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ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS
MISOGYNIST SEXOLOGY IN FIN DE SIECLE
VIENNA
RALPH LECK
Modern Intellectual History / Volume 9 / Issue 01 / April 2012, pp 33 - 60
DOI: 10.1017/S147924431100045X, Published online: 13 March 2012
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S147924431100045X
How to cite this article:
RALPH LECK (2012). ANTI-ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM VERSUS MISOGYNIST
SEXOLOGY IN FIN DE SIECLE VIENNA. Modern Intellectual History, 9, pp 33-60
doi:10.1017/S147924431100045X
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doi:10.1017/S147924431100045X
anti-essentialist feminism versus
misogynist sexology in n de
siecle vienna
ralph leck
Independent scholar
E-mail: rmleck@yahoo.com
As the foundational contributions of the n de siècle sexual science movement to
research on sexuality continue to be eshed out, new avenues of understanding
this important movement will continue to emerge. This essay uncovers the explosive
intersection of early sexual science and strains of rst-wave feminism in Vienna and
charts the emergence of anti-essentialist feminism from this intersection. The rst
section offers an interpretation of how the discipline of sexual science emerged from
medical criminology and how these origins contributed to the misogynist inection
of early sexology. The essay then chronicles the intersection of rst-wave feminism
and this misogynist sexual science. The central argument is that feminists encounters
with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism.
This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new
vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian,
intellectual history.
Protect women from intellectualism!
Paul Julius M obius, 1903
1
When Paul Robinson observed that Alfred Kinsey has rarely been taken
seriously as a thinker, he meant that Kinsey has not been treated as a theorist
worthy of the attention of intellectual historians.
2
This is also true of many early
sexual scientists. Though the rich history of the sexual science movement now is
being eshed out, there remains a dearth of research on the historical intersection
1
Paul Julius M obius,

Uber den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (Halle, 1903), 45.
2
Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters
and Virginia Johnson (Ithaca, 1989), 42.
33
34 ralph leck
of the sexual science and feminist movements.
3
This essay attempts to remedy
this deciency by illuminating the historical dialogue between feminists and early
sexual scientists.
To date, this dialogue has been absent from the historical record or pushed
to the margins of scholarship in both elds. The signicant contribution of
feminists to sexual science can best be understood by illuminating their struggles
against a largely misogynist discipline. Tracing the emergence of sexual science
from the eld of criminal science reveals the misogynist inection of n de siècle
sexual theory. This misogynistic inection not only conicted with the spirit of
feminism; it also set up roadblocks to theoretical cooperation. Nowhere was the
evidence of the cultural incommensurability of early sexual science and feminism
more vivid than in the intellectual collision of Oda Olberg (18721955) and Paul
M obius (18531907) or in the imaginative gender theory of Rosa Mayreder (1858
1938), which arose as a passionate polemic against misogynist sexology.
The dialectical encounter of feminism and sexual science presented here
was erce but fruitful, for it produced an anti-essentialist (or anti-naturalist)
variant of feminism that was rare among rst-wave feminists. (Most rst-
wave feminist philosophy presupposed an essentialist view of womens nature.
Womens biological capacity for motherhood was treated as the source of an
invariable feminine character or essence.
4
) Thus this essay revises andcomplicates
the category of rst-wave feminism by chronicling the history of anti-essentialist
feminism. The essay then concludes by offering new perspectives on Austrian
intellectual history as a whole on the basis of this recovery of a lost dimension of
rst-wave feminism.
3
See Volkmar Sigusch, Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 2008); Vern Bullough,
Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research (New York, 1994).
4
First-wave feminists generally assumedthe existence of a reproductive nature inall women:
woman as mother, nurturer, wife, and teacher of the young. For a case study of how
feminists found it difcult to free themselves from the concept of nature as a yardstick,
see Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, Weiblich Kultur und soziale Arbeit: Eine Geschichte der
Frauenbewegung amBeispiel Bremens 18101927 (K oln, 1989), 39. On feminist radicalismas
a paradoxical conservation of the naturalized category Weiblichkeit see Barbara Greven-
Aschoff, Die b urgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 18941933 (G ottingen, 1981), 37
44. By proposing the historical character of gender relations, socialist feminists came
closest to rejecting what Klara Zetkin called the traditional vision of woman as only her
sexual essence. But even Zetkin was unable to free herself from essentialist expressions
such as the special nature and special tasks of women and the female Full-Human
. . . as mother, spouse, and citizen. Klara Zetkin, Nicht Haussklavin, nicht Mannweib,
weiblicher Vollmensch, Die Gleichheit 8/2 (19 Jan. 1898), 12.
anti-essentialist feminism versus misogynist sexology 35
criminology and anti-feminism
Prior to the twentieth century, the concerns of what was known at the turn of
the twentiethcentury as the womanquestion surfacedinvery fewearly works of
sexual science. Tothe extent that female issues appearedinearlysexological texts at
all, they materializedinreference to so-calledvices suchas lesbianism(sometimes
called tribaldism or sapphism), prostitution, and physiological discussions of
orgasm and reproduction. There are several reasons for the absence of feminist
themes, but one overriding reason can be located in the historical origins of the
discipline of sexual science. The sexual science movement was disproportionately
dominated by male medical doctors. Imagining that a woman of the nineteenth
century developed feminist consciousness and sought to become a medical
doctor, there was no chance of her expressing that consciousness in the academic
discipline of sexual science, because, at least in Germany and Austria, women
were excluded from the medical profession until the early twentieth century.
5
A less obvious explanation for the marginalization of womens issues within
the history of sexual science can be gleaned from the criminological origins of
sexology.
6
Mainstreamsexual science disproportionately emergedinEurope from
the subeldof forensic medical science. After 1850, medical doctors suchas Johann
Ludwig Casper (17961864) in Berlin and Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (181879)
in Paris did pioneering work in medical criminology. Their research touched on
important topics such as pederasty, zoophilia, rape, and the sexual identity of
hermaphrodites, but these topics were investigated almost exclusively in terms of
medical law. Casper seems to have been the more rigorously empirical natural
scientist. He corrected Tardieus unproven assumptions of anthropometry,
5
See James Albisetti, The Fight for Female Physicians in Imperial Germany, Central
European History 15 (1982), 88123.
6
On the birth of modern criminology in Germany see Richard Wetzell, Inventing the
Criminal: A History of German Criminology 18801945 (Chapel Hill, 2000). Wetzell,
however, offers no history of the development of sexual criminology in Germany. The
key contributions of Johann Ludwig Casper and Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, for instance,
are unreferenced. The reason for this might be chronological. Casper and Ulrichss
contributions to the development of sexual criminology pre-date 1880. Yet chronology
is not an adequate or satisfactory explanation. For instance, Wetzell placed Cesare
Lombroso at the plinth of his study but failed to examine Cesare Lombroso and
Guglielmo Ferreros Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, trans.
Nicole Rafter and Mary Gibson (Durham, 2004; rst published 1893). My narrative is
an addendumto Wetzells work. On German criminology and the discourse of the natural
sexual difference, see Karsten Uhl, Das verbrecherische Weib: Geschlecht, Verbrechen und
Strafen im kriminologischen Diskurs 18001945 (Berlin, 2003). See also Imanuel Baumann,
Dem Verbrechen auf der Spur: Eine Geschichte der Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik in
Deutschland, 1880 bis 1980 (G ottingen, 2006).
36 ralph leck
which we now associate with the criminology of Cesare Lombroso (18351909):
according to anthropometry, criminal behavior corresponded to and could be
identied by particular physiological marks. Tardieus 1858 study of two hundred
cases of pederasty concluded that pederasts could be identied by a tapered
penis and, in some cases, by short teeth and thick lips. Casper disputed these
anthropometric claims and similar assertions by other sexual scientists, like the
claim that the vice of lesbianism was caused by an elongated clitoris.
7
Of greatest cultural importance, however, was the indelible mark criminal
sexology left on the emerging discipline of sexual science. Caspers willingness
to challenge presuppositions for which he could nd no empirical evidence
endeared him to early sexual scientist and social activist Karl Ulrichs (182595).
Ulrichs often praised Caspers evidentiary rigor and interpreted it as a sign of the
liberatory potential of empirical reason. However, Ulrichs generally rejected the
civic competence of most forensic doctors:
Forensic doctors, with all of their experience, are not completely competent [to pass
judgments about homosexuals]. Not even one percent of Urnings [homosexuals] pass
through their hands. Once and for all, I must protest against their eternal idea that their
experience enables them to pass judgment on Uranian [homosexual] love. In particular,
I am referring to the work of Casper and Tardieu . . . Who would dare pass judgment
on Dionian [heterosexual] love from books about prostitution, depraved women, and/or
venereal disease? The research of both [Casper and Tardieu on homosexuality] runs
parallel with such an approach.
