I

Is this reframing of the sexual revolution as the revolutionary politics of sex relevant beyond the French context? To what extent was the political version of what we usually call the ‘sexual revolution’ more marked in France than in other Western European and North American countries where historiographical debates about the sexual revolution have also unfolded? There is no question that many of the features of the French context were transnational phenomena or had equivalents in other national contexts: such was the case for post-war renegotiations about morality, the emergence of an anti-Stalinist and anti-orthodox left, the emergence of a student movement, and the tensions between the student movement and feminist and LGBT activism around the turn of the 1970s. Because the Cold War largely determined the form that radical sexual politics took in France, we could expect it to structure sexual politics in other countries of the Western bloc, and to explain a form of sexual dissidence in countries of the Eastern bloc. And indeed, in historical narratives about the 1960s, scholars highlight commonalities between many European and North American countries, marked by a rise of three features: the New Left, the development of student movements, and transformations of legislation, norms and practices around sexuality.

First, New Left movements emerged at least in the UK, the US, Italy, and France. In the late 1950s and 1960s, some intellectuals in these countries began expressing their opposition to the Old Left and their political aspirations in their own publications such as Arguments, the Internationale Situationniste, the New Left Review and the Universities and Left Review, the American Monthly Review, and Italian operaist publications such as Quaderni Rossi.Footnote ³ As a transnational phenomenon with national variations, the New Left was characterized by the shared defiance towards partisan politics of a generation of leftist intellectuals and of the student movement, and by an opposition to rigid ways of thinking about class struggle which, for instance, overlooked emerging youth cultures and sexual matters.

Second, the student movement was an international and transnational phenomenon and, beyond France, it was especially strong in Italy, West Germany, and the US in the late 1960s. Sharing characteristics with the New Left, the student revolt manifested a defiance against both governments and party hierarchies.Footnote ⁴ What has come to be described as the ‘global sixties’ also flourished beyond Western Europe, with transnational trends.Footnote ⁵

Third, sexual transformations also occurred across a range of countries, with legislations, practices and discourses changing in parallel. In Sexuality in Europe, Dagmar Herzog analyses these European transformations, highlighting commonalities more than national specificities, and she considers the peculiar hope ‘that making love would also make revolution’ as a European phenomenon. Through the circulation of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas in the post-war period, during the 1920s and 1930s a tradition of anti-capitalism and sex-radicality was at least rediscovered in Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark, and even in Yugoslavia.Footnote ⁶ Pointing at the ambivalences which quickly emerged from the end of the 1960s, especially around the marketization of sex and the limits brought by unquestioned power dynamics,Footnote ⁷ Herzog also considers the dashing of this political hope in sexuality to be an international phenomenon.

Beyond these similarities, however, there were also national differences, and historians Dagmar Herzog and Todd Shepard have highlighted the need to regionalize histories of sexuality by exploring the specific national developments of transnational phenomena.Footnote ⁸ Focusing on West Germany, Herzog has shown how radical sexual politics were reactivated after the war as a way to confront the memory of Nazi fascism.Footnote ⁹ Laws on abortion and contraception also changed according to different timelines, with Italy, for instance, changing later than other Western European countries. For the French context, Shepard has sought to demonstrate how local and global histories intertwine by showing how discourses on Arab men and Algeria shaped discourses on sexuality in France after the independence of Algeria in 1962, making these controversies ‘French’ rather than ‘Western’ or ‘late modern’.Footnote ¹⁰

Following in the footsteps of these scholars, this article aims at comparing iterations of radical sexual politics in several national contexts for which commonalities have been identified (the US, the UK, Italy, and West and East Germany) in order to refine our understanding of the peculiar nature of their politicizations in each of these contexts. Indeed, when Herzog quotes a former British activist – who retrospectively considers their hope for the sexual revolution as ‘naïve and innocent’ – to highlight the limits of the revolutionary hope in sexuality in various European countries, the hippie atmosphere he describes hardly resembles the rather theoretical French radical sexual politics: ‘At the time one generally believed that this was changing the world, that if you fucked the girl that you rather fancied with the big tits next door in Kathmandu Valley on Buddha’s birthday then that actually was going to make nuclear bombs disintegrate. You really thought that.’Footnote ¹¹ If this quote conveys an articulation of sex and revolutionary politics in 1960s by Western Europeans, it also refers to what sounds more like hippie culture. With a strong focus on lifestyles, this hippie culture contrasts with the more structural and often Marxist understanding of the sexual revolution circulating among French activists and intellectuals. Do we therefore refer to the same phenomena when we talk about revolutionary hopes in sexuality in the UK and in France, and in other countries?

