Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

The Conservative Roots of Reproductive Rights

Roman Birke is a Research and Teaching Associate in Contemporary History at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. His research focuses on the history of human rights, reproductive policies, and gender. In 2020, he published ‘Geburtenkontrolle als Menschenrecht. Die globale Diskussion über Überbevölkerung seit den 1940ern‘ (Wallstein). The book investigates the linkage between overpopulation discourse and human rights since the 1940s. It argues that in the 1950s and 1960s, claims that ‘overpopulation’ threatened to endanger human rights proved to be a key factor in the success of population control programs in the global south. 

In the 1960s, traditional norms about sexuality were challenged by what became known as the ‘sexual revolution’. In 1968, the United Nations adopted a resolution which, for the first time in the UN’s history, declared the use of contraceptives to be a human right. But, as this contribution argues, the new human right to contraception was not part of a discourse of sexual freedom but reinforced traditional family norms. 

‘Sexual revolution’

Historiographical accounts have convincingly questioned the term ‘sexual revolution’ as the transformation of sexual norms was less an event but rather a process. But, without a doubt, studies on sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s changed the public debates about sexual practices long considered taboo, including extra-marital sex and homosexuality. At the same time, feminist activists campaigned for the acknowledgment of female sexual desires and demanded a separation of sex and reproduction. At least in the ‘Western’ world, the development of new contraceptive technologies like the ‘pill’ and the IUD (Intrauterine device) have been key for advancing this agenda, despite the uneven access to contraceptives and women’s critique of bearing the sole responsibility for contraceptive choices and risks.

Contraception as a Human Right

During the contentious debates about sexual norms in the 1960s, the United Nations claimed that the use of contraceptives was a human right and urged governments to provide couples with the ‘means necessary to enable them to exercise their right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children’.[1] Many contemporary contributions like the Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics claim that these UN documents were the cornerstone of what we understand as reproductive and sexual rights today which include the right to decide whether or not to have children, the right to sexual and reproductive health and being able to have a ‘satisfying and safe sex life’, independent of sexual preferences.[2] But, surprisingly, the UN-resolutions of the 1960s were not part of a discourse of sexual freedom. Rather, they understood contraception as a potential remedy to the anxieties of global overpopulation and emphasized traditional family norms.

The couple as rights-holder

Contrary to many human rights documents at the time, the resolutions declared the couple instead of the individual to be the bearer of a right to contraception. But, who, within the couple, had the power to decide on whether or not to use contraception? Many domestic legal and constitutional norms in the 1960s and beyond declared men to be the head of the family which made the individual exercise of rights dependent on the gendered power imbalances within the couple. This was not only a matter of legal theory. When, in 1984, a large number of activists gathered for the International Women’s Health Conference, speakers emphasized that many women in their respective countries cannot make contraceptive choices without the agreement of their male spouses. 

Protecting the family

The UN’s view on reproductive rights was strongly linked to how human rights documents conceptualized the family. The 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 16) and the 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 23) both defined the family as ‘the natural and fundamental group unit of society’ and argued that it was ‘entitled to protection by society and the State.’ Many UN member countries emphasized that contraception should not question traditional roles of men and women within the family. In a series of meetings of the UN’s Third Committee in 1966 and 1967, the French and Iranian delegates argued that questioning these roles would introduce ‘elements of conflict into the marriage’ and threaten the ‘unity and harmony of the family’. The British delegate reasoned that equal opportunities should not be ‘divorced from a woman’s primary duty to her family’. Only the US-delegate argued that the responsibilities for family affairs including family planning ‘should be shared by both spouses’ and that calls to protect the harmony of the family were just ‘pretext for discriminatory practices against women’.[3]

Despite such a critique, traditional family norms remained at the forefront of global UN-programs that distributed contraceptives to men and women. While many organizations and activists involved in these efforts privately believed in the emancipatory potential of contraception, they focused on providing only married couples with contraceptives and emphasized traditional gender roles. Instead of showcasing alternative roles beyond traditional family norms, advertisements for contraception like the 1968 Disney film ‘Family Planning’ argued that using contraceptives to reduce the number of children would allow women to be more efficient in carrying out their domestic duties.  

