World League for Sexual Reform
The World League for Sexual Reform was a League for coordinating policy reforms related to greater openness around sex.[1] The initial groundwork for the organisation, including a congress in Berlin which was later counted as the organisation's first, was orchestrated by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1921. It officially came into being at a congress in Copenhagen in 1928.[2][3]
Platform
The organization advocated a ten-point platform which included:
- Economic, political, and sexual equality of men and women
- Secularization and reform of laws on marriage and divorce
- Birth control to make birth voluntary and responsible
- Eugenic birth selection
- Protection of unmarried mothers and "illegitimate children"
- Rational understanding of intersex people and homosexuals.
- Comprehensive sex education
- Reforms to eliminate the dangers of prostitution
- Treating sexual abnormalities medically, rather than "as crimes, vices or sins"
- Legalization of sexual acts between consenting adults, while criminalizing sexual acts without consent, or acts upon minors and the mentally disabled. Distinguishing crime from vice.[4][5]
History
From September 15 to September 21, 1921, Magnus Hirschfeld organised the First International Congress for Sexual Reform on the Basis of Sexual Science in Berlin, which formed the original groundwork for the League. The World League for Sexual Reform officially came into existence on July 3, 1928, at its congress in Copenhagen.[2] Representatives came from many countries: England, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Lithuania, Egypt, Liberia, Argentina, Chile, the British Indies, and Malaysia.[5]
Ralf Dose has written an overview of the League.
Magnus Hirschfeld, the British physician Havelock Ellis and Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel were elected the first presidents of the World League. From 1930, Norman Haire and Dane Jonathan Leunbach replaced the elderly and largely inactive Ellis and Forel, but they remained Honorary Presidents.[6]
In 1928
In 1929 Hirschfeld presided over the third international congress held at
By 1930, the League claimed to have 182 individuals as members. It also claimed 190,000 members overall, many of them belonging to affiliated organisations. Groups which constituted portions of its worldwide membership included the German National League for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene, Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, and the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sex Reform.[2]
In 1932, the fourth international conference of the WLSR was organized and hosted by
Many of the WLSR's books and records were destroyed by the Nazis during a raid in Berlin on the institute in May 1933.[14][15] The League ceased to exist in 1935.[2]
See also
References
- ^ "Archive for Sexology". Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Archived from the original on 15 January 2011. Retrieved 28 May 2018.
- ^ Project MUSE.
- S2CID 242907960.
- ^ Weltliga für Sexualreform. "Principal Points of the League's Platform". Archived from the original on November 22, 2011.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-87586-357-3.
- ^ a b Ralf Dose, "The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches", Journal for the History of Sexuality 12:1, pp. 1–15.
- ^ ISBN 0710093004, (p. 173).
- ^ Barbara Burman, "Better and Brighter Clothes; The Men's Dress Reform Party, 1929–1940". Journal of Design History, vol 8, no 4, 1995, pp. 275–290.
- ISBN 0691138176.
- ^ a b The Times, League For Sexual Reform International Congress Opened, 9 September 1929.
- ^ "News - The University of Sydney". Sydney.edu.au. Retrieved 22 September 2017.
- ^ Ivan Crozier, "All the World's a Stage": Dora Russell, Norman Haire, and the 1929 London World League for Sexual Reform Congress, Journal for the History of Sexuality 12:1 (Jan. 2003).
- ^ Lesley A. Hall,
The Life and Times of Stella Browne: Feminist and Free Spirit. I. B. Tauris, 2011, ISBN 1848855834, (p. 153, 173–74).
- ^ ISBN 0857453386, (pp. 175–177, 193).
- ISBN 0582294894, (pp. 140–141).