8
Ulrichs, a pioneer of the homosexual rights movement, clearly understood
the politico-judicial implications of a sexual science governed by traditional
criminology.
9
He exposed the fallacious quality of judgments about homosexuals
7
Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, Etude m edico-l egale sur les attentats aux moeurs, Annales
dhygiène publique et de medecine legale 2/9 (1858), 13798. Johann Ludwig Casper,
Practisches Handbuch des gerichtlichen Medicin: Nach eigenen Erfahrung, Bd. III,
Biologischer Teil (Berlin, 1858), 17182; see also idem,
Uber Nothzucht und P aderastie

und deren Ermittlung seitens des Gerichtsarztes, Vierteljahresschrift f ur gerichtliche und
offentliche Medicin 1 (1852), 2178. Since Tardieus essay and Caspers book appeared
simultaneously in 1858, Casper did not reference Tardieus work until later additions
appeared. See, for example, Johann Ludwig Casper, Chapter 3, Streitige widernat urliche
Unzucht, in Practisches Handbuch des gerichtlichen Medicin: Nach eigenen Erfahrung, Bd.
III, Biologischer Teil (Berlin, 1865).
8
Carl Ulrichs, Formatrix: Anthropologische Studien uber urnische Liebe (Leipzig, 1898;
rst published 1865), 33. Uranian and Dionian were Ulrichss terms for homosexual
and heterosexual. Since the latter terms had not been invented when Ulrichs published
Formatrix, I have left the original neologisms as a historical marker.
9
See Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the
Modern Gay Movement (Boston, 1988).
drawn from a research pool composed exclusively of criminals. More broadly,
Ulrichss work pregured Michel Foucaults arguments about the symbiotic
nature of the social sciences, criminal justice, and social control.
10
As we shall
see belowin our analysis of Lombrosos Criminal Woman (1893), the problematic
methodology of criminological science produced equally specious conclusions
about women.
Ulrichs, however, was an activist and outsider. The critical inection of his
work had little impact on the unfolding discipline of sexual science. Indeed, the
criminological tradition of sexual science was distinguished not by social critique
but disproportionately by what Foucauldian analyses have properly seen as a
production of knowledge wedded toif not identical withmatrices of social
control. In fact, this Foucauldian character of sexual criminology was transcribed
like a genetic signature ontothe then-emerging discipline of sexual science proper.
When in 1886 Dr Richard von Krafft-Ebing (18401902)then a professor of
psychiatry at Graz Universitypublished Psychopathia Sexualis, this seminal text
in the history of sexual science carried the subtitle A ClinicalForensic Study.
The Foreword referenced Tardieus work on pederasty and public decency and
describedit as serious researchinthe area of natural science andjurisprudence.
11
Thus Krafft-Ebing viewed his pioneering work in the discipline of sexual science
as an extension of criminological science.
12
Another important early text of
sexual science was Contrary Sexual Feeling (1891) by Albert Moll (18621939).
10
On Ulrichss enormous contribution to the development of sexual criminology and sexual
science see David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago, 1988); Magnus
Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualit at des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 2001; rst published
1914); Marita Keilson-Lauritz, Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte (Berlin, 1997); Francis
Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality (Baltimore, 1996); and Vernon Rosario,
ed., Science and Sexualities (New York,1997).
11
RichardvonKrafft-Ebing, PsychopathiaSexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie (Stuttgart,
1886), v.
12
If ones disposition toward homosexuality is used to measure whether sexual science
functioned as a politics of control or liberation, then Krafft-Ebings case facilitates no
simple conclusion. First, Krafft-Ebings views on homosexuality changed over time. The
rst edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) stigmatized homosexuality and did not call for
decriminalization. Several years later, however, he came out in favor of decriminalization.
See Dr Krafft-Ebing, Absatz 175 des deutschen Strafgesetzbuches und die Urningsliebe,
Zeitschrift f ur die Strafrechtswissenschaft 12 (1892), 3454. By 1892, stigmatizing discourse
coexisted with support for decriminalization. Second, the civic impact of sexual science
may be independent of authorial intention. By producing a taxonomy of sexual diversity,
sexual scientists placed sexual variety into public knowledge and this, Harry Oosterhuis
argues, had a therapeutic impact on sexual minorities. Following this line of thought,
Oosterhuis challenged Foucauldian shibboleths. Whereas Foucault, Szasz, and other
scholars consider the emergence of the science of sexuality as a deplorable medical
colonization, replacing religious and judicial authority with a new form of moral tyranny,
38 ralph leck
The interpretive inection of this text can be gleaned from the fact that the
Foreword was written by Krafft-Ebing and began with the following sentence:
When Casper made the rened observation in 1852 that so-called pederastywhich
until then had been seen as a vicious aberrationmost often derived from an in-born
pathological anomaly, no one could have suspected that scarcely forty years later a formal
pathology of the psychological side of Vita sexualis would be found in a comprehensive
scientic work.
13
Krafft-Ebing validated Molls etiologies of sexual pathology with the
imprimatur of Caspers criminological research. According to Moll, homosexuals
were pathological liars, and in his work, homosexual perversion was discussed
alongside cases of sadism, masochism, and the sexual violation of corpses. One
nds in the early works of Krafft-Ebing and Moll little sympathy for the sexual
others who were the subjects of their pathbreaking studies. An empathetic
treatment very likely would have produced a critical condemnation of certain
laws and perhaps a plea for tolerance. In the absence of empathy, the emergence
of sexual science resulted in the stigmatization and criminalization of sexual
minorities.
14
No criminological scholarship possessed more prestige and credibility in the
late nineteenth century than Lombrosos positivistic biometrics. A preeminent
German criminologist heralded the Italian Lombroso an epochal genius of
the scientic era.
15
While a military physician, Lombroso undertook extensive
measurements of soldiers in the late 1850s, and in the 1860s he turned his
attention to the anatomical measurement of those in insane asylums. Later, as a
prisonphysician, he examined and measured thousands of criminals. Lombrosos
lifework, then, depended onthe measurement and examinationof precisely those
groupssoldiers, prisoners, and the so-called insanewho suffered systematic
discipline and surveillance in modern society.
16
We can only speculate about the
contemporaries . . . did not experience it as such. Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of
Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000), 10.
13
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Vorwort zur ersten Auage, in Albert Moll, Die kontr are
Sexualempndung (Berlin, 1899; rst published 1891), iii.
14
Molls views, like those of Krafft-Ebing, changed over time. See his more sympathetic
treatment of homosexuality: Albert Moll, Ber uhmte Homosexuelle (Wiesbaden, 1910).
15
In his intellectual biography, Hans Kurella (18581916) sought to demonstrate how high
the position Lombroso may be justly allotted in a brilliant epoch of positivistic study of
the world, mankind, and society. Hans Kurella, Cesare Lombroso als Mensch und Forscher
(Wiesbaden, 1911), iii.
16
Wetzel criticizes Foucault for assuming that criminology functioned exclusively as social
control. However, Wetzel does not ask whether Lombroso, whose work, he admits, derived
from the anthropometric measurements of prison inmates, ts the Foucauldian model.
Wetzel, Inventing the Criminal, 10, 29.
invasive nature of examinations that included the measurement of genitalia.
17
However, it is safe to say that it was probably humiliating and represented what
Foucault called a normalizing gaze.
Lombrosos Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (1893)
rened and extended the symbiotic relationship of criminology to traditional
gender norms found in mainstream nineteenth-century sexual science.
18
Lombroso wielded scientic truth-discourses like a cudgel against any deviation
from procreative marital sexuality. He condemned premarital sex, adultery, and
masturbation by way of the most prestigious scientic theories of the era. He
interpreted them alternatively as (1) hereditary degeneration, (2) the reversion
to a primitive state of atavism (e.g. tattooing among prostitutes), and (3) the
retardation of human evolution.
19
Furthermore, Lombroso asserted that female
criminals and prostitutes could often be identied physiologically, through
observation of physical anomalies which included (among other characteristics)
enlarged inner labia, hypotrophy of the outer labia and clitoris, abnormalities
of the nipples, profuse pubic hair, asymmetrical eyebrows, virile physiognomy,
and cranial asymmetry.