Change

Despite their focus on maintaining traditional family norms, early reproductive rights declarations already contained an acknowledgement of individual desires to limit the number of children. Paradoxically, this position was not per se related to the discourses of the ‘sexual revolution’. Also, it was not primarily concerned with envisioning new roles for women beyond motherhood and duties to the family. Rather, limiting the number of children was part of a wider discourse of overpopulation and attempts to reduce population growth in the global south. But despite the original intentions, the human right to contraception became a slogan that was reappropriated by the women’s movement and activist-minded international lawyers who intended to change global gender relations. Already in 1975, the UN Mexico City Women’s conference formulated a strong rebuke to previous UN resolutions on contraception. Instead of declaring contraception a couple’s right, their resolution claimed that all individuals had such a right. They also emphasized that individuals did not only have a right to limit the number of their children. They also claimed a right of not having children at all. 

While UN human rights doctrine started to understand women’s rights as independent of their roles within the family, many contemporary debates about contraception and the family are reminiscent of the conservative origins of reproductive rights in the 1960s. Based on what Ivan Krastev described as ‘demographic anxiety’, many authoritarian governments envision a national awakening by the means of an increased birth rate of heterosexual couples, turning back decades of developments in the legal understanding of reproductive rights.[4]


Cite this article: Roman Birke, „The Conservative Roots of Reproductive Rights“, in: History | Sexuality | Law, 19/01/2021, https://hsl.hypotheses.org/1580, (abgerufen am: Datum).


[1] United Nations: Declaration on Social Progress and Development, Proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 2542 (XXIV) of 11 December 1969.
[2] Leslie Francis, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
[3] United Nations Official Records: Minutes of the Third Committee in 1966 and 1967 (Meetings 1444, 1445, 1469, 1475).
[4] Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, ‘Populisms in Eastern Europe: A Demographic Anxiety’, Le Débat No 204, no. 2 (2019): 161–69.

Theodor Sternberg and the Closet of Conceptualism

Katharina Isabel Schmidt is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University and a JSD candidate in law at the Yale Law School. She is currently writing a history of German legal modernism from the left-wing, German-Jewish free law movement before WWI to Nazi jurists like Carl Schmitt. She looks forward to receiving your questions and comments at kis2@princeton.edu.

Sometime in the mid-1930s, German jurist Theodor Sternberg (1878-1950) concluded that law and love were incompatible.[1] In one of his “erotosophical” fragments, he claimed that affective bonds thrived under anarchy. Love, for Sternberg had to be free from egoism and compulsion, eschew both duty and obligation. “Coitus,” especially, was divine in origin—God’s love for the world incarnate—and just like God’s love was limitless, sexuality knew no law.

Sternberg wrote his fragment in Japan, where he lived as an independent scholar for almost forty years.[2] As a Jewish socialist yearning for femininity in all its forms, he had struggled to make a living in the German Empire. He had moved to Tokyo before WWI where he turned his attention to the human sciences. In 1935, he was invited to give a series of sexological lectures at Keio University. Around the same time, he started developing a program for humanity’s transition from an order of law to an order of love.[3]

A look at Sternberg helps us see that modernism in sex and in law overlapped. Historians have shown that, by the turn of the century, law had become the language in which sexual rights activists articulated their demands. Simultaneously, sex emerged as a site for critiquing law itself—a process less frequently noted. Legal modernists looked beyond formal rules to alternative sources of order. And Sternberg’s preferred alternatives were desire and intimacy.

Continue reading “Theodor Sternberg and the Closet of Conceptualism”

A Gay Turning Point that Failed to Turn? The Beethoven hall Podium Discussion of 1980

Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. His research, which focuses on gender and sexuality in Nazi and Cold War Germany, has appeared in scholarly publications including Journal of Contemporary History and New German Critique. His first book, tentatively titled States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany, is under contract with University of Toronto Press. He is a frequent contributor to Boston ReviewLos Angeles Review of Books, and The Point magazine.  

On July 12, 1980, thousands of gay West Germans descended on Bonn. A federal election was imminent and West Germany’s gay activists had organized a so-called podium discussion at the Beethovenhalle, the large performance hall that had twice hosted the Bundesversammlung, which elects the Federal Republic’s President. Inviting representatives of the major parties to speak to a queer audience, the instigators hoped the event would pressure politicians—in particular those of the governing Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Free Democratic Party (FDP)—to concede to their policy demands. These included reparations for gay victims of the Holocaust and repeal of §175 of the penal code, which after the law’s 1969 reform set a higher age of consent for sex acts between men. 

