Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (review)

This new volume on the history of sexuality in Europe is ideal for the undergraduate who is beginning to explore the subject and for researchers who are keen to find material to buttress international and transnational connections between discourses and practices around sexuality in the twentieth century. Dagmar Herzog has made a concerted and wide-ranging attempt to produce an account of sexuality that provides interconnections between her multiple chosen subject areas and between the different regions within the geographical remit of this book series, which focuses on new approaches to European history. As such, the book should satisfy its intended audience and, what is more, should be of interest to readers of Modernism/Modernity.

Any trepidation that may seize the reader upon picking up a book with such a broad remit is dispelled by the ease with which the author interweaves the relevant issues with the diverse range of countries covered. The substantive chapters of the book follow a strict chronological order, progressing from 1900 through to the present; the account is not, however, naively progressive. In line with Foucault’s and others’ suggestions on historical method and interpretation, Herzog’s story is one of tensions over sexual issues, revisions, reversions, some advances towards liberalization, and some returns to oppressive restrictions on the exercise of sexuality.

The first chapter focuses on the cultural and scientific contexts in which sexuality was inserted from 1900 to 1914, presented by Herzog as a period of reconceptualization. New attitudes towards prostitution are understood within a broader frame of feminist struggles; the dangers that prostitution represented, its causes, and its sexological analysis are linked with the separation of sex from reproduction and with what Foucault has termed one of the innovations in the science of sex: eugenics. Notably clear in this chapter is its analysis of the increasing visibility of homosexuality, a trend resulting from a “feed-back loop” of activism, scandal, and scientific investigation (35–36).

The second chapter sets changes in sexual discourse and practice within the paradigm of state intervention, and behaviors are viewed through the prisms of war, peace, masculinity, right- and left-wing authoritarian regimes, and changes in culture led by groundswell demands. While the role of the state in welcoming or rejecting certain changes is highlighted, and while the variability of sexuality across supposed national divides is clearly illustrated, the chapter reads less like an analysis of state intervention and more like a general account of the years between and including the two world wars. The reasons behind state acceptance or opposition to issues like abortion or homosexuality remain less clear in this chapter.

The third chapter is useful for its analysis of the postwar conservatism that arose after the European catastrophe, and continuing Herzog’s analysis of left- and right-wing interpretations of the Nazi period in Germany, it eloquently interrogates the embattled “return to morality” and its consequences for sexuality. The tensions in such a conundrum, however, once more allow the author to avoid a simple regressive account: British postwar conservatism and promotion of domestic harmony was matched by the search for romance and for reciprocal pleasure between men and women. Nevertheless, continuities between the Italian Fascist Party’s ban on birth control methods—which was not rescinded until the 1960s—and the ongoing repression of homosexuality are mobilized to subdue any simplistic, progressive story.

The fourth chapter continues against the backdrop of progressive and regressive change by analyzing the fate of homosexuality in diverse European scenarios. It recalls, for example, that change was in the wind in Britain but not in Spain in the 1960s. The rise of consumer culture and “quick-fix” liberation is charted across European countries, as are the critique of compulsory heterosexuality and new models of masculinity and femininity. The fall of communism, the rise of individualized sexual and romantic personal economies, the challenges of Islam, and the battle between liberality and new conservatism occupy the pages of the fifth chapter.

Despite the wide...