20
Lombroso extended his physiological science of
female criminality into a universal theory of women. Tellingly, his scientic
17
The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a
normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible
to qualify, to classify, to punish. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York, 1995; rst published 1975), 184. Despite references to humiliating
techniques of examination, Foucaults Discipline and Punish made no reference to
Lombrosos criminology. This is remarkable, because the latters science literally depended
upon an examination of a captive audience, and the conservation and normalization of
existing power relations via social science was explicit. Nonetheless, Foucault radically
transformed the historical analysis of criminology in three ways. First, he shifted radically
the focus of penology fromthe study of presumably abnormal criminals to anexamination
of how the law constituted individuals as correlatives of ideology, institutions, and
classicatory social science. Second, he revealed that systems of social control are not
merely external institutions but tropic mental frameworks that might be understood
as internal penal codes. These codes are not autarkic. Their functioning depends upon
our willing participation, a type of self-subjectication. Third, although Foucault would
not have put it this way, his history of bio-power and revelation that social control is
participatory created a vista of second-order observation facilitating both a degree of
individual sovereignty and Promethean resistance.
18
Criminal Woman expanded greatly upon a section of Lombrosos more famous Criminal
Man, trans. Mary Gibson and Nichole Rafter (Durham, 2006; rst published 1876), 547.
19
On Lombrosos relationship with degenerative theory see Daniel Pick, Lombrosos
Criminal Science, in idem, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 18481814
(Cambridge, 1989), 10952. Like Wetzell, however, Pick does not analyze Lombrosos
sexual criminology.
20
Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal Woman, 11517, 1312.
40 ralph leck
interpretation of women replicated the conservative conceptions of gender
dominating the nineteenth century. For example, he furnished a battery of
modern scientic discourses to substantiate the normality of traditional gender
conceptions of women as intellectually inferior and biologically evil: women
are big children; their evil tendencies are more numerous and more varied
than mens.
21
The implicit conclusions were clear. Big children never reach
the age of majority and therefore must not be granted equal rights. In fact,
Lombrosos research suggested that nature itself was violated by female erotic
desire, and human progress was arrested by cultures that grant women equal
rights.
22
Lombrosos inuence on sexual criminology in Germany was enormous,
but his inuence on sexual science is difcult to ascertain, because few scholars
devoted specic attention to female criminal behavior.
23
One exception was Paul N ackes Crime and Insanity in Women: Perspectives
on Criminal Anthropology (1894), which relied heavily, though not uncritically,
on Lombrosos thought.
24
Here too, however, the direct inuence of Lombrosos
criminology on sexual politics is difcult to discern because issues related to the
woman question are unexamined. Lombrosos most notable impact on cultural
politics in central Europe manifested itself less overtly in the realm of sexual
science per se than via Max Nordaus Degeneration (1892), which was not only
dedicated to Lombroso but commenced with a declaratory letter of effusive
admiration.
25
Degeneration transcribed Lombrosos criminological thought into
a theory intent on identifying atavistic and decadent forms of culture.
Nordaus chapter on Ibsenism encapsulated the cultural distillation of
Lombrosos criminal science. Here Nordau dealt most directly with sexual
degeneracy. In the realm of literature and the arts, Nordau concluded, Ibsens
egotistical viragos and termagants constituted the highest renement of the
degenerate imagination. Nordau diagnosed the feminist yearning for moral
21
Ibid., 183.
22
For instance, the editors introduction, entitled The Birth of Sexology, states that
Lombrosos contribution to sexual science consisted of furnishing modern scientic
underpinnings for traditional condemnations of nonmarital sexuality. GibsonandRafter,
in Lombroso, Criminal Woman, 21.
23
A wide spectrum of topics was covered in Mariacarla Bondio, Die Rezeption der
kriminalanthropologischen Theorien von Cesare Lombroso in Deutschland von 18801914
(Husum, 1995.) However, gender and sexual criminology were not among them. On
Lombrosos inuence in Germany, see also idem, From the Atavistic to the Inferior
Criminal Type: The Impact of the Lombrosian Theory of the Born Criminal on German
Psychiatry, in Peter Becker and Richard Wetzell, eds., Criminals and Their Scientists: The
History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge, 2006), 183206.
24
Paul N acke, Verbrechen und Wahnsinn beim Weibe: Mit Ausblicken auf die Criminal-
Anthropologie uberhaupt (Wien, 1894), 99101.
25
Max Nordau, Degeneration, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1893), 1: viviii.
independence as an instinctual return to promiscuous sexuality, prostitution,
and animalistic polygamy. Concerning Ibsens critique of patriarchal marriage,
he added, Marriage is a higher form of progress than the free pairing of
savages. To return to primitive promiscuity would be the profoundest atavism
of degeneracy.
26
In this manner, Nordau recalibrated the feminist critique
of oppressive marriage as a war on evolutionary progress. The full measure
of Lombrosos natural science as a cultural politics emerges from Nordaus
comparison of feminism with sadism. Just as in Leopold von Sacher-Masochs
novella Venus in Furs (1870), Ibsens Nora-types were described here as a sub-
species of Krafft-Ebings contrary sexual feelings.
27
Both male masochismand
feminist sadisminvert the healthy and natural relationship between the sexes.
28
Nordaus translation of Lombrosos natural science into an anti-feminist
cultural politics symbolized larger trends within the sexual science movement.
Lombrosos criminological natural science and Nordaus interpretation of it
shared with early mainstream German sexual scientists a tendency to naturalize
and thereby confer scientic validity upon patriarchal institutions. Their works
reected the ideological hegemony of male domination and thereby functioned
to preserve the sexual unconscious of the established order.
Nevertheless, especially after the turnof the twentiethcentury, feminist themes
began to make their way into the discipline of sexual science, in part thanks to
coalitional ties. Most notable in this regard were Havelock Elliss sponsorship of
Ellen Keys feminist scholarship and Iwan Blochs political ties to the Nietzschean
feminist Helene St ocker. In his most feminist work, Little Essays of Love and
Virtue (Charleston, 2007; rst published 1921), Ellis referred to Ellen Keyss work
and largely replicated her ideals of egalitarian marriage and womens right to
self-cultivation and erotic pleasure.
29
These ties to feminism were a marker of
the distinction between mainline early sexual science charted above and a critical
sexology. Critical sexual scientists, like Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, did not
merely classify deviations from normality; they criticized the status quo when it
reied systemic gender injustice, and they strengthened alliances with feminist
organizations.
26
Ibid., 2: 301.
27
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz (Leipzig, 1980; rst published 1870). This is
the source of the word masochism. The sadist in the novel is a woman.
28
Nordau, Degeneration, 2: 300.
29
See Havelock Ellis, Little Essays of Love and Virtue (Charleston, 2007; rst published 1921);
Ellen Key, The Woman Movement, trans. Mamah Borthwick (New York, 1912); and idem,
Love and Marriage, trans. Arthur Chater (NewYork, 1911). For examples of the intellectual
and civic afnities of St ocker and Bloch see Helene St ocker, ed., Resolutionen des Deutschen
Bundes f ur Mutterschutz (Berlin, 1916), 10; and Iwan Bloch, Individualisierung der Liebe,
Mutterschutz 77 (1906), 27482.
42 ralph leck
a science of sexual inferiority: m obius, olberg, and
the MANNWEIB
countess orsina: A woman who thinks is just as disgusting as a man who uses makeup.
Gotthold Lessing, Emilia Galotti
30
RichardJ. Evans has writtencogently about the rise of anti-feminismingeneral
and the founding of the League for Combating Womens Emancipation (Bund
zur Bek ampfung der Frauenemanzipation) in 1912.
31
However, years before the
foundationof the Anti-League, as it was known, cultural combat against feminism
had commenced on the scientic front. Perhaps no monograph provided a more
denitive scientic assessment of the turn-of-the-century woman question than
Paul J. M obiuss Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women (1900),
a text sopopular that by 1908 a nintheditionwas inprint. M obius, whohadearned
a PhD in philosophy and a second PhD in medicine by the age of twenty-three,
published more than fteen monographs on neuroanatomy. Many of his works
were devoted exclusively to a science of sexuality. In addition to Concerning the
Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women, these includedSex and Sickness (1903),
Sex and Degeneration (1903), Concerning the Effects of Castration (1903), Sex and
Cranial Size (1903), Goethe and Sexuality (1903), Sex and the Love of Children
(1904), and The Sexuality of Animals (three volumes, 19056).
32
Long forgotten
today, M obius was a major gure in n de siècle intellectual life and his work
was well known to leading sexual theorists like Hirschfeld, Emil Kraepelin, and
Otto Weininger. According to Iwan Bloch, M obius was the German Lombroso
and thereby displayed, on the one hand, unquestionable genius and, on the
other hand, the superciality and purely hypothetical nature of some scientic
deductions.
