The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin PDF Download

Author: Annette F. Timm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052119539X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
How a declining population influenced reproductive and sexual health policy in Germany.

Author: Kara L. Ritzheimer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movies and pulp fiction, and prioritizing social rights over individual rights. These provisions enabled legislations to adopt two national censorship laws intended to regulate the movie industry and retail trade in pulp fiction. Both laws had their ideological origins in grass-roots anti-'trash' campaigns inspired by early encounters with commercial mass culture and Germany's federalist structure. Before the war, activists characterized censorship as a form of youth protection. Afterwards, they described it as a form of social welfare. Local activists and authorities enforcing the decisions of federal censors made censorship familiar and respectable even as these laws became a lightning rod for criticism of the young republic. Nazi leaders subsequently refashioned anti-'trash' rhetoric to justify the stringent censorship regime they imposed on Germany.

Author: Jill Suzanne Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801469694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Author: M. Turda
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137293535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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In 1900 Hungary was a regional power in Europe with imperial pretensions; by 1919 it was crippled by profound territorial, social and national transformations. This book chronicles the development of eugenic thinking in early twentieth-century Hungary, examining how eugenics was an integral part of this dynamic historical transformation.

Author: Melissa Kravetz
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442629649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Examining how German women physicians gained a foothold in the medical profession during the Weimar and Nazi periods, Women Doctors in Weimar and Nazi Germany reveals the continuity in rhetoric, strategy, and tactics of female doctors who worked under both regimes. Melissa Kravetz explains how and why women occupied particular fields within the medical profession, how they presented themselves in their professional writing, and how they reconciled their medical perspectives with their views of the Weimar and later the Nazi state. Focusing primarily on those women who were members of the Bund Deutscher Ärztinnen (League of German Female Physicians or BDÄ), this study shows that female physicians used maternalist and, to a lesser extent, eugenic arguments to make a case for their presence in particular medical spaces. They emphasized gender difference to claim that they were better suited than male practitioners to care for women and children in a range of new medical spaces. During the Weimar Republic, they laid claim to marriage counselling centres, school health reform, and the movements against alcoholism, venereal disease, and prostitution. In the Nazi period, they emphasized their importance to the Bund Deutscher Mädels (League of German Girls), the Reichsmütterdienst (Reich Mothers' Service), and breast milk collection efforts. Women doctors also tried to instil middle-class values into their working-class patients while fashioning themselves as advocates for lower-class women.

Author: Randall Hansen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107434599
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book is the first comprehensive analysis of eugenics in North America focused on the second half of the twentieth century. Based on new research, Randall Hansen and Desmond King show why eugenic sterilization policies persisted after the 1940s in the United States and Canada. Through extensive archival research, King and Hansen show how both superintendents at homes for the 'feebleminded' and pro-sterilization advocates repositioned themselves after 1945 to avoid the taint of Nazi eugenics. Drawing on interviews with victims of sterilization and primary documents, this book traces the post-1940s development of eugenic policy and shows that both eugenic arguments and committed eugenicists informed population, welfare, and birth control policy in postwar America. In providing revisionist histories of the choice movement, the anti-population growth movement, and the Great Society programs, this book contributes to public policy and political and intellectual history.

Author: Lisa M. Todd
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319515144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book is the first comprehensive study of sexual lives in Germany and occupied Europe during the First World War. Reconsidering sex in war brings to life a whole cast of characters too often left out of the historical narrative: widowed women who worked as prostitutes, fresh-faced recruits who experienced the war in a VD hospital, eugenicists who conflated sex and national decline, soldiers’ wives ostracized by neighbourhood rumour mills. By considering the confluence of public discourse, state policy, and everyday life, Lisa M. Todd adds to the growing body of knowledge on war and society in the twentieth century. By incorporating the 1914-1918 experience into the longer frame of the pre-war sex reform movement and the post-war Allied occupation of the Rhineland, this book is able to more fully evaluate the impact of the war years on the history of intimate relations in early twentieth-century Germany.

Author: Annette F. Timm
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472583825
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Through a blend of history and historiography, Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe provides a clear and concise introduction to gender history in the region. The detailed examples and engaging language make this a useful overview for students not only of gender history, but also of European history more widely, as considerations of gender illuminate our understanding of historical change and individual experience. In six thematic chapters that cover democracy and capitalism, imperialism and war, the authors explain how gender roles were socially constructed and how they influenced political and economic developments during the period. This new edition has been thoroughly re-edited and expanded to take account of ongoing methodological innovation and recent scholarship in the field. The book also includes a brand new chapter on sexuality in the 21st century and extended material on: · Scandinavia · The Mediterranean · Alternative Sexualities · Women's history and femininity Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe is a key text for all students of gender history and the history of modern Europe in general.

Author: Michael Geyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521897963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
These essays rethink the nature of Stalinism and Nazism and establish a new methodology for viewing their histories that goes well beyond outdated twentieth-century models of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality. They offer a new understanding of the intertwined trajectories of socialism and nationalism in European and global history.

Author: Ian Dowbiggin
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070061947X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Why are Americans so bad at marriage? It's certainly not for lack of trying. By the early 21st century Americans were spending billions on marriage and family counseling, seeking advice and guidance from some 50,000 experts. And yet, the divorce rate suggests that all of this therapeutic intervention isn't making couples happier or marriages more durable. Quite the contrary, Ian Dowbiggin tells us in this thought-provoking book: the "caring industry" is part of the problem. Under the influence of therapeutic reformers, marital and familial dynamics in this country have shifted from mores and commitment to love and companionship. This movement toward a "me marriage," as the New York Times has termed it, with its attendant soaring expectations and acute dissatisfactions, is rooted as much in the twists and turns of 20th-century history as it is in the realities in the hearts and minds of modern Americans, Dowbiggin argues; and his book reveals how effectively those changes have been encouraged and orchestrated by a small but resourceful group of social reformers with ties to eugenics, birth control, population control, and sex education. In The Search for Domestic Bliss, Dowbiggin delves into the stories of the usual suspects in the founding of the therapeutic gospel, exposing little known aspects of their influence and misunderstood features of their work. Here we learn, for instance, that Betty Friedan did not after all discover "the problem that knows no name"--the widespread unhappiness of women in mid-century America; and that, like Friedan, one of the pioneers of marriage counseling was an open admirer of Stalin's Russia. The book also explores the long overlooked impact of sex researchers Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson on the development of marriage and family counseling; and considers the under-appreciated contributions to the marriage counseling movement of social reformer and activist Emily Mudd. Through these and other reform-minded Americans, Dowbiggin traces the concerted and deliberate way in which the old order of looking to family and community for guidance gave way to seeking guidance from marriage and family counseling professionals. Such a transformation, as this book makes clear, has been a key part of a major revolution in the way Americans think about their inner selves and their relations with friends, family, and community members--a revolution in which once deeply private concerns have been redefined as grave matters of public mental health.