World League for Sexual Reform
세계 성개혁 연맹
The international sexual reform organisation founded under Magnus Hirschfeld’s leadership at a congress in Copenhagen in 1928. Its ten demands included equality of the sexes, the secularisation of marriage and divorce, birth control, a rational understanding of homosexuals, an end to punishing consensual sex between adults, and sex education; it was dissolved in 1935, the year of Hirschfeld’s death.
In depth
It was formally launched on 3 July 1928 at the second International Congress for Sexual Reform in Copenhagen, counting the congress Hirschfeld had held in Berlin in 1921 as its first. Its founding members included Max Hodann, Helene Stöcker, the birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger, Alexandra Kollontai, then Soviet envoy to Norway, Dora Russell and Norman Haire. Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis and Auguste Forel were its first presidents; from 1930 Norman Haire and the Dane Jonathan Leunbach replaced the largely inactive Ellis and Forel. Its seat was the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Its demands also included “eugenic influence on offspring”. Around 1933 its 30 national sections acted largely independently of one another; in 1930 it had 182 individual members and some 130,000 more through affiliated bodies such as the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform. Congresses followed in London (1929), Vienna (1930) and Brno (1932), but those planned for Moscow (1931) and Paris (1933) never met. Much of its record was lost when the Institute for Sexual Science was looted in May 1933, and after Hirschfeld’s death in 1935 Haire and Leunbach dissolved the League.
Its participants were remarkably varied. Congress speakers included Bertrand and Dora Russell, George Bernard Shaw, the birth-control campaigner Marie Stopes, the abortion-rights advocate Stella Browne, the writers Vera Brittain and Ethel Mannin, Alexandra Kollontai and Max Hodann, the transgender-medicine pioneer Harry Benjamin, Felix Abraham, who performed sex reassignment surgery at the institute in 1931, and the psychoanalyst J. C. Flügel, leader of the Men’s Dress Reform Party; Albert Einstein was also in contact with the congress. Norman Haire as secretary and Dora Russell as treasurer organised the 1929 London congress, at which Brittain spoke on “The Failure of Monogamy”, Browne on “The Right to Abortion” and Naomi Mitchison on contraception among intellectuals. From the German-speaking world Forel and the Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid took part besides Hirschfeld, from France the writer Victor Margueritte, and Hugo Iltis hosted the 1932 congress in Brno. Foreigners such as the archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre lived and worked at the institute. The British section was especially active and carried on after the League’s dissolution as the Sex Education Society.