33
Like Lombroso, M obius had earned an international reputation
30
Gotthold Lessing, Emilia Galotti, trans. Edward Dvoretzky (NewYork, 1979; rst published
1772), 57.
31
Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 18941933 (London, 1976), especially
chap. 6, The Antifeminists, 175206. Onwomens sexual politics see alsoAtina Grossman,
Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 19201950
(New York, 1995); and Kirsten Reinert, Frauen und Sexualreform 18971933 (Herbolzheim,
2000).
32
Paul Julius M obius, Geschlecht und Krankheit (Halle, 1903); idem, Geschlecht und Entartung
(Halle, 1903); idem,

Uber die Wirkungen der Castration (Halle, 1903); idem, Geschlecht und
Kopfgr osse (Halle, 1903); idem, Goethe und Geschlechter (Halle, 1903); idem, Geschlecht und
Kinderliebe (Halle, 1904); idem, Die Geschlechter der Tiere, 1. Teil (Halle, 1905); idem, Die
Geschlechter der Tiere, 2. Teil (Halle, 1906); and idem, Die Geschlechter der Tiere, 3. Teil
(Halle, 1906).
33
Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeitin seinen Beziehungen zur modernen Kultur
(Berlin, 1919; rst published 1906), 512.
in the sciences, so his conclusions carried considerable weight. The most relevant
similarities between Lombroso and M obius were their positivistic methodologies
and their socially relevant conclusions about sexual differentiation. As the
provocative title of his work on the imbecility of women indicates, M obiuss style
was polemical, and the object of his ire was feminism. M obius was also ambitious.
He desperatelywantedtoexpandhis readershipfrommedical circles tothe general
public, so he wrote for a popular audience. His tone was authoritative without
being academic or weighed down by the pedantry of footnotes.
Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of Women relied heavily
upon Theodor Bischoffs The Weight of the Human Brain (1880) and referred
frequently to Lombrosos phrenological studies. M obiuss central argument,
which was reiterated in his Sex and Cranial Size (1903), was simple and was
no less powerful for being so: the smaller weight of the female brain and
circumference of the female skull were irrefutable physiological proof of the
mental inferiority of women.
34
Moreover, these measurements were socially
prescriptive. Anthropometric science functioned sociologically as corroboration
of the theological, legal, and social propriety of womens inferiority.
In pursuing his thesis, M obius added the scientic authority of Darwinism
and embryology to the authority of phrenology. Both Darwinism and modern
embryology agreed that the dimorphic reproduction of Homo sapiens was the
highest expression of sexual evolution. The progress of the human species
depended upon the polarity of sexual characteristics.
There were, then, two scientic schoolsanthropometry and evolutionary
biologyoffering denite proof of M obiuss physiological postulate: women
were intellectually inferior. M obius claried the social meaning of his science:
If we want a woman that completely fullls her motherly profession, then she
cannot have a male brain . . . the unnatural struggles of the feminists . . . corrupt
the human race and culturally signify the beginning of the end.
35
The cultured
feminist brain was intellectual miscegenation. Feminism polluted the masculine
bloodlines of civilization by arrogantly asserting womens right to participate
in the male realm of erudition. Moreover, the feminist insistence on equality
was a nightmare of sexual homogenization. Feminism threatened to destroy the
dimorphic dissimilarity upon which the ascendency of human evolution rested.
Proof of womens mental inferiority was irrefutable; feminists violated nature
and promoted the cultural degeneration of European civilization.
According to M obius, civilizationthe great unquestionable bromide of late
nineteenth-century cultural conservativeswas in great peril due to feminist
demands. What exactly was the essence of the feminist threat? The threat
34
Paul Julius M obius,
Uber weibliche K opfe, in idem, Geschlecht und Kopfgr osse, 427.

35
M obius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 278.
44 ralph leck
of feminism had many dimensions. The rst danger was political. According
to M obius, feminists were completely naive about the need for a militaristic
realpolitik. M obius asserted that feminist appeals for peacebest exemplied in
Bertha von Suttners critique of male militarism in Die Waffen nieder! (1889)
threatened the manly diplomacy of bloodshed upon which the survival of
the modern nation state rested.
36
In short, feminist nonsense, as he called it,
threatened the future of the German state: a feminist Volk would be defeated
by its neighbors and, therefore, feminist politics were an example of social
suicide.
37
The state must maintain its masculine character by denouncing the
civic counterimages emerging from the womens movement.
Not only political survival but also social development was imperiled by
feminism. Although M obius was skeptical of degeneration as a psychological
concept, anthroprometry certied an eternal biological order. Both the
evolutionary character of motherhood and the smaller brain sizes of women
proved that women were best suited for housework and that men were natural
intellectuals. The greatest social threat to civilized society was the confusion of
these xed sexual characteristics, which produced social degeneration: One of
the essential signs of modern . . . degeneration is the blurring of sexual characters:
i.e. feminine men and masculine women . . . The leaders of the womens
movement are degenerates [Entartete]. They have (at least psychologically) a
portion of mens sexual characteristics, i.e. special mental talents and a yearning
for freedom.
38
This argumentwhich cast feminist women as suffering from the degenerate
condition of excessive virility, intelligence, and freedomalready had a long
history in the sexual science movement. For example, in his attempt to explain
the degeneracy of lesbianism, Krafft-Ebing used two neologisms: Viraginit at and
Mannweib.
39
Both terms designated a hyper-virilized female, but, in subsequent
literature, the latter term, Mannweibor man-woman, became the most prominent
idiom derogating lesbians and feminists.
40
Feminists as virilized deviants from
nature were also a central theme of Weiningers Sex and Character (1903).
Regardless of the variety of justications for the concept of the masculine woman,
it is important to recognize that this concept was both a mental framework
36
Suttner received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.
37
M obius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 42. Similar anti-feminist defenses of the male-state
appear in Eduard Fuchs and Alfred Kind, Die Weiberherrschaft in der Geschichte der
Menschheit, Bd. 2 (Munich, 1923), 383.
38
M obius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 29, 9.
39
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (Munich, 1997; rst published 1886), 302.
40
See Gudrun Schwartz, Mannweiber in M annertheorien, in Karin Hausin, ed., Frauen
suchen ihre Geschichte:Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1983),
6280.
for explaining a sexual minority and a pejorative term deployed to defend the
hegemony of patriarchy.
Patriarchy was anchored by assumptions of a natural polarity of sexual
character and social roles. By seeking occupational and educational positions
previously reserved for men, feminists endangered the social harmony of this
sexual duality. The real misogynists, M obius concluded, are the feminists who
want to destroy the differences of the sexes.
41
In a brilliant reversal of cultural
meaning, M obius rendered feminist criticisms of misogyny and inequality as the
ultimate expression of misogyny. In effect, feminists were women-haters, because
they deridedthe anti-intellectual nature of women. M obius alsodrewpedagogical
conclusions fromhis phrenological science of sexual differentiation. The obvious
mental inferiority of women meant that coeducation and womens access to
higher education must be rejected. Pedagogical equality would only ratify the
cultural degenerationwrought by feminism. Educating women, M obius asserted,
could only lead them to acquire knowledge that they do not need and thereby
receive a severe headache! Above all, M obiuss scientic authority punctuated
the conclusion that feminism was unnatural and could only lead to the political
destruction of the German state and the cultural decline of civilization.
However, by the turn of the century, the political implications of anti-feminist
sexual science were no longer uncontested. In fact, the condescending and
offensive tone of M obiuss Concerning the Physiological Feeble-Mindedness of
Women provoked the publication of a lucid and important cultural critique of
misogynist sexual science, Woman and Intellectualism (1902), by the Austrian
socialist feminist Oda Olberg.
42
Olberg was one of the nest socialist journalists
of her era. Prior to World War I she wrote labor articles for the Viennese Arbeiter-
Zeitung (Worker Paper) and other socialist newspapers; from 1929 to 1933 she
served as the editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Yet her earlier work on sexual science,
discussed below, is less well known.
The rst paragraph of Olbergs Woman and Intellectualism, a watershed in the
development of a feminist philosophy of culture, read as follows:
The following book has been generated directly in response to Professor M obiuss work
about the physiological feeble-mindedness of the woman. In the process of writing my
response, polemic has been removed for the most part, and the text before you isat
least in its motivationnot simply a polemical text. The reader must hold the origin
41
M obius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 38.
42
A variety of important works refer to Olbergs scholarship and attest to her intellectual
signicance. See, for instance, Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society, Vol. 2, Part 3,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex (NewYork, 1936; rst p;ublished 1910), 607; Robert Michels,
Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy,
trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York, 1962; rst published 1915), 139.
