Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany 1900–1933 by Kirsten Leng (review)

Kirsten Leng's monograph Sexual Politics and Feminist Science: Women Sexologists in Germany, 1900–1933 is an original work based on extensive archival research, and it will no doubt become an important reference point for all scholars interested in the history of sexology and its reception. Beautifully written, Leng's book puts women and the right to pleasure at the center of the historical reconstruction of sexual knowledge, moving away from the more familiar accounts of the pathologization of nonreproductive sexual behaviors. Leng breaks new ground in showing how women produced and engaged with sexual knowledge in the first three decades of the twentieth century in Germany.

This critical intellectual history is chiefly concerned with nine middleclass German and Austrian women and their work on sexual matters: Ruth Bré, Johanna Elberskirchen, Henriette Fürth, Sofie Lazarsfeld, Rosa Mayreder, Grete Meisel-Hess, Anna Rüling, Helene Stöcker, and Mathilde Vaerting. Leng explores what these women wrote about the female sex drive and heterosexuality (chapter 2); how they articulated new female sexual subjectivities by formulating new understandings of female same-sex desires (chapter 3); how they understood men's sex drives and male heterosexuality; and how these women criticized the sexual double standard (chapter 4). She also offers an excellent and nuanced analysis of how these women engaged with eugenics and racial theories (chapter 5). Finally, she explores how World War I gave women more cultural and social power and helped shift the interests of women who produced sexual knowledge (chapter 6). Sexual Politics and Feminist Science uncovers the richness of women's intellectual production on sexual matters and their readiness to question male sexual knowledge. One of the most fascinating contributions of this historical study is that it reveals the sexual freedom certain women at the beginning of the twentieth century were starting to demand. At the same time, Leng is always careful to highlight the extent to which female authors shared with male sexologists several basic prejudices typical of their time.

While Leng's work has the great merit of broadening our historical knowledge of sexology and brings female writers who have largely been overlooked by historians into the foreground, her definition of the field of sexology is somewhat unconvincing. She explicitly sets out to look at sexology not as a set of discourses or a disciplinary knowledge in the Foucauldian manner but as a scientific field. To formulate a "new conceptualization of sexology" (34), Leng relies on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the scientific field and on Steven Epstein's work on the knowledge that medical researchers and activists produced around HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Certainly Leng offers her readers the opportunity to reconsider the narrowness of the disciplinary boundaries imposed on sexology by many historians, yet it somehow remains unclear exactly what the field of sexology entails and how it functions in Leng's conceptual framework. In Bourdieu's analysis, a scientific field is the result of a combination of factors, including the interactions of many agents who have different types of power and the interactions of the knowledge producers with the rules defining the field. Scientists vested with great scientific authority wield the power to lay down the rules of the field. Their authority can be contested, of course, but there are still internal logics, rules, and shared assumptions that characterize a field. In Leng's book it is not clear what the rules of sexology as a field were or exactly who could claim to be or be considered a sexologist. For example, the difference between a female sexual reformer, a female journalist, and a female sexologist remains unclear. Of course, a sexual reformer or journalist may well write on scientific issues and accept and even popularize medical theories (or reject them), but this does not necessarily mean that they are or can be legitimately considered to be sexologists. By showing...