Eugenics; Sexual ethics; Women -- Social and moral questions
This movement, although it may properly be said to be German, since its
manifestations are mainly exhibited in the great German Empire, is yet
essentially a Teutonic movement in the broader sense of the word.
Germans of Austria, Germans of Switzerland, Dutch women, Scandinavians,
have all been drawn into this movement. But it is in Germany proper that
they all find the chief field of their activities.
If we attempt to define in a single sentence the specific object of this
agitation we may best describe it as based on the demands of woman the
mother, and as directed to the end of securing for her the right to
control and regulate the personal and social relations which spring from
her nature as mother or possible mother. Therein we see at once both the
intimately emotional and practical nature of this new claim and its
decisive unlikeness to the earlier woman movement. That was definitely a
demand for emancipation; political enfranchisement was its goal; its
perpetual assertion was that women must be allowed to do everything
that men do. But the new Teutonic woman's movement, so far from making
as its ideal the imitation of men, bases itself on that which most
essentially marks the woman as unlike the man.
The basis of the movement is significantly indicated by the title,
_Mutterschutz_--the protection of the mother--originally borne by "a
Journal for the reform of sexual morals," established in 1905, edited by
Dr. Helene Stoecker, of Berlin, and now called _Die Neue Generation_. All
the questions that radiate outwards from the maternal function are here
discussed: the ethics of love, prostitution ancient and modern, the
position of illegitimate mothers and illegitimate children, sexual
hygiene, the sexual instruction of the young, etc. It must not be
supposed that these matters are dealt with from the standpoint of a
vigilance society for combating vice. The demand throughout is for the
regulation of life, for reform, but for reform quite as much in the
direction of expansion as of restraint. On many matters of detail,
indeed, there is no agreement among these writers, some of whom approach
the problems from the social and practical side, some from the
psychological and philosophic side, others from the medical, legal, or
historical sides.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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