46 ralph leck
of the text [i.e. M obius] responsible for places where the content and form are purely
polemical. Perhaps one can reproach my short work for wanting to encompass too broad
a sphere. The questions covered by me would be completely ineffable if one did not rst
examine fundamental questions about the life of society . . . because, in his fundamental
arguments, M obius reproduces a social ideology to which the arguments represented here
are responding.
43
Olberg thus produced a text that made several references to M obius and
Lombroso, but invective was not her motivation. Rather, her intention, as the
quote above suggests, was to supplant M obiuss physiological postulate, as he
called it, and demand that the question of the inferiority of women be viewed as
in fact a social postulate.
44
Olbergs social postulate had two parts. First, M obiuss thesis about the
imbecility of women was faulty because it was derived from an empirical
examination of the wrong object. Cranial measurements and brain weights
proved little. To determine the intellectual capacity of women, Olberg argued,
one must start with an examination of female intellectuals. Ultimately, Olberg
reasoned, M obiuss thesis about the inferiority of women merely expressed the
dominant ideology justifying the injustice of institutional inequality. In other
words, M obiuss anti-feminist conclusions evinced ideological captivity, not
empirical evidence. His conclusions were socially conditioned by a normative
collective consciousness. Correlatively, the cause of womens inequality, Olberg
contended, was not physiological but sociological. Social conservativeswhom
Olberg alternatively designated opponents of the womens movement and
opponents of intellectualismproduced cultural conditions injurious to
the education of women, and then hypocritically claimed that women were
mentally inferior and incapable of educational renement.
45
Olberg exposed this
hypocrisy. Sexual scientists like M obius and Lombroso did not confront the
institutional absurdity of this situation, because they were enemies of womens
emancipation to begin with.
While the Enlightenment conferred a general legacy of empirical rationality,
Olberg implicitly theorized a split in the European tradition of empiricism: the
methodological and political divergence of the natural and social sciences.
46
43
Oda Olberg, Das Weib und der Intellectualismus (Berlin, 1902), 7.
44
Olberg, Das Weib, 114.
45
Ibid., 1067.
46
Wilhelm Dilthey articulated the distinction between the natural sciences
(Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). The key question
for the human sciences was the relationship of the soul (Seele), free and sovereign,
to the historical world (Lebenswelt). Like Dilthey, Olberg theorized under an
implicit distinction between the natural and human sciences. However, she uniquely
Underlying the natural science of M obius was a presupposition that it could
explain and justify the lawful nature of the existing social order. Olberg rejected
this proposition. In her mind, natural scientists like M obius merely reiedand
thereby deiedthat which was in no way eternal: human culture. In natural-
scientic analyses of society, there was no tension between rational science and
conservative spheres of culture, such as patriarchy; M obiuss empirical science,
for instance, treated the different mental aptitudes of men and women and the
existence of separate spheres as xed laws.
Over and against the conservative implications of this natural science, Olberg
envisioned a social science that pivoted on the assumption that society and
culture were historical and alterable.
47
This axial assumption of the modern
social sciences was incommensurable with the xed concepts of sexual identity
found in the natural science of Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and M obius. As Olberg
put it, woman as a pure expression of sexual nature does not exist.
48
Olberg
did not deny that biological factors inuenced human lives, but she did reject
the proposition, implicit in M obiuss work, that the biological and the social
determinants of sexual identity could be easily disentangled from one another. If
they cannot be disentangled, she reasoned, then why not focus on what we know
and can control: the social production of gender inequality?
M obiuss physiological reductionism, then, symbolized opposition within the
natural sciences tothe rst principle of social science: anunderstanding of human
relations will arise not from an extrapolation of physiological laws but from a
material analysis of the cultural and economic conditions of society itself. The
postulate of the social sciences was that sexual culture as it currently existed
did not reect sacrosanct eternal laws. Social conventions were not timeless
and inviolable expressions of natural providence. Rather, all aspects of culture,
including sexual conventions, were historical and malleable.
Olberg, in effect, revealed the conservative implications of M obiuss natural
science of society and connected this revelation to the theme of womens
educational opportunities. As she explained in one of her strongest formulations,
extrapolated this distinction in the realm of sexuality. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die
Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung f ur das Studien der Gesellschaft und der
Geschichte (Leipzig, 1883).
47
The leading sexual scientist in contemporary Germany, Volkmar Sigusch, developed a
sociological theory of sexual nature that largely replicates the ideas of Olberg. Olberg,
however, was not cited in his work. See Volkmar Sigusch, Natur und Sexualit at:

Uber
die Bedeutung der Kategorie Natur f ur eine Theorie der Sexualit at des Menschen, Das
Argument 22/119 (1980), 315.
48
48 ralph leck
We begin with the presupposition that an alternative education would enable women to
fulll their tasks more competently. And when we attribute many of the inadequacies
of women to the lack of an existing intellectual culture, we havein this theoretical
considerationthe evidence of social experience on our side. Those who have had
frequent opportunities to observe people of different social classes (who are excluded
from access to modern intellectual culture) will easily convince themselves that pettiness,
small-mindedness, the incapacity to assess the meaning of an event, rigidity in judgment,
indignation towards social arrangements and other deciencies, which one gladly stamps
as specically feminine, are generally attributable to lack of knowledge and education. The
opponents of intellectualism disseminate these ideas in the same way that the opponents
of philosophical materialism reproach the material realm: rst they kill intellectualism,
and then they say that it is dead.
49
Misogynist sexual scientists were not just adversaries of philosophical
materialism or social science. Opposition to the methodology of philosophical
materialism paralleled a hypocritical social logic: anti-feminists rst supported
a patriarchal culture denying women access to education, and then claimed
to possess proof that women were intellectually inferior. In short, M obius
and Lombrosos natural science of sexuality functioned as a philosophy of
political patriarchy which ignored the material underpinnings of sexual and class
inequality, incorrectly postulated the eternal and unalterable nature of sexual
identity, and naturalized institutional injustices that were completely remediable.
In addition to social and methodological tensions between the sexology of
natural science and social science, Olberg discovered a faulty assumption in the
logic of M obiuss Darwinian science. M obius maintained that the smaller size
of the feminine brain and skull were physiological proof of the evolutionary
degeneration of the female brain. Olberg savaged the neo-Darwinian logic of
anti-feminists and again revealed the conservative social function to which
natural science was being put. She suggested that the development of intellect,
whether in a male or a female, might best be understood from the Darwinian
perspective of biological variation. Darwin had made it clear that some biological
adaptations could be benecial to human evolution. Olberg transferred this
biological argument to the realm of culture. It is impossible and unscientic,
Olberg reasoned, to preemptively dismiss all mental variations as degenerate. To
Olbergs mind, M obiuss thesis about womens imbecility improperly prejudged
all previous and future evolutionary contributions from women. To make a
determination about the civic benet of cranial and cultural variations, Olberg
argued, one would rst need to dene human progress and make a practical
determination as to the value of individual adaptations. This M obius had not
done.
49
Ibid., 1067.
Olbergs argument provides a reminder of the political indeterminacy of
Darwinian science itself. The social logic of the Darwinian doctrines of
natural selection and the survival of the ttest (a phrase coined by Herbert
Spencer) often conservatively justied extant imperial, racial, class, and sexual
hierarchies.
50
However, Darwins assertion of the evolutionary benets of
biological variation was extremely useful for those, like Olberg, who rejected
the assumption that difference signied inferiority. For example, Olberg praised
Havelock Elliss Man and Woman (1894), because it proposed a new valuation
of physiological differences. Ellis, Olberg asserted, rejected the proposition that
what is different fromthe male is inferior and thereby renounced the tyranny
of Lombrosos and M obiuss dominant ideas:
The error, upon which the hierarchy of the male depends, is that judgment must be passed
on woman as such, woman in general. When this error created a principle of rank, then the
anatomist, the physiologist, and the psychologist were able to experience the accidental
characteristics of woman emphasized in their discipline as proof of inferiority. However,
women in the entirety of their life-expressions as biological and social beings logically can
be neither superior nor inferior to men, because they are incommensurable in relation to
their physiological function and their place in the life of society.
51
This line of thought recapitulated Elliss argument that, since the purpose of
evolution is reproduction and reproduction requires the participation of both
men and women, the ranking of reproductive contributions makes no sense.
52
Men and women play different but equally important roles in reproduction.