Continue reading “A Gay Turning Point that Failed to Turn? The Beethoven hall Podium Discussion of 1980”

Verschränkung von Geschlecht, (Straf-) Recht und kommerzieller Sexualität – Der Blick der Wiener Polizei auf das Verkaufen sexueller Dienstleistungen

Nora Lehner ist Universitätsassistentin am Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte an der Universität Wien. Sie arbeitet an ihrer Dissertation in der sie kommerzieller Sexualität in den ersten beiden Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in Wien unter einer verwaltungs- und rechtshistorischen, alltagsgeschichtlichen und diskursanalytischen Perspektive untersucht. Ihre Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte, Geschichte der Sexualitäten, Biografieforschung und Diskursanalyse. Kontakt: nora.lehner(at)univie.ac.at 



„Dass Strafrecht ein Geschlecht hat, zeigt sich […]“ wie der Historiker Martin Lücke festhält „auf besonders deutliche Weise am Beispiel der käuflichen Sexualität“.[1] Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll aufgezeigt werden, inwiefern in Österreich nach 1945 die Gesetzgebung zu kommerzieller Sexualität und deren Umsetzung vergeschlechtlicht war. Neben den vagen definierten rechtlichen Bestimmungen wird, anhand von ausgewählten Behördendokumenten, der Blick der Wiener Polizei auf kommerzielle Sexualität veranschaulicht. 

Regulierungen der kommerziellen Sexualität 

Continue reading “Verschränkung von Geschlecht, (Straf-) Recht und kommerzieller Sexualität – Der Blick der Wiener Polizei auf das Verkaufen sexueller Dienstleistungen”

Policing without Police. Republican Paramilitary “Punishment” Attacks on Women in Northern Ireland 1971 – 1979

Juliane Röleke is currently a PhD candidate in history at Humboldt-University Berlin and at Leibniz-Centre for Contemporary Historical Research Potsdam. She has studied history and social sciences in Berlin and Belfast and is working on a project about violence and gender in everday-life during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Her research interest centers around forms of female deviant behaviour during the Troubles, gendered logic of sanctions and feminist interventions. In addition, she is working on the history of Nazi Germany for various memorials and organises educational projects for different football clubs.

Cartoon from: Belfast Telegraph, 13th Nov 1971, p. 6.
Picture courtesy of Belfast Telegraph

A few days after the 21st Miss World contest had taken place in London in November 1971, the Belfast Telegraph published the displayed cartoon by Rowel Friers, connecting the event across the sea to recent incidents in the war-torn province of Northern Ireland.[1] The cartoon picked up the phenomenon of Republican paramilitary “punishment” attacks against Catholic women in the region. It reveals the meaning of gender within informal justice[2] and constitutes itself an example of its sexist logic and perception.

Continue reading “Policing without Police. Republican Paramilitary “Punishment” Attacks on Women in Northern Ireland 1971 – 1979”

Wer zählt als Opfer? Einige Gedanken zu Gedächtnissymbolen und Legitimation.

Sébastien Tremblay hat kürzlich mit einer Dissertation über den Rosa Winkel als Symbol der schwulen und lesbischen Identität in der nördlichen transatlantischen Welt promoviert. Seine Arbeiten konzentrieren sich auf transatlantische Holocaust-Erinnerungen, queere transatlantische Geschichte, visuelle Begriffsgeschichte und das Potenzial einer neuen Form queerer globaler Geschichte, die weiße schwule euroamerikanische Erzählungen ‚provinzialisiert“. Nach seinem Studium an der Université de Montréal, der Freien Universität Berlin und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ist Tremblay derzeit wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Arbeitsbereich Globalgeschichte an der Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin. Er war Gastwissenschaftler am Centre for Queer History Goldsmiths, University of London. Kontakt: sebastien.tremblay@fu-berlin.de

