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4 Denying Desire Professional Women Facing Accusations of Homosexuality The chaos following defeat in World War I brought Germans both hope and mourning. Groups of individuals who had been loosely affiliated as homosexuals before the war began organizing and publicizing as never before when restraints ceased to operate after the collapse of the monarchy in November 1918. Magnus Hirschfeld pioneered spreading his enlightening messages about homosexuality through the relatively new medium of film. He appeared as himself in the film Different from the Others, part dramatization of blackmail, part platform for Hirschfeld’s arguments in favor of repealing Criminal Code Paragraph 175. One person who saw the film following its release in 1919, allowed under the relaxed censorship of the new Weimar Constitution, was Anna Philipps, a teacher in an elite girls’ secondary school near Bremen. “[The film] interested me,” Philipps wrote in a later autobiographical account, “so I ordered Hirschfeld’s book about homosexuality and studied the questionnaire. Through conscientiously answering the questions, I wanted to clarify whether or not I was homosexual.”1 Philipps’s statements imply that the concept of homosexuality struck her as a plausible explanation of her feelings and relationships. Philipps’s story is significant evidence of how some women became aware of sexological labels and adopted them as personal identities. But Philipps’s story is much more complicated. She included the vignette of her curiosity about homosexuality in the autobiography (and wrote down her life story in the first place) because she had come to reject the label for herself and apply it to a shadowy conspiracy of “real homosexuals.” “Whoever 117 118 Desiring Emancipation has read my account, will notice that all my efforts to bring clarity to the affair are thwarted,” she wrote. “It is perfectly clear who has an interest in keeping things in the dark—the homosexuals.”2 By 1932, she believed that these secretive and corrupt people were to blame for her having been fired from her teaching job. As one of their victims, it was her duty to expose their pernicious influence on the state. Other evidence included in the book she published suggests that she pushed some of her colleagues to consider whether their relationships and feelings might mean they were also homosexual . Her persistent questions blew up into an investigation of the relationships between teachers, of relationships between teachers and students, and of Philipps’s mental state and professionalism. The investigating officials tried to steer the case away from the teachers’ sex lives, but suspicions and charges of homosexuality were central to conflicts among the teachers. In their circle, same-sex intimacy was unremarkable until Philipps insisted on classifying it with a term widely understood as synonymous with perversion, and thus as a threat to their professional standing. Philipps’s case was not unique. This chapter analyzes Philipps’s documents along with archival files from two similar cases of workplace discipline involving charges of homosexuality to address three important questions in the history of women’s same-sex sexual relationships.3 This evidence allows us to investigate the texture of daily life among emancipated women to assess the role that intense friendships, feelings of attraction, and couples played in their social and professional worlds. Secondly, testimony from these cases gives us a window into the ways that people in general understood and used the concept of homosexuality in the 1920s. Finally, by the 1920s many doctors were trained in the basics of sexology. Their expertise was called upon in each case, demonstrating medicine’s effects on emancipated women’s sexuality. In historical accounts of the interwar period, the most visible kind of New Woman is the sexually active, matter-of-fact consumer employed in the white-collar economy.4 Yet contemporaries were also aware of a very different type of New Woman: the educated professional. Professional women—teachers, social workers, and government inspectors—cultivated scrupulously respectable reputations. Most of them were single and worked in human service bureaucracies with other women. Like the university students of the previous generation, the career women conformed to expectations of asexuality in order to be taken seriously in the workplace.5 Josefine Erkens, another of the women involved in a disciplinary case, was head of the Women’s Section in the Hamburg Police Department and a tireless advocate for the expansion of women’s professions.6 Her writings expressed the shared hope of professional women—to experience “the clear [3.145.60.166] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 15:21...

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