Elliss different-but-equal credo was an advance over patriarchal
devaluations of women, but it carried a conservative residue. Elliss thought was
supercial in that it assumed a general feminine character and thereby denied the
possibility of intellectual differentiation. Moreover, Elliss reproductive analogy
retained the assumption that men and women would always occupy different
social spaces. Did not this assumption conict with feminists desire to gain
equal access to higher education and the professions? Olberg trimmed most
of the conservative implications from Elliss credo by treating it as an analogy
for individual capacities. Today women are pushing their way into almost all
professions and will continue to do so until experience places in their hands
50
Several scholars address the political polyvalence of Darwinian thought. See Peter Bowler,
The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore, 1983); Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The
Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 18601914 (Chapel Hill, 1981); Paul Weindling,
Health, Race and German Politics between National Unication and Nazism, 18701945
(Cambridge, 1993); Woodruff Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840
1920 (New York, 1991).
51
Olberg, Das Weib, 15; cf. ibid., 17, 81.
52
See especially, Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman (London, 1894), 3937.
50 ralph leck
the ability to demarcate the limits of their abilities. However, women carry their
sexual essence inthe performance of these professions inso far as they are granted
space for individual particularity.
53
Olberg made a powerful argument that the
evolution of society would greatly benet from the broad education of women.
Olberg masterfully put forth a cultural correlative of her critique of M obiuss
and Lombrosos hierarchical view of evolution. She practiced an immanent
critique of misogynist science, using critical science against conservative
science. Just as womens biological differences could not be judged a priori
inferior, cultural innovationssuch as feminismthat challenge dominant
social conventions should not be treated dismissively. After all, like some
biological variations, intellectual innovations may constitute a benecial social
adaptation. M obius was unable to theorize the potential contribution of female
intellectuals to modern cultural development, because his natural science
falsely assumed the existence of women in general.
54
M obiuss willingness
to afrmneither the evolutionary indeterminacy of physiological differences nor
the variety of womens intellectual and cultural accomplishments led Olberg to
describe him as a reactionary enemy of cultural development.
In the foreword of the third edition of Concerning the Physiological Feeble-
Mindedness of Women, M obius responded directly to Olberg I am really
not that bad and he suggested that gender hierarchies were best understood
through an analogy to the army. Armies protect the evolutionary achievements of
civilization through a hierarchical social order. Women are the gender equivalent
of foot soldiers. As mothers, they advance human evolution though their
obedient sacrice to the greater good. Most often, however, M obius replied
to his feminist critics not with military analogies but with smug sarcasm: The
lack of understanding, the numerous errors, and the spitefulness of my female
critics only proves that I have properly judged the female mental capacity.
55
True
to form, M obius read interpretive differencein this case, Olbergs alternative
social rendering of physiological differences and Darwinian variationthrough
the bifocals of immutable hierarchy.
Olbergs greatest accomplishment as a social scientist was her ability todislodge
questions of sexuality fromthe conservative clutches of scientists of sexuality like
M obius and Lombroso and connect feminismto broader cultural developments.
In particular, she connected feminist culture to the growing class consciousness
of workers, modern industry, and what she called the unfolding of individuality
and intellectualism:
53
54
M obius, Schwachsinn des Weibes, 19, 17.
55
Ibid., 45.
[Above all,] the social justness of womens demands arises in the same way that demands
for democracy result from democratic principles. In view of this, one must recognize the
great disparity between peoples consciousness of rights and the current administration
of justice, which nearly every verdict reveals . . . The fundamental idea of womens rights
proceeds in the name of every general feeling of justice.
56
Critics of feminismoftenclaimed that the increasing inuence of womeninsocial
life represented a danger to civilization. By presenting the womens movement as
a river contributing to the rising tide of modern culture, Olberg made the women
question a referendumon modern liberal culture in general. Are equal rights and
the expansion of educational opportunities benecial to society? If so, then why
should women not participate in these large historical transformations?
olberg, mayreder, and the canon of austrian
intellectual history
The movement for womens emancipation only wants men who are not very sexual, who
have little need for love, and who are not very intelligent.
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character
57
Howmight the OlbergM obius encounter alter the historiography of Austrian
intellectual culture? First, we should note the exclusion of Olberg from the
historiography of Austrian intellectual history. While M obius frequently turns
up in canonical texts of Austrian intellectual historylike William Johnstons
The Austrian Mind and Edward Timmss Karl KrausOlberg does not.
58
Nor
is Olberg part of the canon of Austrian feminism. In part, this is due to the
fact that the history of central European feminism is often divided by class
politics.
59
Consequently, one nds references to Olbergs legacy in scholarship
about womens labor in Germany and revolutionary intellectuals in Vienna but
56
57
Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Character: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Munich, 1980;
rst published 1903), 459.
58
William Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 18481938
(Berkeley, 2000); Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe
in Hapsburg Vienna (New Haven, 1986). More commonly Olbergs name arises in
connection with population policy and socialist eugenics. See, for example, Gudrun
Exner, Josef Kytir, and Alexander Pinwinkler, Bev olkerungswissenschaft in

Osterreich in der
Zwischenkriegszeit, 19181938: Personen, Institutionen, Diskurse (Vienna, 2004); Manfred
Kappeler, Der schreckliche TraumvomvollkommenenMenschen: Rassenhygiene undEugenik
in der sozialen Arbeit (Marburg, 2000).
59
Greven-Aschoff, Die b urgerliche Frauenbewegung; Clara Zetkin, Zur Geschichte der
proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands (Berlin, 1958).
52 ralph leck
not in Harriet Andersons Utopian Feminism: Womens Movements in Fin-de-
Siècle Vienna.
60
Olbergs historiographical marginalization, while noteworthy, is
far less signicant than the revisionary consequences of Olbergs anti-essentialist
philosophy as a newhermeneutic lens. This lens can facilitate important revisions
of Austrian intellectual history in the era.
Olbergs anti-essentialist philosophy can help historians appreciate the
complexity and diversity of rst-wave feminism. In attempting to reconstruct
Olbergs socialist feminist civic vision of modernity, it might even be necessary
to avoid conceptual reications such as rst-wave feminism. As Harriet
Andersons UtopianFeminismdeftly demonstrated, the era of rst-wave feminism
included a diversity of feminist philosophies. Many of those philosophies were
theoretically and politically incompatible with one another.
One of the most important divisions was between feminists like the Viennese
Irma Troll-Borostyani (18471912), who embraced the Enlightenment tradition
and championed science, and those like Olberg whose feminist theory emerged
froma critical encounter withmisogynist sexual science. Reasonwas a key concept
in Troll-Borostyanis feminist thought, and she extolled reason and nature as the
path to human progress. This tradition did not challenge essentialist ideas about
womens innate nature, however.
61
Encomia to rationality and optimism about
the progressive potential of science were rare in the writings of anti-essentialists.
Another major division existed in rst-wave feminismbetween bourgeois and
socialist feminists.
62
Troll-Borostyani was explicitly antisocialist and extolled her
versionof feminismas a prophylaxis against sexual revolution. Olberg, conversely,
was a socialist feminist. She linked feminist demands to an anticapitalist vision
of structural change:
The era of charity as a collective undertaking has passed; the rising class movement of
the workforce and the new social ethics [Sittlichkeit], about which they educate, includes
a rebellion against institutions whose bread tastes of humiliation. Between people there
will be a compassionate understanding that will exclude humiliation and bitterness.
63
60
Olberg appears in Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work
in Germany, 18501914 (Ithaca, 1996); and Doris Ingrisch, ed., Die Revolutionierung des
Alltags: Zur intellektuellen Kultur von Frauen in Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit (Frankfurt
am Main, 2004). Olberg is absent from Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Womens
Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New Haven, 1992).
61
Anderson, Utopian Feminism, chaps. 711 devoted to a taxonomy of feminist
philosophers.
62
For a canonical treatment of this division see Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Womens
Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 18401920 (London: Croom
Helm, 1979).
63
Within the ranks of socialists, there was a split between leaders who sought to
politicize workers through promises of economic gain and those who promised
moral transformation. Olberg refused to proselytize on behalf of the economic
advantages of socialism. Her patronage of a newsocialist ethicscharacterizedby
a phalanx of solidarity against all social sufferingexemplied what Anderson
has called moral feminism as opposed to a spiritual feminism. Spiritual
feminists tended to be bourgeois feminists. They spoke through the language of
soul and character (Seele and Pers onlichkeit). These concepts were not central
to Olberg. Instead, she castigated bourgeois elements of the feminist movement
because their call for the development of moral conscience was isolated from
the everyday hardships facing proletarian women. In the absence of a sincere
engagement with the social life of the most destitute, individual conscience
facilitates a capricious continuation of the objective social order. For her part,
Olberg was more likely to refer to womens material ght for existence than to
the renement of individual morality.
