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ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS
MISOGYNIST SEXOLOGY IN FIN DE SIECLE
VIENNA
RALPH LECK
Modern Intellectual History / Volume 9 / Issue 01 / April 2012, pp 33 - 60
DOI: 10.1017/S147924431100045X, Published online: 13 March 2012
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S147924431100045X
How to cite this article:
RALPH LECK (2012). ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS MISOGYNIST
SEXOLOGY IN FIN DE SIECLE VIENNA. Modern Intellectual History, 9, pp 33-60
doi:10.1017/S147924431100045X
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Modern Intellectual History, 9, 1 (2012), pp. 3360 C
Cambridge University Press 2012
doi:10.1017/S147924431100045X
anti-essentialist feminism versus
misogynist sexology in n de
siecle vienna
ralph leck
Independent scholar
E-mail: rmleck@yahoo.com
As the foundational contributions of the n de si`ecle sexual science movement to
research on sexuality continue to be eshed 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 rst-wave feminism in Vienna and
charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The rst
section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from
medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inection
of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of rst-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.
Protect women from intellectualism!
Paul Julius M obius, 1903
1
When Paul Robinson observed that Alfred Kinsey has rarely been taken
seriously as a thinker, he meant that Kinsey has not been treated as a theorist
worthy of the attention of intellectual historians.
2
This is also true of many early
sexual scientists. Though the rich history of the sexual science movement now is
being eshed out, there remains a dearth of research on the historical intersection
1
Paul Julius M obius,
Uber den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (Halle, 1903), 45.
2
Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters
and Virginia Johnson (Ithaca, 1989), 42.
33
34 ralph leck
of the sexual science and feminist movements.
3
This essay attempts to remedy
this deciency by illuminating the historical dialogue between feminists and early
sexual scientists.
To date, this dialogue has been absent from the historical record or pushed
to the margins of scholarship in both elds. The signicant contribution of
feminists to sexual science can best be understood by illuminating their struggles
against a largely misogynist discipline. Tracing the emergence of sexual science
from the eld of criminal science reveals the misogynist inection of n de si`ecle
sexual theory. This misogynistic inection not only conicted with the spirit of
feminism; it also set up roadblocks to theoretical cooperation. Nowhere was the
evidence of the cultural incommensurability of early sexual science and feminism
more vivid than in the intellectual collision of Oda Olberg (18721955) and Paul
M obius (18531907) or in the imaginative gender theory of Rosa Mayreder (1858
1938), which arose as a passionate polemic against misogynist sexology.
The dialectical encounter of feminism and sexual science presented here
was erce but fruitful, for it produced an anti-essentialist (or anti-naturalist)
variant of feminism that was rare among rst-wave feminists. (Most rst-
wave feminist philosophy presupposed an essentialist view of womens nature.
Womens biological capacity for motherhood was treated as the source of an
invariable feminine character or essence.
4
) Thus this essay revises andcomplicates
the category of rst-wave feminism by chronicling the history of anti-essentialist
feminism. The essay then concludes by offering new perspectives on Austrian
intellectual history as a whole on the basis of this recovery of a lost dimension of
rst-wave feminism.
3
See Volkmar Sigusch, Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 2008); Vern Bullough,
Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New York, 1994).
4
First-wave feminists generally assumedthe existence of a reproductive nature inall women:
woman as mother, nurturer, wife, and teacher of the young. For a case study of how
feminists found it difcult to free themselves from the concept of nature as a yardstick,
see Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, Weiblich Kultur und soziale Arbeit: Eine Geschichte der
Frauenbewegung amBeispiel Bremens 18101927 (K oln, 1989), 39. On feminist radicalismas
a paradoxical conservation of the naturalized category Weiblichkeit see Barbara Greven-
Aschoff, Die b urgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 18941933 (G ottingen, 1981), 37
44. 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. Klara Zetkin, Nicht Haussklavin, nicht Mannweib,
weiblicher Vollmensch, Die Gleichheit 8/2 (19 Jan. 1898), 12.
