

15 In his intellectual biography, Hans Kurella (1858–1916) sought “to demonstrate how high the position Lombroso may be justly allotted in a brilliant epoch of positivistic study of the world, mankind, and society.” Kurella, Hans, Cesare Lombroso als Mensch und Forscher (Wiesbaden, 1911), iiiGoogle Scholar.

16 Wetzel criticizes Foucault for assuming that criminology functioned exclusively as social control. However, Wetzel does not ask whether Lombroso, whose work, he admits, derived from “the anthropometric measurements of prison inmates,” fits the Foucauldian model. Wetzel, Inventing the Criminal, 10, 29.

17 “The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify, to punish.” Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1995; first published 1975), 184Google Scholar. Despite references to humiliating techniques of examination, Foucault's Discipline and Punish made no reference to Lombroso's criminology. This is remarkable, because the latter's science literally depended upon an examination of a captive audience, and the conservation and normalization of existing power relations via social science was explicit. Nonetheless, Foucault radically transformed the historical analysis of criminology in three ways. First, he shifted radically the focus of penology from the study of presumably abnormal criminals to an examination of how the law constituted individuals as correlatives of ideology, institutions, and classificatory social science. Second, he revealed that systems of social control are not merely external institutions but tropic mental frameworks that might be understood as internal penal codes. These codes are not autarkic. Their functioning depends upon our willing participation, a type of self-subjectification. Third, although Foucault would not have put it this way, his history of bio-power and revelation that social control is participatory created a vista of second-order observation facilitating both a degree of individual sovereignty and Promethean resistance.

18 Criminal Woman expanded greatly upon a section of Lombroso's more famous Criminal Man, trans. Mary Gibson and Nichole Rafter (Durham, 2006; first published 1876), 54–7.

19 On Lombroso's relationship with degenerative theory see Pick, Daniel, “Lombroso's Criminal Science,” in idem, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848–1814 (Cambridge, 1989), 109–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Like Wetzell, however, Pick does not analyze Lombroso's sexual criminology.

20 Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal Woman, 115–17, 131–2.

21 Ibid., 183.

22 For instance, the editors’ introduction, entitled “The Birth of Sexology,” states that Lombroso's contribution to sexual science “consisted of furnishing modern scientific underpinnings for traditional condemnations of nonmarital sexuality.” Gibson and Rafter, in Lombroso, Criminal Woman, 21.

23 A wide spectrum of topics was covered in Bondio, Mariacarla, Die Rezeption der kriminalanthropologischen Theorien von Cesare Lombroso in Deutschland von 1880–1914 (Husum, 1995.)Google Scholar However, gender and sexual criminology were not among them. On Lombroso's influence in Germany, see also idem, “From the ‘Atavistic’ to the ‘Inferior’ Criminal Type: The Impact of the Lombrosian Theory of the Born Criminal on German Psychiatry,” in Becker, Peter and Wetzell, Richard, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge, 2006), 183–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25 Nordau, Max, Degeneration, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1893), 1: vi–viiiGoogle Scholar.

26 Ibid., 2: 301.

27 von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, Venus im Pelz (Leipzig, 1980; first published 1870)Google Scholar. This is the source of the word “masochism.” The sadist in the novel is a woman.

28 Nordau, Degeneration, 2: 300.

29 See Ellis, Havelock, Little Essays of Love and Virtue (Charleston, 2007; first published 1921)Google Scholar; Key, Ellen, The Woman Movement, trans. Borthwick, Mamah (New York, 1912)Google Scholar; and idem, Love and Marriage, trans. Arthur Chater (New York, 1911). For examples of the intellectual and civic affinities of Stöcker and Bloch see Stöcker, Helene, ed., Resolutionen des Deutschen Bundes für Mutterschutz (Berlin, 1916), 10Google Scholar; and Bloch, Iwan, “Individualisierung der Liebe,” Mutterschutz 77 (1906), 274–82Google Scholar.

