Forget any ideas you might presently hold about sexual liberation having its roots in the heady liberalism of the swinging 60s and early 1970s.  Almost one hundred years before that particular era of “free love”, European society was already indulging in a new more liberated approach towards to sex.   Nonetheless, sexual liberation is not a continuous pursuit to total liberation from sexual mores, it is also liable to decline into a more restrictive and controlled attitude, as it did during the 1930s, only re-emerging thirty years later when society was ready again to grow up sexually.

Sexual liberation all began with the steady weakening of religious beliefs, which arose out of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and the nineteenth century industrial revolution.  European society had been for many hundreds of years a rural and devoutly religious society, seeing the world through a religious mindset, and man’s own place in that world strictly conditioned by his birth.   But the "industrialising process," which is distinguished by several related developments, changed all this and brought about a more sexually liberated society as a result. 

So how are sexual behaviour and the industrial revolution linked you might ask?  Well, industrialisation begins with an increase in population, this leads to the spread and growth of towns and cities.  The increased demand for labour leads to a highly complex division of labour, which permits and fulfils the need for the mass production of goods and services.  In addition there is also an abandonment of religion and consequently an increasing secularisation of society. The rise in population and the concentration of those larger secularised populations into mass urban areas brings about a change in human behaviour and in particular sexual behaviour and culture.

Firstly, a rise in population is achieved through the promotion of heterosexual genital love[1], with the aim of providing a physically and mentally fit population to fuel the requirements of an industrialising society.  Secondly, the demand for labour gives way to a concentration of labour and urbanisation, which in turn both destroy the old social order, creating in its place unfamiliar problems of human interaction.  So as to cope with these new pressures, inventive forms of social control are required; to borrow from Freud, the "pleasure principle" relinquishes its hold in favour of the "reality principle", a trade off, which offers personal security, while at the same time providing reassurance and a means of social control through its explanations of human and sexual behaviour. 

Michel Foucault believes the changes in sexual behaviour experienced in the late nineteenth century also generated a discourse, which surprisingly did not give rise to "an age of increased sexual repression", but instead ushered in a proliferation of the "various forms of sexuality".[2]

Connected to population growth and urbanisation, is the nineteenth-century invention often referred to as the nuclear family, which Jeffrey Weeks describes as "a microcosm of stable society", and the foundation stone for a modern industrialised and urbanised nation-state.[3]  Within the confines of the newly created family, sexual behaviour emerged as a point of discussion demanding increased restrictions and regulations.  For the woman, the pronouncement of independence in the changed industrialised society exposed her to increased scrutiny.  While for the child there was separation from the sexual proximity of the adult in the form of restrictions on child workers, compulsory education and the like.  Through this separation of the child from the world of the adult, childhood could thus become asexualised and so placed beyond danger.[4]  This was reinforced by organisations such as the Boy Scouts; boys were seen as especially at risk from the believed physical and psychological damage masturbation was thought to produce.[5]  Hysteria, homosexuality, insanity, a loss of memory, sterility, and blindness were just some of the injuries thought likely; educators, doctors, and parents were all employed against discouraging the practice of self-abuse.  Coital union within marriage was regarded by our great grandparents as the proper means to venting sexual desires, but only for the purposes of procreation, and not to excess as this could lead to acquired homosexuality.[6]  Either excessive masturbation or “over-doing the pleasures of women,” were thought could lead to homosexual behaviour.  Food for thought you might say.

The dilemma for early industrialised societies with regards non-reproductive forms of sexual behaviour was no longer based solely upon "Christian morality", which had long argued that sodomy, or as it was know in Britain, buggery was wrong for it was a waste of semen and so was affront to humanity.  The more important concern however, was the effects non-reproductive sexual behaviour, had upon a nation's economic strength.  Those members of society who did not fulfil their reproductive role for whatever reason, or conform to the ideologically acceptable male/female heterosexual relationship, were increasingly isolated and condemned as social misfits during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This is evident from the increased sexual ordering imposed by the medical and legal worlds, empowering heterosexual coital relationships and behaviour, while at the same time redefining what was considered "normal" and "abnormal".  For an industrialised society non-reproductive sexual behaviour was both an issue highly visible to those living in the newly formed urban expanses, but also indicative, many thought, of society’s degeneration.

The theory of degeneration was first put forward by nineteenth century French physicians to tackle the social problems associated with the rise of industrialisation.  An increase in alcoholism, crime, and poverty, as well as the declining birth rate, were all believed indicative of national degeneration.  Its earliest supporter was Bénédict Auguste Morel who, by translating into secular terms the biblical story of the Fall of Man, drew upon the Lamarckian[7] doctrine of the inheritability of acquired characteristics.  Morel suggested that the unhealthy environment created through industrialisation had resulted in a deterioration of mankind from a previously perfect state, and that inherited weaknesses were augmented with each generation.[8]

Furthermore, the importance attached to maintaining restricted and regulated sexual conduct was reinforced by the belief that if management of the nation's reproductive abilities was not adopted then the nation would ultimately collapse.  It was accepted that "if the British Empire was to survive, the imperial race must exercise sexual restraint, and government should intervene to enforce it."[9]  By suggesting a link between genealogical characteristics and sexual deviancy, Richard Krafft-Ebing's case studies entitled, Psychopathia Sexualis, gave added authority to the theory of congenital degeneration and the need for measures to combat this weakening of the social body.  In 1937, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi elitist paramilitary organisation the SS, gave a speech expressing his own fears of national disintegration

"Assuming that roughly 7-8% of men in Germany are homosexual.  If that is how things remain, our nation will fall to pieces because of that plague.  A nation will not for long bear such a destruction of its sexual economy and equilibrium."[10]

How to deal with the problem of homosexuality troubled many observers including Cesare Lombroso the Italian physician and criminologist who advocated life-long incarceration for those found guilty of committing homosexual acts.[11]  Others like Krafft-Ebing, felt such extreme action would prove unsuccessful, only a greater knowledge and tolerance could resolve social anxieties about homosexuality and sexuality in general.

