Cornelie Usborne

University of Roehampton | RU · Department of Humanities

Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany - edited by Elizabeth Harvey July 2019

Cambridge Core - Twentieth Century European History - Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany - edited by Elizabeth Harvey

This volume is a collection based on the contributions to witchcraft studies of Willem de Blécourt, to whom it is dedicated, and who provides the opening chapter, setting out a methodological and conceptual agenda for the study of cultures of witchcraft (broadly defined) in Europe since the Middle Ages. It includes contributions from historians, an...

When Lynne Fallwell mentioned her research about the professionalization of modern German midwifery since the late nineteenth century to colleagues, she was greeted with surprise. North American colleagues questioned her time frame: wasn’t midwife-assisted home delivery a recent phenomenon and linked to second-wave feminism in the 1960s? German col...

This introduction places the forum contributions in the wider context of the “spatial turn” within the humanities and social sciences. Following a survey of the historical trajectories of the field, a review of impulses from different disciplines, and a sketch of general developments over the last few decades, the editors exemplify key approaches,...

This article compares the responses to the declining birthrate by three very different regimes in Wilhelmine, Weimar and Nazi Germany. In their intent these policies were markedly different: Just before and during the First World War a declining birthrate symbolised national decline, sapping national progress and military power and the central aim...

Abortion in the Weimar Republic is a compelling subject since it provoked public debates and campaigns of an intensity rarely matched elsewhere. It proved so explosive because populationist, ecclesiastical and political concerns were heightened by cultural anxieties of a modernity in crisis. Based on an exceptionally rich source material (e.g., cri...

This article argues for the value of popular culture for the historian, both for its own sake but also for the light it sheds on attitudes to topical issues of the past, in this case abortion. This was one of the discursive obsessions in Weimar Germany, having been at the centre of debates on gender identity and reproductive rights since the First...

To comprehend how health, illness and healing were understood in the past the historian has to enquire into the variety of the meanings attached to these terms. The argument of this book is that meaning is produced by mediation. One of the characteristics of meaning is that it is usually contested; hence a good method to study how people have perce...

The campaign for abortion reform in the Weimar Republic occasioned passionate disputes between factions supporting and opposing liberalization of abortion laws. Nevertheless, both camps agreed on one issue: that doctors, and only doctors, should be authorized to terminate a pregnancy. The implication was that an operation induced by a registered me...

Contents: Why gender and crime? : aspects of an international debate / Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne -- Gender, crime and justice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England / Peter King -- The trouble with boys : gender and the "invention" of the juvenile offender in early nineteenth-century Britain / Heather Shore -- Women a...

This paper deals with rationalization of reproduction as a subject of public discourse and a basis of policy-making in Weimar Germany. Rhetoric and policy-making consisted of a three-pronged attempt to "rationalize" reproduction: firstly by regulating fertility according to the "scientific" principles of eugenics, secondly by the diffusion of moder...

This is an English-language collection of essays on modern German history with a generational theme, first published in 1995. It addresses, first, the extraordinary power and persistence of a German tradition of youthful rebellion extending from the Sturm und Drang in the eighteenth century to the student revolts of 1968 and, second, the impact of...

Although there was a surprising consensus by all parties that the patriarchal family was an important institution, the campaign for its preservation became the special preserve of conservative factions in Weimar society. They regarded it as first and foremost a moral matter. The fight against immorality was the Right’s answer to the Left’s welfare...

By the mid-1920s a remarkable shift had occurred in official attitudes towards contraception and its regulation, producing at least a tacit acceptance. As we shall see, this was due in part to the commercial success of patent manufacturers and the growth of birth-control organisations. It seemed an obvious anomaly that, although it was illegal to g...

During the Weimar Republic abortion not only became one of the most controversial health issues; it also became political dynamite. For the Right it was the most tangible proof of the Republic’s moral corruption and physical degeneration; for the Left it was an issue which promised rich rewards in the attempt to mobilise female support for the part...

The heavy losses on the battlefields of the First World War heightened in some the feelings of alarm at the falling birth-rate; in others it strengthened their determination to break with the ‘enforced breeding’ policy of the militaristic past. Although it would be too simplistic to group attitudes neatly according to a Left-Right divide, there was...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University, 1989.

This paper arises from a larger study of fertility control and population policy in Germany, 1910-1928, concerned with the tension between state population programmes and individual attempts to obtain reproductive choice. The aspect examined here is the medical ideology and its influence on abortion law and regulation. The medical discourse is cons...