ABSTRACT

Research on sexualities has always been inextricably linked with wider social projects. The pioneering sexological work of people such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud from the late nineteenth century was closely associated with goals of scientific enlightenment and social reform, whether of reforming attitudes towards homosexuality, female sexuality, childhood, prostitution or the tyranny of religious beliefs and social controls (Weeks 1985). ‘Through Science to Justice’ was the motto of Hirschfeld’s World League for Sexual Reform, and in the inter-war years sex reform became an international movement with delegates from India, China, Japan, Latin America and Africa alongside European experts at the world congresses. The aspirations and hopes of these pioneers expired in the fires of fascism and global conflict from the late 1930s. But post-war a new generation of sex researchers, epitomised by the work of Alfred Kinsey, once again took up the cudgels for public enlightenment, and were hounded for doing so by conservative governments and movements in the 1950 and 1960s – and by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s. Sex research caused trouble – and many were troubled by it.