ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to trace out 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. Feminisms had a problematic relationship with the question of sexuality, radical sex reform. The early English feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, or French independent women, George Sands, few of the later leaders of the women's movement could be frontally attacked for their private lives. The principle behind feminist social purity was that men should adopt the high moral standards of women. The two traditions are sexual radicalism and an ascetic moralism, and meant that the socialist and labour movements were reluctant travellers in the long haul towards 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 traceable.