Special attention should be paid to the distinction between a political and structural analysis of sexual liberation, and a more cultural understanding of it. In May ’68 and its afterlives, Kristin Ross considers that the dominant memory of the French ’68 has focused on culture and lifestyle and has erased its real revolutionary dimension. Ross instead defends a repoliticized reading, leaving aside matters related to sexual liberation which she considers as belonging to the cultural narrative of ’68. In the American context, Beth Bailey has also differentiated between culture and politics by arguing that the American sexual revolution was not only the result of American revolutionaries from the East and West coasts who called fundamental principles of sexual morality and control into question’,Footnote ¹² but also of a wider range of actors, found for instance in America’s heartland like Kansas City, who contributed to these changes while having ‘absolutely no intention of abetting a revolution in sex’.Footnote ¹³

An important part of the scholarship has focused on the broad cultural transformations surrounding changes in sexuality. This is famously the case of Arthur Marwick, but also of a large body of research on the North American and British contexts exploring youth culture, dating cultures, mini-skirts, rock & roll, counterculture, the hippie movement, etc.Footnote ¹⁴ The widespread slogan ‘Make love not war’, for instance, suggests a general countercultural resistance in the 1960s (with the power of love seen as a challenge to militaristic logics in the context of the anti-Vietnam war protests), rather than pointing towards the existence of a strong structural and political analysis of how capitalism shapes sexuality. In other contexts, however, a more unequivocally political version of the sexual revolution existed. In France, for example, slogans about sex and politics flourished within the student movement in 1968, building on political arguments about the role of desire and sex in revolution formulated since the 1950s within an emerging New Left. This article seeks to deconstruct the historiographical focus on counterculture social movements by interrogating its relationship with specifically political approaches to the sexual revolution.

Rather than using the coexistence of the themes of sex and revolution in discourses to argue sweepingly that the revolutionary hope in sex was an international and transnational phenomenon, it is necessary to conduct a comparative study of the various versions of revolutionary sexual politics to refine our understanding of what it meant to defend the idea that sex was political in these different national contexts. Can we find traces of New Left discussions of revolutionary sexuality in countries such as the US and the UK, where sexual permissiveness appears as a mostly cultural phenomenon? With its strong Communist Party and strong student movement resembling the French context, did Italy see discourses on sex and revolution flourish within dissidence to orthodox communism? With its strong student movement and the centrality of the memory of Nazism, how does West Germany compare to France? And how does it contrast with East Germany, and with countries from the Eastern bloc, which had a different relationship to communism? How do specific national resonances of the language of revolution shape the national specificities of sexual politics?

Through the exploration of published sources produced by New Left movements and student groups in North American countries (mostly the US, but also Canada), the UK, Italy, and West and East Germany and a review of the secondary literature on changes to sexual norms and practices in these countries, the article successively explores these different contexts, beginning with a recontextualization of French revolutionary sexual politics between 1945 and 1970.

II

In the years immediately following the end of the Occupation, rare attempts to politicize sexuality emerged in France through Françoise d’Eaubonne, Simone de Beauvoir, and a few other intellectuals who had been active in the Resistance and were not firmly aligned with communist positions.Footnote ¹⁵ They positioned themselves against a post-war consensus shared by both communists and Gaullists (the Catholic right) which linked public discussions of sexual matters with wartime immorality and Nazism.Footnote ¹⁶ While these discourses were first carried by relatively isolated voices, from the early 1950s onwards, more publications and discussions of radical sexual politics emerged out of an increasingly dense network of intellectuals and activists. Whereas the war was a crucial reference in the late 1940s, discussions on radical sexual politics then started to respond instead to Cold War dynamics. Discussing sexuality became a way for dissident leftists to take a stance against what they considered to be orthodox puritanical communism, and to fight for a new type of revolution. The people forming this heterogenous network more generally shared a rejection of the ideological alternative of the Cold War as they simultaneously rejected orthodox communism and a capitalist model of sexual liberation characterized by the marketization of sex.

