Reforming Sex The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950

Reforming Sex reconstructs the complicated history of a movement that has been romanticized as the harbinger of 1960s sexual radicalism and demonized as a precursor to Nazi racial policy, but mostly buried and obscured by Nazi bookburnings and repression. Relying on a broad range of sources--from police reports, films and personal interviews to sex manuals unearthed from library basements and secondhand bookstores--the book analyzes a remarkable mass mobilization during the turbulent and innovative Weimar years of doctors and laypeople for women's right to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education.

Atina Grossmann is Associate Professor of History at The Cooper Union and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Columbia University