ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the major features of sexual reformism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the aim of showing both the continuities with conservative thought and the painful and hazardous efforts at a more radical rupture. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminisms had a problematic relationship with the question of sexuality, let alone radical sex reform. Marx and Engels, the founders of a more 'scientific socialism', generally rejected what they labelled for all future generations as utopianism, though traces of radical attitudes towards sexuality are discernible. The synthesis of the insights of Marx and Freud, which in the Central European tradition promised new insights into sexual and social behaviour, was a thin stream in the British school of sexual radicalism. The sexual reform movements that emerged by the end of the nineteenth century largely worked within the constraints of a gender and sexual conservatism.