Beyond these important divisions within rst-wave feminism, there has
been little attention paid to the division between essentialists who practiced
conservative empowermentmaintaining patriarchal forms like maternal
compassion but giving them a different contentand anti-essentialists who
rejected a reied notion of universal womanhood.
64
Feminists who developed
their sexual philosophies through a critical engagment with misogynist sexual
science, by contrast, came to see naturalizedconceptions of femininity as a barrier
to womens freedom.
The OlbergM obius encounter not only complicates the notion of rst-wave
feminism and places sexual science at the center of cultural debates; it also
may illuminate important differences among anti-essentialist feminists. I will
pursue this last point through a discussion of the feminist philosophy of Rosa
Mayreder. The different social and cultural inection of Olbergs and Mayreders
feminist philosophies must be emphasized, because it is crucial to understand
that anti-essentialism was not a premise that inevitably led to the same political
conclusions.
Both Olberg and Mayreder were public intellectuals. Like Olbergs devotion
to socialism, Mayreders historicization of gender relations emerged from a
Promethean life of political activism. In 1893 she was vice president of the
General Womens Unionof Austria (AllgemeinenOesterreichischenFrauenverein),
the leading organization of bourgeois feminism in Austria; in 1921, she became
vice president of the newly founded Austrian branch of the International
64
On the concept of conservative empowerment feminism see Ralph Leck, Conservative
Empowerment and the Gender of Nazism, Journal of Womens History 12/2 (Summer
2000), 14769.
54 ralph leck
Womens League for Peace and Freedom. Her life expressed a participatory
social philosophy of life. She intended to make history, and she was a leading
activist of her era. But, unlike the sociologically minded Olberg, Mayreder was
a bourgeois feminist whose work orbited around the concepts of soul and
individuated intellectual character (Seele and Pers onlichkeit). Her early work
made few references to capitalism or the huge economic and cultural barriers
to freedom facing proletarian women. Instead, Mayreders early work was most
concerned with creative individualism, which she later described as personal
culture. By personal culture, Mayreder meant an iconoclastic and individualist
philosophy: the individuals path of critical rebellion against tradition.
65
In a
manner reminiscent of Nietzsche, whose philosophy greatly inuenced her work,
Mayreder conceived of herself as a member of a moral and intellectual vanguard.
Indeed, many of her early feminist essays were dedicatedto proving the possibility
of an intellectual

Uberfrau, whose soul [Seele] is unburdened by sexual identity:
What the perspective of natural science generally denes as normal is, in fact, the
average human being, and it regards every deviation from this norm as a symptom of
disease or degeneration. This confusionbetween the normal individual as ordinary and
the normal individual as the highest manifestationof the speciesdeprives the perspective
of natural science of a proper standard for recognizing the highest and most uncommon
individuals of the human race.
66
Female intellectuals, she insisted, were perceived as depraved because natural
science lacked the capacity to recognize cultural individuation.
In Mayreders case, it was not M obius but Weininger (18801903) who
served as the misogynistic grindstone against which her feminist philosophy
was honed. Her Towards a Critique of Femininity (1905) responded directly to
the undifferentiated conception of femininity found in leading texts of sexual
science. Mayreder concluded that the concept of femininity was irrelevant,
absolutely immaterial, to an understanding of diversity among women. In
pursuing this argument, no sexual scientist received more scholarly attention
than her fellow denizen of Vienna, Weininger, whose Sex and Character
(1903) is a classicand once extremely populartext of misogynist sexual
theory.
67
Mayreder encountered in Weininger the standard n de siècle theory
65
Rosa Mayreder, Geschlecht und Kultur (Wien, 1998; rst published 1923), 27, 23.
66
Rosa Mayreder, Perspektiven der Individualit at in idem, Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit
(Munich, 1982; rst published 1905), 173, 177.
67
Parenthetically, M obius, for his part, resented this popularity and accused Weininger
of intellectual plagiarism. See Paul Julius M obius, Geschlecht und Unbescheidenheit:
Beurteilung des Buches von O. Weininger

Uber Geschlecht und Charakter, 3. Auage
(Halle, 1907). Weininger threatened a litigious response to libelous allegations. See Francis
Schiller, A Moebius Strip (Berkeley, 1982), 1034. M obiuss megalomania blinded him to
of dimorphic evolution. This theory, to recall, advanced the evolutionary view
that the present state of gender development created an extreme polarization
between men and women. Weininger referred to his psychological variant
of this evolutionary theory alternatively as empirical psychology and deep
characterology (Charakterologie). Central to Weiningers theory of mental
morphology was the assertion that male and female psychologies constitute
a xed unity of being. Evolution had created absolute males and absolute
females.
68
In Toward a Critique of Femininity Mayreder responded by emphasizing the
analytical deciency of these xed conceptions of the sexes: While one struggles
to clarify the present form of masculinity and femininity by way of original
and primitive organic conditions, one overlooks the fact that in many essential
respects they are purely products of culture; there is nothing xed, conclusive,
or generally decisive about them.
69
Further, she contended, scholars gripped
by this conceptual bias had no way of evaluating the evolutionary variability of
culturally progressive individuals:
From the standpoint of free intellectuality, it is a philistine achievement to erect a general
normof mental differences between the sexes and believe in it as a guiding principle which
the individual has to follow and on the basis of which one must measure personal value
. . . Through this principle deciency and misunderstanding of the fundamental problem,
Weiningers work shows that the problem of sexual psychology remains irresolvable as
long as one grasps sexual antitheses as a thorough separation and essential difference
determining the entire mental constitution of the personality [Pers onlichkeit].
70
And, of course, the best contemporary examples of progressive intellect, Mayreder
asserted, were to be found in the womens movement.
Thus the contrast between mainline sexual science and Mayreders feminism
could not have been sharper. The philistine generalizations of misogynist sexual
scientists denied the possibility of womens intellectual development; Mayreder
conversely celebrated and prescribed something that Weininger and other sexual
scientists categorically denied was possible: the intellectual individuation of
women. Consequently, she was keenly aware of intellectual diversity among
women, and this awareness constituted an outlook that was incommensurable
with the conclusions of mainline sexual science. If the fundamental objective of
the fact that the ballast of popular misogyny derived fromthe weight of numerous sources,
from theology to science. Even within the sciences, the evidentiary bases for misogyny
differed depending on subdisciplines. Weininger, in short, did not need M obius to provide
scientic justications for womens inherent inferiority.
68
Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 1012.
69
Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 41.
70
Ibid., 634.
56 ralph leck
sexual science was the classicatory differentiationof individuals, thensexologists
had failed completely to achieve this goal due to their coarse and supercial
generalizations about sexual identity. In short, elemental concepts of sexual
science, such as femininity, precluded a nuanced view of human diversity.
AlthoughTowards a Critique of Femininity is not well knowntoday, its publication
did not go unnoticed by leading Viennese intellectuals. Two years after its
publication, Mayreder was invited to join the Sociological Society of Vienna,
which included such renowned sociologists as Max Adler and Rudolf Goldscheid.
She was the rst female member of the organization. Her induction symbolized
her reputation as a great sociologist of gender.
What does the MayrederWeininger exchange add to the tableau of Austrian
intellectual history? References to Mayreder and Weininger often appear in
the historiography of Austrian intellectual history; for example, references to
Mayreder and Weininger can be found in Johnstons The Austrian Mind and
Andersons Utopian Feminism, as well as in Jacques Le Riders Modernity and the
Crisis of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.
71
However, none of
these texts denes Mayreder as an anti-essentialist and none of them grasps the
emergence of anti-essentialismas unfolding fromthe dialectical history of sexual
science and feminism. In his important book on Weininger, Chandak Sengoopta
has perhaps come closest to recognizing the anti-essentialist foundations of
Mayreders philosophy, but only ina passing andsomewhat denigrating reference.
Mayreders feminist theory emerged through a sophisticated and thorough
engagement with sexist sexual scientists such as Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, and
M obius. No one can read her work closely and justly describe it as simplistic.
72
In fact, the intellectual intercourse between Mayreder and Weininger is very
much illumated by a juxtaposition with the OlbergM obius encounter. From
this perspective, it is obvious that Mayreders philosophy, no less than Olbergs,
gained its critical depth from a discriminating engagement with the canon of
sexual science. Above all, Mayreder portrayed misogynist sexual science as a
tyranny of the norm, and by this she intended to reveal how natural science
reinforced a conservative herd mentality. The reied conceptions of women
and men posited by sexual scientists left no room for the equal possibility of
an unlimited differentiation in the female psyche as in the masculine psyche.