While they did not necessarily align on what revolutionary sexuality looked like exactly, these intellectuals and activists shared the conviction that sexuality was an essential revolutionary question which should not be neglected by any emancipatory political project. This challenged dominant communist ideologies in the context of the 1950s and 1960s which considered sexual matters as either secondary contradictions or mere bourgeois concerns. To legitimize their dissident position, they relied on Marxist theories and provided a structural analysis of sexual liberation and repression, where, for instance, economic exploitation was central.Footnote ¹⁷ The Trotskyist activist Boris Fraenkel argued in the journal Partisans in 1966 that ‘the condition of the sexual liberation is the diminution of work, of the hours of work, the disappearance of the enslaving subordination of individuals to the capitalist organisation of work’.Footnote ¹⁸ The feminist group Féminin Masculin Avenir also engaged with Marxist materialism in the late 1960s to formulate their own feminist approach.Footnote ¹⁹ While tensions emerged in the late 1960s and the 1970s around the articulation between leftist groups, claims for sexual liberation and feminist claims, the early groups which then formed the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes originally did not repudiate references such as Engels, Marx, Alexandra Kollontaï and Wilhelm Reich, which some of them appropriated to frame their own sexual politics.Footnote ²⁰ Marxism in its various forms had a strong legitimacy in the French intellectual and political landscape of the time, and it was a time when France imposed itself as central in postwar redefinitions of the idea of revolution, with a global influence of French Marxist ideas.Footnote ²¹

Beyond their shared dissidence from orthodox communism, these intellectuals and activists also shared a marginality in their own intimate experiences: through homosexual relationships, experiences of non-monogamy and experiences of non-conjugal sexual pleasure for women, they deviated from the dominant sexual and romantic norms of the post-war decades. It was precisely these personal experiences that were increasingly discussed publicly and integrated into structural reflections on sexual liberation, forming a legitimate basis for political actions and public discussions. By granting value to situated experiences, this challenged the French model of universalism. By upholding the political significance of intimate choices, it also challenged the widely-held definition of revolutionary politics whereby systemic change would lead the way to emancipation (rather than personal choices). The anarchist Gérard Gilles, for instance, argued in 1967 in an article titled ‘Révolution économique, révolution érotique’ in Recherches Libertaires: ‘We need to return to concrete experience, how the system’s rules are internalized, how they condition individuals and how we can still recuperate these individuals conditioned by the system to make them take their destiny in their hands and to lead them to action through a revolutionary awakening.’Footnote ²² The concrete and individual manifestations of sexual repression were thus treated as a revolutionary question.

From 1965 onward, students appropriated these revolutionary sexual politics, borrowing from intellectuals’ and activists’ ideas and mixing them with their own preoccupations around grassroots campaigns demanding freedom of movement within university residences. These campaigns emerged all across France to challenge rules that forbade men and women from visiting each other’s rooms (justified by the presence of students under twenty-one, considered minors). Students demanded free circulation, framing their claims in terms of responsibility and autonomy, some of them more explicitly demanding the recognition of their ability to manage their own sexuality. Initially, the protests arose informally on campuses, sometimes encouraged by small radical groups like anarchists and Trotskyists at Nanterre, before being taken up by student organizations like the National Union of Students of France (UNEF) and the Federation of University Residents of France (FRUF), which coordinated nationwide actions.Footnote ²³ Although not all students lived in university housing, the issue became a central focus of student activism in the lead-up to May ’68. Student sexual politics therefore took the form of occupations, demonstrations, public conferences, publications, etc., which then went beyond the question of university accommodations. Wilhelm Reich’s writings on the sexual repression of the youth especially found an echo in politicized students’ circles around ’68, such as in Nanterre in 1967.Footnote ²⁴

The dissemination of this language of revolution around sexual matters forms part of what Tom McDonough has identified as a reinvention of the language of contestation between 1945 and 1968 in France.Footnote ²⁵ This brief sketch of the circulations of revolutionary sexual politics in France suggests how sexuality was integrated into revolutionary politics by heterodox New Left thinkers in the 1950s and 1960s, and how their ideas circulated towards some student circles who kept this resolutely structural analysis of sexual repression and sexual liberation while transforming it into more public claims with a strong provocative dimension. Through a process of both continuity and rupture, the circulations and visibility enabled by the student movement and May ’68 contributed to the emergence of feminist and LGBT movements such as the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) and the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR) in the early 1970s, some of whose strands remained strongly attached to structural and materialist analysis. To what extent can these features of French sexual politics be found in other national contexts? This question is all the more relevant given the strength of transnational circulations of political and intellectual ideas, with France playing a crucial role in these exchanges.Footnote ²⁶

