Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934 by Britta McEwen (review)

In this monograph, based on her 2003 dissertation, Britta McEwen has written a sensitive and thorough examination of the way in which knowledge about sex and sexuality was constructed, negotiated, and distributed in Vienna. Her timeframe is well chosen, beginning with the rapid development of the sexual sciences in the late nineteenth century and ending in February 1934 when the reform efforts in the Social Democrat–governed “Red Vienna” came to a halt in the violent conflicts with the police and the army. McEwen argues convincingly that Vienna occupied a special status during the post–World War I years, not only as the only socialist-run capital in Europe but also as a social-progressive island within a conservative nation. As such, the city-state of Vienna made for a fascinating social laboratory for the construction of sexuality and its meanings in society. While separating her study methodologically from those that link sexuality and nationalism, McEwen does frame it within supra-national discourses on sexuality, Social Darwinism and eugenics, and social pedagogy to form her central thesis, namely that sexual knowledge underwent a fundamental shift from a “form of scientific inquiry practiced largely by medical specialists to a social reform issue engaged by and intended for a wide audience” (2).

In order to substantiate her claims, McEwen analyzes a myriad of mostly published yet hitherto largely unexamined texts by public servants and sex reformers close to the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria and as well as those with allegiances to the Roman Catholic Church, such as sex manuals, children’s sexual education texts, or municipal reports. She uses a number of analytical tools that can broadly be subsumed under the label of poststructuralist cultural studies: Foucauldian discourse analysis, cultural history of mentalités in the manner of Lucien Febvre or Carlo Ginzburg, and William Reddy’s concept of “emotional regimes,” the cultural process by which emotions are managed and shaped. Common to all these methodologies is their emphasis on the constructedness of knowledge, which McEwen employs for a process-oriented rather than a purely descriptive approach to her topic: “I have sought to understand how people in Vienna thought about sex, what they did with the knowledge, and how that knowledge changed over time” (5).

McEwen’s text is made up of six largely self-contained chapters (plus introduction and conclusion), each of which approaches her central theme from a different angle: Chapter 1 focuses on Julius Tandler’s tenure as the minister of public health after World War I and his central role in the creation of Vienna’s health and hygiene system. Tandler promoted a specifically Viennese form of eugenics called “productive population politics” (44) to bring about the repair of national health and a national regeneration through state-prescribed sexual hygiene as well as support for families, unwed mothers, and illegitimate children. In the process, McEwen argues, Tandler created an official language of sexual knowledge that would find widespread use and initiated the shift away from private doctors to public servants in the delivery of sexual health services. Chapter 2 analyzes various approaches to sexual education during the interwar period. McEwen outlines the efforts of sexual reformers to replace religious doctrine with scientifically based knowledge about the body and sexuality and the resulting counter-discourse put forward by the Catholic Church. McEwen demonstrates that the respective positions were not monolithic but allowed for considerable overlap, especially around the themes of the naturalness of (heterosexual) desire, its sublimation through self-restraint and individual responsibility, marriage, and motherhood. These last two aspects also form the central focus of the third chapter. Here McEwen argues that the heterosexual couple was the principal object of the sexual reform movement, with women having a special role in protecting their reproductive capacities (and that of their partners) through the acquisition of anatomical knowledge and the prevention of disease and unwanted pregnancy. The literary model of the...