ABSTRACT
The data reveals widespread sexual activity among lower-class, rural Bavarians and Westphalians during the first part of the nineteenth century. There was nothing unusual about this for Germany. Even Pomerania counted triple the number of illegitimate births around 1830 than a hundred years earlier. Research has established that the new sexual conduct penetrated throughout Central Europe and that it was urban as well as rural. The great change in sexual mentality was occasioned by the Secularisation and the reforms of the Napoleonic era. Capitalism, not urbanisation, abetted the sexual revolution in rural areas. The argument that economic change was the spur must be limited to the agrarian scene. It obviously does not apply to Pirmasens or the Sauerland on the upper and lower Rhine. In place of the purposefulness, discipline and restraint which prevailed in other homes, proletarian parents were permissive and lenient towards their children.