Bild: Ina Rosenthal

Im Frühjahr 1988 erinnerte die Rosa Info, das offizielle Presseorgan des Vereins für sexuelle Gleichberechtigung e. V. in München, ihre Leser: „Der Stein muss endgültig sein!“[1] Vom welchem Stein aber war die Rede? Ein Gedenkstein für die in Dachau ermordeten homosexuellen Opfer des NS-Regimes sollte eingeweiht werden. Bei der Betrachtung der jüngsten Diskussionen und Ereignisse, könnte man* entsprechend über in den Konzentrationslagern inhaftierten lesbischen Opfer sprechen und sagen: “Die Kugel muss endgültig sein!” [2] Während des letzten Jahrzehnts haben Historiker*innen methodisch nachgewiesen, wie die Nationalsozialisten nicht-heteronormativ lebende Frauen unterdrückten.[3] Einige männliche Historiker, die gerne auch als gatekeeper agieren, bestreiten einen Teil dieser Forschung.[4] Symbolisiert wird diese Kontroverse nicht nur von einem Symbol, dem Rosa Winkel; das Symbol selbst ist die Kontroverse. Schwule Aktivisten haben sich jahrelang auf das Symbol als eine Form der heiligen Ikonographie für ihre Befreiung bezogen, ein legitimes Zeichen der Verletzung und Verfolgung. Lesbische Frauen hingegen oder auch nicht-heteronormativ lebende Frauen wurden in den Konzentrationslagern mit dem Schwarzen Winkel gekennzeichnet. Dessen positive Aneignung durch einige lesbische Aktivistinnen wurde als Instrumentalisierung der Geschichte abgetan.[5] Während also schwule Historiker und Aktivisten den Anspruch einer Wiederaneignung des Schwarzen Winkels dekonstruierten, basiert gleichzeitig einer großer Teil schwuler Identität auf der Verwendung des Rosa Winkels. 

Continue reading “Wer zählt als Opfer? Einige Gedanken zu Gedächtnissymbolen und Legitimation.”

Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Strafen? Die erste Frauenbewegung und der § 175

Elisa Heinrich hat ihre Dissertation mit dem Titel „Intim und respektabel. Aushandlungen von Homosexualität und Freundinnenschaft in der deutschen Frauenbewegung 1870 bis 1914“ im Juli 2020 an der Universität Wien eingereicht. Im Rahmen weiterer Forschungsprojekte hat sie sich u.a. mit Erinnerungspolitiken und Denkmalkulturen in Bezug auf homosexuelle NS-Opfer beschäftigt. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in der Sexualitätengeschichte und der Geschichte sozialer Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.
Kontakt: elisa.heinrich(at)univie.ac.at

Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts entzündete sich im Deutschen Reich eine Debatte um die Frage, ob gleichgeschlechtliche Sexualakte zwischen Frauen ebenso strafbar sein sollten wie jene zwischen Männern. Auslöser dieser Kontroverse war der im Rahmen einer umfassenden Strafrechtsreform im Jahr 1909 veröffentlichte Vorentwurf, der vorsah den – bisher nur auf Männer angewandten – § 175 und damit das Delikt der „widernatürlichen Unzucht“ auf Frauen auszudehnen.

Dieser Vorstoß, gleichgeschlechtliche Beziehungen zwischen Frauen zu kriminalisieren, löste eine Reihe von Reaktionen in unterschiedlichen Öffentlichkeiten aus. Die Frauenbewegung war als homosozialer Raum, in dem Frauen – als Freundinnen, Gefährtinnen, Paare – in professioneller, politischer und intimer Weise miteinander verbunden waren, von dieser Entwicklung in einzigartiger Weise betroffen. 

Der Vorentwurf zu einem Deutschen Strafgesetzbuch

Der Vorentwurf der vorgesehenen Reform erschien im April 1909 und bildete eine von mehreren Stufen, um das Strafgesetzbuch von 1871 zu ersetzen. Die Reformierung der so genannten Sittlichkeitsdelikte berief sich in den Begründungen auf den Rechtswissenschaftler Wolfgang Mittermaier. Er hielt es für „prinzipienlos“, die „widernatürliche Unzucht“ zwischen Frauen nicht zu strafen – auch wenn diese nicht so häufig auftrete oder in der Öffentlichkeit sichtbar werde.[1] Die Gefahr, die davon für Familie und Jugend ausgehen würde, sei jedoch die gleiche, hieß es dann – direkt auf Mittermaier Bezug nehmend – im Vorentwurf; insofern werde nun die bisher bestehende Ungleichheit beseitigt. 

Auf die in Aussicht gestellte Erweiterung des § 175 auf Frauen gab es unterschiedliche, allerdings vermehrt negative Reaktionen. Von medizinischer und juristischer Seite wurde insbesondere auf die schwierige Bestimmung des Tatbestands bei Frauen hingewiesen. Meist handle es sich „um bloße Masturbation“, die ja – von Männern ausgeführt – nicht strafbar sei, während der bei Männern bestrafte Akt der Penetration bei Frauen physiologisch gar nicht möglich sei.[2]

Continue reading “Gleiche Rechte, gleiche Strafen? Die erste Frauenbewegung und der § 175”