30 Lessing, Gotthold, Emilia Galotti, trans. Dvoretzky, Edward (New York, 1979; first published 1772), 57Google Scholar.

31 Evans, Richard J., The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London, 1976), especially chap. 6Google Scholar, “The Antifeminists,” 175–206. On women's sexual politics see also Grossman, Atina, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and Reinert, Kirsten, Frauen und Sexualreform 1897–1933 (Herbolzheim, 2000)Google Scholar.

32 Möbius, Paul Julius, Geschlecht und Krankheit (Halle, 1903)Google Scholar; idem, Geschlecht und Entartung (Halle, 1903); idem, Über die Wirkungen der Castration (Halle, 1903); idem, Geschlecht und Kopfgrösse (Halle, 1903); idem, Goethe und Geschlechter (Halle, 1903); idem, Geschlecht und Kinderliebe (Halle, 1904); idem, Die Geschlechter der Tiere, 1. Teil (Halle, 1905); idem, Die Geschlechter der Tiere, 2. Teil (Halle, 1906); and idem, Die Geschlechter der Tiere, 3. Teil (Halle, 1906).

33 Bloch, Iwan, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit—in seinen Beziehungen zur modernen Kultur (Berlin, 1919; first published 1906), 512Google Scholar.

34 Paul Julius Möbius, “Über weibliche Köpfe,” in idem, Geschlecht und Kopfgrösse, 42–7.

35 Möbius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 27–8.

36 Suttner received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.

37 Möbius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 42. Similar anti-feminist defenses of the “male-state” appear in Fuchs, Eduard and Kind, Alfred, Die Weiberherrschaft in der Geschichte der Menschheit, Bd. 2 (Munich, 1923), 383Google Scholar.

38 Möbius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 29, 9.

39 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, Psychopathia Sexualis (Munich, 1997; first published 1886), 302Google Scholar.

40 See Schwartz, Gudrun, “‘Mannweiber’ in Männertheorien,” in Hausin, Karin, ed., Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte:Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1983), 62–80Google Scholar.

41 Möbius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 38.

42 A variety of important works refer to Olberg's scholarship and attest to her intellectual significance. See, for instance, Ellis, Havelock, Sex in Relation to Society, Vol. 2, Part 3, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York, 1936; first p;ublished 1910), 607Google Scholar; Michels, Robert, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Paul, Cedar (New York, 1962; first published 1915), 139Google Scholar.

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45 Ibid., 106–7.

46 Wilhelm Dilthey articulated the distinction between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). The key question for the human sciences was the relationship of the soul (Seele), free and sovereign, to the historical world (Lebenswelt). Like Dilthey, Olberg theorized under an implicit distinction between the natural and human sciences. However, she uniquely extrapolated this distinction in the realm of sexuality. Dilthey, Wilhelm, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studien der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1883)Google Scholar.

47 The leading sexual scientist in contemporary Germany, Volkmar Sigusch, developed a sociological theory of sexual nature that largely replicates the ideas of Olberg. Olberg, however, was not cited in his work. See Sigusch, Volkmar, “Natur und Sexualität: Über die Bedeutung der Kategorie Natur für eine Theorie der Sexualität des Menschen,” Das Argument 22/119 (1980), 3–15Google Scholar.

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49 Ibid., 106–7.

50 Several scholars address the political polyvalence of Darwinian thought. See Bowler, Peter, The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore, 1983)Google Scholar; Kelly, Alfred, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill, 1981)Google Scholar; Weindling, Paul, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Smith, Woodruff, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

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52 See especially, Ellis, Havelock, Man and Woman (London, 1894), 393–7Google Scholar.

53 Olberg, Das Weib, 113.

54 Möbius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 19, 17.

55 Ibid., 45.

56 Olberg, Das Weib, 116.

57 Weininger, Otto, Geschlecht und Character: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Munich, 1980; first published 1903), 459Google Scholar.