Although many European countries underwent some degree of sexual liberation during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the unlikely central-European location of Germany, which saw the greatest advances in sexual emancipation.  The years between 1860 and 1933 witnessed an explosion of mainly German studies into human sexual behaviour, although others like Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter ensured some English studies were also published.  In the 1860s sexual taboos like male homosexuality were openly discussed by reformers such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the German lawyer and first gay rights campaigner. The first psychiatric study dealing with homosexuality appeared in Germany in 1869, it was written by Karl von Westphal, and was published as an article in a medical journal entitled, Die Konträre Sexualempfindung.[12]  In 1870, Karl Maria Kertbeny a German-Hungarian novelist wrote two pamphlets[13] in which he argued against the criminalisation of same-sex acts, using for the first time ever the term, "homosexual".  By the late nineteenth century an increasing number of mainly German psychiatric studies on sexuality were being published, from the misogyny and anti-Semitism of Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, to the important contributions of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s collection of case studies, Psychopathia Sexualis and later, Magnus Hirschfeld’s many studies into human sexual behaviour.  In 1907 Hirschfeld wrote the first study into transvestism, concluding that it was something mainly practiced by heterosexual men so that they could get in touch with their feminine side.  His 1200 page extensive and in-depth study into male and female homosexuality, published first in 1917, still provides the ideological basis for those who advocate gay equal rights.

Where once there was only the act of sodomy, by the late nineteenth century increasing numbers of prosecutions were brought against those accused of performing homosexual acts.  The trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s gave the British public its first glimpse of what a homosexual actually looked like.  In the early twentieth century men like Hirschfeld, campaigned against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. However, his pioneering Institute for Sexology in Berlin was ransacked and destroyed by Hitler’s Nazis thugs in May 1933, finally destroying the progressive sexual liberation enjoyed by many for many decades in Europe.  Three months earlier in February 1933 the Nazis had begun their crackdown on sexual freedoms by closing the eighty odd lesbian and gay bars found in the German capital and arresting increasing numbers of men accused of homosexual acts.  

With the death in 1933 of German liberal–minded sexual culture, further calls for sexual liberation were rather muted in the post-war years.  By the 1960s society had recovered enough to once again focus its attention on sexual liberation, but this time the campaign for sexual freedom emerged in America.  For the next twenty years sexual liberation became entrenched in people’s minds, so much so that with the advent of HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, sexual liberation turned into a headless chicken unsure of what its role was in a changed world.  It is only through the efforts of those like Mr Cox that today sexual liberation is free to be expressed and enjoyed by us all.

Footnotes

[1] An increased demand for labour, Sydney Coontz suggests, is the motivation behind an increase in fertility.  The decline in infant mortality is not, he believes, the sole reason for the rise in population normally associated with industrialisation.  See Coontz S.H., Population Theories and the Economic Interpretation, (London, Routledge, 1968), p.170, also Habakkuk H.H., "English Population in the Eighteenth Century", in The Economic History Review, (Dec. 1953)

[2] Foucault M., trans. Hurley R., The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, (London: Penguin, 1978),  pp.47-8

[3] Weeks J., Sex, Politics and Society, The regulation of sexuality since 1800, 2nd Edition, (London: Longman, 1989), p.29

[4] The introduction of compulsory state education and restrictions on child labour in the late nineteenth-century began the process of asexualising childhood.  The maintenance of this was often conducted through youth groups like the Boy Scouts in England, the Wandervogel in Germany and later the Hitlerjugend or Hitler Youth.

[5] See Hare E.H., "Masturbatory Insanity: the History of an Idea", in The Journal of Mental Science, no. 108 (1962), pp.1-25

[6] Opinions about what constituted excessive differed, some marriage manuals suggested weekly or monthly, while others, being less restrictive believed regular sexual release without the purpose of reproduction was important for bodily health.  See Greenberg, D. F., The Construction of Homosexuality, (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp.362-3

[7] Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) French botanist and zoologist

[8] See Morel B.A., Traité des dégénerescences physiques, intellectuels et morales de l´espèce humain, (Paris: Bailliere, 1857), in Greenberg, D. F., p.412.  See also Bleys, R. C., The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918, (London: Cassell, 1996), pp.152-7

[9] Hyam R., Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), p.1

[10] Grau G., trans. Camiller P., Hidden Holocaust?  Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany 1933-45, (London: Cassell, 1995), p.91

[11] Greenberg, D. F., p.418

[12]von Westphal K., "Die Konträre Sexualempfindung", in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 1869, no. 2, pp.73-108, in Hirschfeld M., (2000), p.37, see n.24

[13] Benkert (Kertbeny) K.M., "An open letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice", (1869), Blasius M., Phelan S., (eds.), pp.67-79