III

Structural or Marxist approaches to sexuality also circulated in the US, and to a lesser extent in Canada. This is unsurprising given that two key Freudo-Marxist thinkers – Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse – lived and published in the US after the war. Reich published most of his essays on sexual politics before emigrating to the US in 1939, and his later work moved in new – and more scientifically contested – directions, notably with his theory of ‘orgones’. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) positioned itself both against orthodox, especially Soviet, communism and against the commodification of sex in capitalist societies. His theory of ‘repressive desublimation’ responded to a context of increased cultural and social permissiveness in the US and pointed to the risk of capitalist recuperation of sexual licence. It therefore distinguished sharply between a general permissiveness and a structural and political critique of sexuality, in a context when Marxist-inspired ideas infiltrated the American New Left as claims about the social and cultural dimension of revolutionary politics emerged.Footnote ²⁷ A major figure of the American New Left, Marcuse shaped radical sexual politics internationally and was widely read in American and European student milieus, which he toured between 1967 and 1969.Footnote ²⁸ He contributed to New Left publications such as Monthly Review, which published articles on psychoanalysis and its political uses as early as 1959,Footnote ²⁹ although it did not publish any article specifically focused on sexuality until the 1970s.Footnote ³⁰

These discourses emerged in a context where the language of revolution was generally unpopular in the US. The period was marked by a reading of the world and politics structured by the Cold War and anti-communism where ‘there were no just causes for revolution’ in the eyes of the American administration.Footnote ³¹ Marcuse’s and Reich’s ideas were therefore a direct critique against these dominant discourses, and it was in this context that protest movements began emerging, intensifying in the 1960s. Some strands of it used the rhetoric of the revolution, even if, according to many scholars, they were a specific educated and politicized minority.Footnote ³²

Student protests offer another point of comparison. French students’ occupations of dormitories somewhat resembled the American ‘panty raids’, in which male students entered female students’ dormitories and seized underwear. But to what extent can they be compared? Panty raids appeared at a moment when US campuses were becoming more gender-integrated and they were often treated as one manifestation of the post-war American College craze or prank with little political meaning. Contemporary newspapers described them as apolitical riots, or even as attacks on women’s presence on campus. Time Magazine reported that men shouted ‘We want girls’, ‘We want sex’, ‘We want panties’, as they invaded women’s dormitories at Princeton in 1953.Footnote ³³ In other cases, female students joined in – as in 1952, when Time Magazine described female students arriving at Georgetown University (‘a Catholic men’s college in Washington, D.C.’) in ‘an automobile caravan of squealing females’, prompting chaotic scenes before faculty members intervened.Footnote ³⁴

Still, panty raids can also be read as challenges to the restrictive regulations imposed on women on American campuses, to conservative campus morality, and in defence of youth autonomy. Were they simply ‘“a student springtime”, i.e. college kids just letting off steam’, or did they question ‘the fundamentals of sexual morality and control’?Footnote ³⁵ Their political dimension is visible through cases such as the University of Michigan, where the abolition of restrictions on sex in housing policies and the shift to coeducational housing in the late 1960s were understood as a victory of New Left students.Footnote ³⁶ Panty raids also feature as a milestone of the history of SLATE, the influential Berkeley student movement linked to the New Left.Footnote ³⁷

Beth Bailey argues that two distinct phenomena were at play on university campuses, panty raids and articulate student claims:

Indeed, in the 1960s, US students’ claims which resonate with French students' claims emerged, insisting on students’ right to be considered as responsible for their own morality rather than being kept under tutelage. At the University of Kansas, the Student Responsibility Movement, which included New Left activists, defended new freedoms based on the idea of responsibility.Footnote ³⁹ According to Beth Bailey, students’ challenge to in loco parentis regulations – whereby universities assumed responsibility for students in place of their parents – reflects a broader context in which therapeutic culture and new conceptions of individual responsibility emerged. Sex occupied an ambiguous place in students’ demands: ‘Sex was always the subtext in debates over restrictive curfews, and everybody knew it. But sex was not the issue on which this policy was decided. “Responsibility” was, and for some, women’s equality with men.’Footnote ⁴⁰ This partly echoes the French context, where sexuality was not always overtly addressed by résidents, who often framed their claims in terms of responsibility and autonomy. Nevertheless, there were moments – such as at Nanterre in 1967 – when sexual repression and Reichian theories were openly discussed by French students. While there were clearly points of convergence between the French and American contexts, it appears that American challenges to student regulations drew more heavily on emerging psychological discourses and notions of responsibility, whereas in France students’ claims tended to rely on more explicitly political references.

Within the 1960s American student movement more generally, only a few tentative attempts to connect discussions of sexual liberation with broader political claims emerged. The Youth International Party – founded in 1967 in the US – articulated a politics of pleasure, but their manifesto offered a general rhetoric about the vital energy of sex for politics without delving into a structural analysis of sexuality. Key student manifestoes such as the 1962 Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society criticized the American model, rejected liberal policies as well as communism, and promoted participatory democracy and civil disobedience but did not say a word on sexual matters.Footnote ⁴¹ Outside a few intellectual circles, the 1960s appear to have been shaped more by a broad countercultural movement than by widespread, explicit attempts to politicize sexuality through Marxist references or structural frameworks – though further research could refine this claim.

While Marxist and Freudo-Marxist frameworks were less central in the American student milieu than in France, they nevertheless informed important strands of 1970s feminist, gay, and lesbian activism in the US, much as they did in France. Historian Jeffrey Escoffier – himself a gay and communist activist in the 1970s – notes that ‘in the period immediately after the Stonewall riots, the gay and lesbian movement did not at first focus on the question of identity, or even strictly on civil rights’;Footnote ⁴² rather, it focused on sexuality and drew on Marx, alongside more recent Marxist analyses by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. The Marxist branch of the Gay Liberation Front, the Red Butterfly, advocated a general liberation of Eros in a universalist revolutionary rhetoric. Their inaugural 1970 pamphlet proclaimed: ‘Sexual liberation must be a concern for all those striving towards human emancipation. […] Sexual repression in this general form afflicts virtually everyone in America, but it is most acute for women and for homosexuals, both men and women.’Footnote ⁴³ The Los-Angeles-based gay communist group Lavender and Red Union (1974–77), close to Trotskyism, similarly linked sexual liberation to socialist revolution, insisting that: ‘Gay Liberation is impossible without socialist revolution! Socialist Revolution is incomplete without gay liberation!’Footnote ⁴⁴ Although these American activists did not cite Daniel Guérin, their position strongly echoes his 1955 statement that ‘the sexual revolution, like its twin, the social revolution, will be the work of the people’.Footnote ⁴⁵

The revolutionary rhetoric also persisted in parts of the American Women’s Liberation Movement. Reich was mentioned in the Berkeley Women’s Liberation newspaper It Ain’t Me, Babe in 1970, where an article on paternal authority and the state opened with a quotation from The Mass Psychology of Fascism linking the submission to the father figure to the submission to ‘Führer figures’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Reich’s influence also spread in the 1970 pamphlet of the Canadian feminist Laurel Limpus, ‘Liberation of Women: Sexual Repression and the Family’. A graduate student and member of the Toronto Women’s Liberation Group, Limpus discussed Freudo-Marxist thinkers such as Reich and Marcuse alongside feminists like Juliet Mitchell and Simone de Beauvoir. The second part of her pamphlet analysed the repression of female sexuality through her own experience and that of her activist friends, which she interpreted through the frameworks of Marcuse and Reich. Observing a gap between political convictions and embodied response – ‘You can believe in sexual freedom and still be frigid. For many years that was certainly true for me.’Footnote ⁴⁷ – she found their theories illuminating to make sense of the social origins of sexual inhibitions. It led her to denounce the disconnect between radical ideology and sexual norms and practices within leftist groups. Drawing heavily on Reich, Limpus concluded that ‘Both Marcuse and Reich have begun arguments that I think are crucial for any discussion of female liberation’. Her example complicates the common argument that feminists of the second wave simply rejected earlier sexual politics:Footnote ⁴⁸ although they criticized the male left, they did not necessarily discard references like Reich and Marcuse.

