Eugenics; Sexual ethics; Women -- Social and moral questions
public; it had an immediate success and a large sale. Dr. Forel had not
entered this field before; he had merely come to the conclusion that
every man at the end of his life ought to set forth his observations and
conclusions regarding the most vital of questions. Again, at about the
same time, Dr. Iwan Bloch, of Berlin, published his many-sided work on
the sexual life of our time, _Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit_, a work less
remarkable than Forel's for the weight of the personal authority
expressed, but more remarkable by the range of its learning and the
sympathetic attitude it displayed towards the best movements of the day;
this book also met with great success.[61] Still more recently (1912) Dr.
Albert Moll, with characteristic scientific thoroughness, has edited,
and largely himself written, a truly encyclopaedic _Handbuch der
Sexualwissenschaften_. The eminence of the writers of these books and
the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not
concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply
and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread
appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown
not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific
quality, but by the existence of a journal like _Sexual-Probleme_,
edited by Dr. Max Marcuse, a journal with many distinguished
contributors, and undoubtedly the best periodical in this field to be
found in any language.
At the same time the new movement of German women, however it may arise
from or be supported by political or scientific movements, is
fundamentally emotional in its character. If we think of it, every great
movement of the Teutonic soul has been rooted in emotion. The German
literary renaissance of the eighteenth century was emotional in its
origin and received its chief stimulus from the contagion of the new
irruption of sentiment in France. Even German science is often
influenced, and not always to its advantage, by German sentiment. The
Reformation is an example on a huge scale of the emotional force which
underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most
typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world--the
shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius--was an
avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts
irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general
tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the
Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among
German women should be, to a much greater extent than the corresponding
movements in other countries, an emotional renaissance. It is not, first
and last, a cry for political rights, but for emotional rights, and for
the reasonable regulation of all those social functions which are
founded on the emotions.[62]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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