ABSTRACT
The focus of the work of the British Society for Sex Psychology was the attempt to create a sympathetic public. In post-revolutionary Russia the Bolsheviks had legalised divorce and abortion, encouraged birth control and decriminalised homosexuality. In the absence of mass social movements for sex reform, the emphasis necessarily fell on single-issue campaigns. The fundamental premise for the work of the World League for Sexual Reform was the possibility of convincing governments of the rationality of sex reform. Sex reform is always constructed across the dialectic of social control on the one hand and individual freedom on the other, and this, as eugenics had pinpointed, was particularly the case with the issue of contraception. Several factors combined in the 1910s and 1920s to make birth control an important issue. According to Wilhelm Reich, the League in the 1920s 'comprised the most progressive sexologists and sex reformers in the world'.