anti-essentialist feminism versus misogynist sexology 35
criminology and anti-feminism
Prior to the twentieth century, the concerns of what was known at the turn of
the twentiethcentury as the womanquestion surfacedinvery fewearly works of
sexual science. Tothe extent that female issues appearedinearlysexological texts at
all, they materializedinreference to so-calledvices suchas lesbianism(sometimes
called tribaldism or sapphism), prostitution, and physiological discussions of
orgasm and reproduction. There are several reasons for the absence of feminist
themes, but one overriding reason can be located in the historical origins of the
discipline of sexual science. The sexual science movement was disproportionately
dominated by male medical doctors. Imagining that a woman of the nineteenth
century developed feminist consciousness and sought to become a medical
doctor, there was no chance of her expressing that consciousness in the academic
discipline of sexual science, because, at least in Germany and Austria, women
were excluded from the medical profession until the early twentieth century.
5
A less obvious explanation for the marginalization of womens issues within
the history of sexual science can be gleaned from the criminological origins of
sexology.
6
Mainstreamsexual science disproportionately emergedinEurope from
the subeldof forensic medical science. After 1850, medical doctors suchas Johann
Ludwig Casper (17961864) in Berlin and Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (181879)
in Paris did pioneering work in medical criminology. Their research touched on
important topics such as pederasty, zoophilia, rape, and the sexual identity of
hermaphrodites, but these topics were investigated almost exclusively in terms of
medical law. Casper seems to have been the more rigorously empirical natural
scientist. He corrected Tardieus unproven assumptions of anthropometry,
5
See James Albisetti, The Fight for Female Physicians in Imperial Germany, Central
European History 15 (1982), 88123.
6
On the birth of modern criminology in Germany see Richard Wetzell, Inventing the
Criminal: A History of German Criminology 18801945 (Chapel Hill, 2000). 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 Ulrichss
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 Cesare Lombroso and
Guglielmo Ferreros Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, trans.
Nicole Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham, 2004; rst published 1893). My narrative is
an addendumto Wetzells work. On German criminology and the discourse of the natural
sexual difference, see Karsten Uhl, Das verbrecherische Weib: Geschlecht, Verbrechen und
Strafen im kriminologischen Diskurs 18001945 (Berlin, 2003). See also Imanuel Baumann,
Dem Verbrechen auf der Spur: Eine Geschichte der Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik in
Deutschland, 1880 bis 1980 (G ottingen, 2006).
36 ralph leck
which we now associate with the criminology of Cesare Lombroso (18351909):
according to anthropometry, criminal behavior corresponded to and could be
identied by particular physiological marks. Tardieus 1858 study of two hundred
cases of pederasty concluded that pederasts could be identied by a tapered
penis and, in some cases, by short teeth and thick lips. Casper disputed these
anthropometric claims and similar assertions by other sexual scientists, like the
claim that the vice of lesbianism was caused by an elongated clitoris.
7
Of greatest cultural importance, however, was the indelible mark criminal
sexology left on the emerging discipline of sexual science. Caspers willingness
to challenge presuppositions for which he could nd no empirical evidence
endeared him to early sexual scientist and social activist Karl Ulrichs (182595).
Ulrichs often praised Caspers evidentiary rigor and interpreted it as a sign of the
liberatory potential of empirical reason. However, Ulrichs generally rejected the
civic competence of most forensic doctors:
Forensic doctors, with all of their experience, are not completely competent [to pass
judgments about homosexuals]. Not even one percent of Urnings [homosexuals] pass
through their hands. Once and for all, I must protest against their eternal idea that their
experience enables them to pass judgment on Uranian [homosexual] love. In particular,
I am referring to the work of Casper and Tardieu . . . Who would dare pass judgment
on Dionian [heterosexual] love from books about prostitution, depraved women, and/or
venereal disease? The research of both [Casper and Tardieu on homosexuality] runs
parallel with such an approach.
8
Ulrichs, a pioneer of the homosexual rights movement, clearly understood
the politico-judicial implications of a sexual science governed by traditional
criminology.
9
He exposed the fallacious quality of judgments about homosexuals
7
Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, Etude m edico-l egale sur les attentats aux moeurs, Annales
dhygi`ene publique et de medecine legale 2/9 (1858), 13798. Johann Ludwig Casper,
Practisches Handbuch des gerichtlichen Medicin: Nach eigenen Erfahrung, Bd. III,
Biologischer Teil (Berlin, 1858), 17182; see also idem,