The World League for Sexual Reform was a League for coordinating policy reforms related to greater openness around sex. [1] The initial groundwork for the organisation, including a congress in Berlin which was later counted as the organisation's first, was orchestrated by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1921. It officially came into being at a congress in Copenhagen in 1928. [2] [3]
The organization advocated a ten-point platform which included:
From September 15 to September 21, 1921, Magnus Hirschfeld organised the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexual Science in Berlin, which formed the original groundwork for the League. The World League for Sexual Reform officially came into existence on July 3, 1928, at its congress in Copenhagen. [2] Representatives came from many countries: England, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Lithuania, Egypt, Liberia, Argentina, Chile, the British Indies, and Malaysia. [5]
Ralf Dose has written an overview of the League. [6] Congresses were held in Copenhagen (1928), London (1929), Vienna (1930), and Brno (1932). Congress speakers included: Hirschfeld, Norman Haire, Vera Brittain, Dora Russell, [7] Charles Vickery Drysdale (from the Malthusian League), Stella Browne, Ernst Gräfenberg, Marie Stopes, M. D. Eder (a pioneer psychiatrist), Laurence Housman, George Ives, Eden Paul, Alexandra Kollontai, Max Hodann, Felix Abraham (who with Dr Ludwig Levy-Lenz performed the world's first sex-change operation in 1931 at Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin), Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ethel Mannin, [7] Harry Benjamin, Peter Schmidt, William J. Robinson (an American contraception crusader) and Jack Flügel, a Freudian psychologist who assisted Norman Haire and Dora Russell organize the Congress and also led the Men's Dress Reform Party. [8] Although not a speaker, Albert Einstein was in contact with the Congress. [9]
Magnus Hirschfeld, the British physician Havelock Ellis and Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel were elected the first presidents of the World League. From 1930, Norman Haire and Dane Jonathan Leunbach replaced the elderly and largely inactive Ellis and Forel, but they remained Honorary Presidents. [6]
In 1928 Francis Turville-Petre, British archaeologist and friend of Christopher Isherwood, stayed at Hirschfeld's institute in Weimar Berlin. Whilst based in Berlin, Turville-Petre was an active member of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which campaigned for gay legal reform and tolerance, and attended the Second Congress in Copenhagen in 1928.
In 1929 Hirschfeld presided over the third international congress held at Wigmore Hall, London. [10] Harley Street sexologist, Norman Haire as secretary and Dora Russell as treasurer, [11] jointly organized the event. [12] Hirschfeld's speech praised British scientists as "distinguished pioneers in eugenics". [10] A number of British feminists attended the 1929 conference, including Naomi Mitchison (whose paper was "Some Comment on the Use of Contraceptives by Intelligent Persons"), Dora Russell ("Marriage and Freedom"), Janet Chance, a pioneer of abortion-law reform ("A Marriage Education Centre in London"), Vera Brittain, a writer and pacifist ("The Failure of Monogamy") and Stella Browne ("The Right to Abortion"). [13]
By 1930, the League claimed to have 182 individuals as members. It also claimed 190,000 members overall, many of them belonging to affiliated organisations. Groups which constituted portions of its worldwide membership included the German National League for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene, Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, and the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sex Reform. [2]
In 1932, the fourth international conference of the WLSR was organized and hosted by Hugo Iltis in Brno. Plans for a fifth conference in Moscow were scrubbed because of the political stresses caused by the growing power of Hitler and Stalin. [14]
Many of the WLSR's books and records were destroyed by the Nazis during a raid in Berlin on the institute in May 1933. [14] [15] The League ceased to exist in 1935. [2]
Sexology is the scientific study of human sexuality, including human sexual interests, behaviors, and functions. The term sexology does not generally refer to the non-scientific study of sexuality, such as social criticism.
Magnus T. Hirschfeld was a Jewish German physician and sexologist, whose citizenship was later revoked by the Nazi government. Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and World League for Sexual Reform. He based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. Performance Studies and Rhetoric Professor Dustin Goltz characterized the committee as having carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights".