73
While Olbergs thought emphasized social transformation and Mayreders theory
71
Johnston, The Austrian Mind, 161, 199, 223; Anderson, Utopian Feminism, 150, 201; Jacques
Le Rider, Modernity and the Crisis of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,
trans. Rosemary Morris (New York, 1993), 1557.
72
Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weiniger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago,
2000), 147.
73
Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 59, 35.
of gender aimed at individual development, they shared an anti-essentialist
philosophy of liberty: freedom was incompatible with essentialist views of
humanity found in sexual science. From there, however, they drew very different
political conclusions.
conclusion: anti-essentialist feminism and
microscopic history
In a recent historiographical essay about Austrian intellectual history, Michael
Gubser proselytized on behalf of a new approach to contextualization. Instead
of interpreting Austrian intellectual history from the global perspective of
modernity or modernism, like Carl Schorske, Gubser prescribed what might be
called a microscopic approach: Rather than presupposing the more or less stable
edice of a n-de-si` ecle Viennese milieu, intellectual historians should build
outwardfromtheir sources towardcontextual insights that are not predetermined
by a dominant disciplinary paradigm.
74
This essay has attempted to do this in
relation to rst-wave feminism.
Our primary focus has beenthe criminological origins of sexology andfeminist
responses to sexual science. If one treats historical context as a great canvas that
is always incomplete, then this essay adds layers of paint to that canvas with the
intention of altering our overall perspective of intellectual developments. What
has been missing from the global interpretation of Vienna as the birthplace of
modernismis an understanding of howthe cultural forces of criminology, sexual
science, and feminism became locked in intellectual engagement and how this
dialectical encounter produced a new form of feminism.
This neglected form of feminism supplements not simply accounts of n de
siècle Vienna but also treatments of the European-wide emergence of feminism.
First-wave feminism was very diverse. A now canonical typology, reected in the
comparison of Olberg and Mayreder, insists on the division between bourgeois
feminismmostly devoted to the expansion of individual rights, education, and
employment opportunitiesand socialist feminism, which sought to articulate
womens freedom as part of a larger institutional and cultural politics of
anticapitalist transformation. Together with Andersons contrast between moral
and spiritual materialism, a study of Olberg and Mayreder also suggests an
74
Michael Gubser, A Cozy Little World: Reections on Context in Austrian Intellectual
History, AustrianHistory Yearbook 40(2009), 202. The dominant paradigmcontextualizes
the Austriansetting throughthe discourse of modernism andmodernity. For example,
see Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1993), xviii;
Caroline Arni, Simultaneous Love: An Argument on Love, Modernity, and the Feminist
Subject, European Review of History 11/2 (2004), 202.
58 ralph leck
additional distinction between feminisms based on reason and on love. The one
prized the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, where the other drew on a faith
in the ethical power of an emotion: love. Troll-Borostyani, for instance, placed
her feminist hopes in the promise of science and reason. Reason was not a key
concept for Helene St ocker, however. She envisioned feminist transformation of
culture via the civics of love.
The personages that make up the history of feminism are, of course,
more complex than these helpful but simplifying analytical distinctions. Their
philosophies were often matrices of thought that included several inuences.
Meisel-Hess and Key are a case in point. They were as intellectually devoted
to evolutionary science as to the civics of love. Reductive distinctions are
also problematic, because the inection of feminist philosophies often changed
radically over time. Lily Braun and Rosa Mayreder, for instance, exemplify the
transformation of feminist philosophy froma concentration on individual rights
to focus on sociology. In Gender and Culture (1923), Mayreder described this
change in civic inection as a movement from personal culture to social
culture.
75
Yet even this distinction is problematic, because Braun and Mayreder
never abandoned their devotion to equal individual rights.
In any case, to date, the typology of rst-wave feminism generally has not
includedthe differentiationof essentialist andanti-essentialist strains. AnnTaylor
Allen, for instance, has written extensively on the centrality of motherhood to
rst-wave feminism.
76
Motherhood was associated with emotions like love and
values such as caring that most rst-wave feminists assumed were natural and
permanent constituents of female biology and psychology. Nowhere does Allen
describe the anti-essentialist variant of rst-wave feminism that occupies the
focus of this essay. Anti-essentialists not only took aim at misogynist sexual
science, but they were also equally critical of their essentializing sisters. In
Mayreders trenchant words, The newest danger of once again offering room
to conventional [sexual] norms rests in the heralded tendency of the womens
movement to recognize a fundamental difference of the sexes. This is done
by raising motherhood to the decisive factor and thereby limiting the role of
women in the culture of the future.
77
Mayreder viewed motherhood ideology
not as a vehicle for progressive social transformation but as the reinscription of a
conservative conceptual trousseau. By parroting conventional sexual norms, the
75
Mayreder, Geschlecht und Kultur, 27.
76
See Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 18901970 (NewYork,
2005), idem, Mothers of the New Generation: Adele Schreiber, Helene Stoecker, and the
Evolution of the German Idea of Motherhood, 19001914, Journal of Women in Culture
and Society 10/3 (1985), 41838.
77
Mayreder, Zur Kritik, 40.
idea of woman as mother constrained womens self-fashioning. There was no
theoretical consensus in the rst-wave womens movement.
Anti-essentialist feminism derived from an aesthetic philosophy of self-
creation and the articulation of this philosophy certainly pre-dated the feminist
philosophies of Olberg and Mayreder. Marxs early manuscripts and Diltheys
subsequent theory of cultural science resteduponthe aesthetic belief that humans
were essentially creative and social. For Marx and Dilthey, human creativity was
the highest expression of social existence.
78
Human beings could create society
anew. Nietzsches philosophy derivedless fromanaesthetic philosophy of a social-
self (species being) capable of creating the world anew than from an aestheticist
individualism. Noble human beings had the fortitude to reject the accumulated
store of consciousness of tradition and create themselves independently from
enslavement tosocially imposedidentities. These aesthetic philosophies informed
Olbergs socialist feminism and Mayreders individualist theory of freedom
respectively. Olberg andMayreder deserve historical credit for extending aesthetic
philosophy to the realm of sexuality and gender.
It should be noted, however, that the prior existence of aestheticist
philosophies of freedomdoes not help us understand why some feminists sought
liberation through a naturalizing or essentialist philosophy such as motherhood
and others did not. Nor does the availability of Marxist and Nietzschean
critiques of reication explain why some feminists were decidedly more anti-
essentialist than others. This essay offers a contextual interpretation. Olberg and
Mayreder developed a decidedly anti-essentialist rst-wave feminism because
their philosophies developed most pointedly as a reaction to a naturalizing and
misogynist sexual science. Sexual theorists like Lombroso, M obius, andWeininger
consistently returned to the principle of nature in order to justify anti-egalitarian
and anti-feminist conclusions. In response, Olberg and Mayreder developed
an anti-essentialist philosophy of freedom that denied the scientic viability of
conceptual naturalizations such as woman and femininity.
One might even claim that this anti-essentialist feminism preceded and
pregured the existentialist feminism of Simone de Beauvoir (190886). De
Beauvoirs Second Sex (1949), canonically understood as the advent of second-
wave feminism, asserted that too often women accepted their social roles
as wives and mothers and thereby internalized the biological essentialism of
patriarchal society. She emboldened women to free themselves from traditional
roles and naturalized identities, thereby jettisoning the feminine mystique of
rst-wave motherhood feminism.
79
Nietzschean elements of second-wave
78
Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Leipzig, 1991), 19.
79
On the predominance of a maternal feminism in the n-de-si` ecle womens movement,
see Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 22149; Irene Stoehr,
60 ralph leck
feminism already existed, however, in the rst-wave philosophies of some
Viennese feminists.
Olberg and Mayreder revealed the conceptual fallacies of anti-feminist
sexual science and concomitantly encouraged women to reject concepts like
femininity. This rejection would, they hoped, facilitate the individuation of
womens intellects. Ultimately, Olberg and Mayreder contributed mightily to
a foundational revision of sexual science. Sexual scientists were most concerned
with sexual differentiation. Olberg and Mayreder explained why an essentialist a
prioriwhereby women as a biological genus exhibited mental and emotional
uniformitycategorically precluded the realization of the primary goal of
sexual science: classicatory differentiation and psychological individuation.
This feminist hermeneutic was anepoch-making revisionof shibboleths of sexual
science andsimultaneouslya philosophyof liberation. Womencouldonlybecome
who they wanted to be by freeing themselves from conceptual traditions that
stied their intellectual capacity to promote social justice and develop unique
characters.
Organisierte M utterlichkeit: Zur Politik der deutschen Frauenbewegung um 1900, in
Hausin, Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte, 6280.

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