ABSTRACT
Many different reportages could be made about sex and marriage around 1900. The period was in Britain seen as a time of ‘sexual anarchy’, of nevermarried old women, emancipated ‘new women’ – against whom a prominent author (Walter Besant) wrote an anonymous book of male revenge – and of homosexual men (Showalter 1960/1992). In Europe, prudish and hypocritical Victorian Britain glued its eyes to the homosexual trial of Oscar Wilde, while not quite recovered from the Bradlaugh/Besant1 contraceptives trial in 1877; in fin-de-siècle Vienna, there were the erotic society portraits of Gustav Klimt and the novel sexual theory of Sigmund Freud; and in the embattled Third French Republic, with its galanteries and its demi-mondes, ordinary whores supplemented the virtues of the French family and enhanced the pleasures of its chefs. The Second Congress of Feminine Organizations and Institutions met in Paris in 1900, and debated, inter alia, §340 of the Code Napoléon, prohibiting any search for paternity outside marriage. The outcome of the congress debate was, that under certain circumstances a single mother should have a right to claim child support (Fuchs 1992: 90ff ).