Dora Winifred Russell, Countess Russell was a British author, a feminist and socialist campaigner, and the second wife of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a campaigner for contraception and peace. She worked for the UK-government-funded Moscow newspaper British Ally, and in 1958 she led the "Women's Peace Caravan" across Europe during the Cold War.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute for Sexual Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology, or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was the first sexology research center in the world.
The connection between left-leaning ideologies and LGBT rights struggles has a long and mixed history. The status of LGBT people in socialist states have varied throughout history.
Helene Stöcker was a German feminist, pacifist and gender activist. She successfully campaigned to keep same sex relationships between women legal, but she was unsuccessful in her campaign to legalise abortion. She was a pacifist in Germany and joined the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft. As war emerged, she fled to Norway. As Norway was invaded, she moved to Japan and emigrated to America in 1942.
The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in May 1897, to campaign for social recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and against their legal persecution. It was the first LGBT rights organization in history. The motto of the organization was "Per scientiam ad justitiam", and the committee included representatives from various professions. The committee's membership peaked at about 700 people. In 1929, Kurt Hiller took over as chairman of the group from Hirschfeld. At its peak, the WhK had branches in approximately 25 cities in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
Albert Moll was a neurologist, psychologist, sexologist, and ethicist. Alongside Iwan Bloch and Magnus Hirschfeld, he is considered the founder of medical psychology and sexology. Although Moll was a pioneer of sexology, his contemporaries such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud eclipsed his work, primarily due to the bitter rivalry between them. Moll accused Freud of selection bias, and Freud claimed Moll could not handle constructive criticism after their first meeting.
The Einstein of Sex is a 1999 German film by Rosa von Praunheim. The plot follows the life of the Jewish doctor, sexologist, and gay socialist Magnus Hirschfeld.
Eugen Steinach was an Austrian physiologist and pioneer in endocrinology. Steinach played a significant role in discovering the relationship between sex hormones and human physical identifiers.
Francis Adrian Joseph Turville-Petre was a British archaeologist, famous for the discovery of the Homo heidelbergensis fossil Galilee Man in 1926, and for his work at Mount Carmel, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel. He was a close friend of Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden.
Norman Haire, born Norman Zions was an Australian medical practitioner and sexologist. He has been called "the most prominent sexologist in Britain" between the wars.
Stella Browne was a Canadian-born British feminist, socialist, sex radical, and birth control campaigner. She was one of the primary women in the fight for women's right to control and make decisions regarding their sexual choices. Active mainly in Britain, her principal focus was on sexual law reform, including the right for women to both access knowledge on and use birth control, as well as the right to abortion. She was also involved in labour parties, communist parties, as well as a number of women's societies.
The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP) was founded in 1913, "to advance a particularly radical agenda in the field of sex reform, based on the writings of gurus such as [Edward] Carpenter and [Havelock] Ellis." Magnus Hirschfeld, the famous German-Jewish sexologist, was also a co-founder. In 1931, the Society was renamed the British Sexological Society. It seems to have continued until some point in the 1940s.
Max Julius Carl Alexander Hodann was a German physician, eugenicist, sex educator and Marxist, "the best-known and most controversial medical sex educationalist in the Weimar Republic". He wrote for a working-class readership and for children. After 1933, as a refugee from Nazi Germany, he lived predominantly in Norway and Sweden.
Janet Chance was a British feminist writer, sex education advocate and birth control and abortion law reformer.
Karl Giese was a German archivist, museum curator, and the life partner of Magnus Hirschfeld.
Dora Rudolfine Richter was a German trans woman and the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender-affirming surgery. She was one of a number of transgender people in the care of sex-research pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld at Berlin's Institute for Sexual Research during the 1920s and early 1930s. She underwent surgical removal of the testicles in 1922, followed in 1931 by removal of the penis and vaginoplasty. Richter died at the age of 74 in Allersberg, Bavaria on 26 April 1966.
Li Shiu Tong was a Hong Kong medical student, sexologist, and LGBTQ activist in the early twentieth century, known as the companion of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.
Charlotte Charlaque was a German-American actress. She was an early trans activist and one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
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