ABSTRACT
Austrian writers, physicians, and painters of the 1890s have attracted considerable attention for their interest in sexuality, in sexual behavior, and in sexual convention, but also for their emphasis on the power and threat of femininity for men. The men who wrote about sexuality and gender in Vienna were all strongly influenced by the tensions within the liberal tradition on these issues. The women’s movement was at an early stage in Vienna in 1900, involving a small number of key figures and supported mainly by socialists and liberals, as well as a variety of writers and philosophers. The intellectual world of liberal Vienna was almost exclusively male. Public discourse about sexuality and gender in liberal Vienna was dominated by men, both in medicalized discourse about sexuality and in literary portrayals of sexual life. In the creative minds of Vienna after 1900, sexuality and gender became metaphors for thinking out human experience in the wake of scientific materialism and philosophical irrationalism.