58 Johnston, William, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938 (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar; Timms, Edward, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Hapsburg Vienna (New Haven, 1986)Google Scholar. More commonly Olberg's name arises in connection with population policy and socialist eugenics. See, for example, Exner, Gudrun, Kytir, Josef, and Pinwinkler, Alexander, Bevölkerungswissenschaft in Österreich in der Zwischenkriegszeit, 1918–1938: Personen, Institutionen, Diskurse (Vienna, 2004)Google Scholar; Kappeler, Manfred, Der schreckliche Traum vom vollkommenen Menschen: Rassenhygiene und Eugenik in der sozialen Arbeit (Marburg, 2000)Google Scholar.

59 Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung; Zetkin, Clara, Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands (Berlin, 1958)Google Scholar.

60 Olberg appears in Canning, Kathleen, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, 1996)Google Scholar; and Ingrisch, Doris, ed., Die Revolutionierung des Alltags: Zur intellektuellen Kultur von Frauen in Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2004)Google Scholar. Olberg is absent from Anderson, Harriet, Utopian Feminism: Women's Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New Haven, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Anderson, Utopian Feminism, chaps. 7–11 devoted to a taxonomy of “feminist philosophers.”

62 For a canonical treatment of this division see Evans, Richard J., The Feminists: Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1979)Google Scholar.

63 Olberg, Das Weib, 113.

64 On the concept of conservative empowerment feminism see Leck, Ralph, “Conservative Empowerment and the Gender of Nazism,” Journal of Women's History 12/2 (Summer 2000), 147–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Mayreder, Rosa, Geschlecht und Kultur (Wien, 1998; first published 1923), 27, 23Google Scholar.

66 Mayreder, Rosa, “Perspektiven der Individualität” in idem, Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit (Munich, 1982; first published 1905), 173, 177Google Scholar.

67 Parenthetically, Möbius, for his part, resented this popularity and accused Weininger of intellectual plagiarism. See Möbius, Paul Julius, Geschlecht und Unbescheidenheit: Beurteilung des Buches von O. Weininger “Über Geschlecht und Charakter”, 3. Auflage (Halle, 1907)Google Scholar. Weininger threatened a litigious response to libelous allegations. See Schiller, Francis, A Moebius Strip (Berkeley, 1982), 103–4Google Scholar. Möbius's megalomania blinded him to the fact that the ballast of popular misogyny derived from the weight of numerous sources, from theology to science. Even within the sciences, the evidentiary bases for misogyny differed depending on subdisciplines. Weininger, in short, did not need Möbius to provide scientific justifications for women's inherent inferiority.

68 Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 101–2.

69 Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 41.

70 Ibid., 63–4.

71 Johnston, The Austrian Mind, 161, 199, 223; Anderson, Utopian Feminism, 150, 201; Le Rider, Jacques, Modernity and the Crisis of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, trans. Morris, Rosemary (New York, 1993), 155–7Google Scholar.

72 Sengoopta, Chandak, Otto Weiniger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago, 2000), 147Google Scholar.

73 Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 59, 35.

74 Gubser, Michael, “A Cozy Little World: Reflections on Context in Austrian Intellectual History,” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009), 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The dominant paradigm contextualizes the Austrian setting through the discourse of “modernism” and “modernity.” For example, see Schorske, Carl, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1993), xviiiGoogle Scholar; Arni, Caroline, “Simultaneous Love: An Argument on Love, Modernity, and the Feminist Subject,” European Review of History 11/2 (2004), 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Mayreder, Geschlecht und Kultur, 27.

76 See Allen, Ann Taylor, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970 (New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, idem, “Mothers of the New Generation: Adele Schreiber, Helene Stoecker, and the Evolution of the German Idea of Motherhood, 1900–1914,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10/3 (1985), 418–38.

77 Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 40.

78 Dilthey, Wilhelm, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Leipzig, 1991), 19Google Scholar.

79 On the predominance of a maternal feminism in the fin-de-siècle women's movement, see Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 221–49; Irene Stoehr, “‘Organisierte Mütterlichkeit’: Zur Politik der deutschen Frauenbewegung um 1900,” in Hausin, Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte, 62–80.