The North American context thus offers notable parallels with the French: Freudo-Marxist ideas circulated among a few intellectual and student groups; students challenged the regimes of tutelage imposed on them; and 1970s feminist, gay, and lesbian movements built on earlier revolutionary sexual politics. Yet, the political version of the sexual revolution appears to have been less pervasive in the US, where it blended more readily with a general liberalization of mores and with evolving attitudes toward psychology and sexology. Two possible factors for this divergence are the different relationship to the memory of the war and the absence of a strong communist orthodoxy in American partisan politics, though further research on the student movement and New Left groups would refine this comparison.

IV

While both the US and the UK witnessed vibrant countercultural movements in the 1960s, radical sexual politics seem to have been even more marginal in Britain. In the late nineteenth century and the interwar period, a few intellectuals, like Edward Carpenter, Alec Craig, and Reuben Osborn,Footnote ⁴⁹ had attempted to link sexuality and socialism, yet, as Jeffrey Weeks notes, ‘the synthesis of the insights of Marx and Freud, which in the Central European tradition promised new insights into sexual behaviour, was a thin stream in the British school of sexual radicalism’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Carpenter’s socialist analysis of sexuality did persist as an ‘undercurrent in the socialist tradition’ and ‘reappeared in the revival of Western socialist practice since the late 1960s’,Footnote ⁵¹ but it remained limited in the UK. Other historians, such as Callum Brown, similarly downplay the importance of sexual revolutionaries after 1945, arguing that changes came from grass-root transformations rather than avant-garde sexual politics.Footnote ⁵² Echoing Weeks’ comparison with continental Europe, Sam Brewitt-Taylor contrasts Britain with the US: ‘International coteries of modernist and Marxist intellectuals developed the idea of a “sexual revolution” in the US, for example, but in Britain their views remained the preserve of a tiny radical minority; mainstream British interpretations of Freudianism tended to leave its more radical implications unexplored until the 1970s.’Footnote ⁵³

There were nonetheless a few British attempts to connect sexual matters and socialist or Marxist politics in the 1950s and 1960s. These did not emerge from the Labour Party – which did not consider sexual matters as crucial for socialismFootnote ⁵⁴ – but from Trotskyist circles and figures of the emerging New Left. Indeed, critiques of Stalinism strengthened in the UK as in other countries, especially after Hungary and the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. As dissident communists, British Trotskyists shared with their French counterparts a general critique of Soviet politics, which included a critique of Soviet sexual conservatism. In 1951, Tony Cliff, then a former member of a post-war Trotskyist party (the Revolutionary Communist Party), offered a critique of the situation of women in the USSR in the pages of the magazine Socialist Review, which he had contributed to create.Footnote ⁵⁵ Cliff criticized the recentring on the family and the limited emancipation of women since the mid-1930s. Yet Trotskyism was less influential in Britain than in France, and Cliff’s intervention seems to have had little resonance in other publications.

New Left publications featured sporadic discussions of sexual politics before the early 1970s, often embedded within debates on art and culture. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of interest and debates about the relevance of non-economic matters within New Left circles. Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in particular defended the notion that cultural and personal issues were relevant to Marxism. E. P. Thompson didn’t deny the relevance of these matters but he insisted on the need to always connect them with structural matters and with other more material claims.Footnote ⁵⁶ These discussions centred on claims for nuclear disarmament in a context when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), formed in 1957, gained prominence within the left and youth movements.Footnote ⁵⁷ These structuring New Left discussions and debates on peace campaigns didn’t materialize in the same way around the issue of sexual matters, but a few interventions nonetheless appeared in New Left publications. In University and Left Review in 1959, photographer Roger Mayne reflected on the limitations of conventional politics and called for a version of socialism ‘as a way of life or a new morality’:

Within the New Left, Mayne pushed for everyday issues such as sex to be discussed politically. A similar impulse appeared in an article on D. H. Lawrence by New Left intellectual Raymond Williams in 1958. Williams closed his article on Lawrence’s belief in the transformative power of sexual relationships:

Although Williams did not develop a theory of sexual politics himself, his reading of Lawrence as concerned with the political relevance of sex (rather than as concerned with a middle-class individual practice) echoed contemporaneous debates in the French New Left – for instance in articles by Kostas Axelos and Edgar Morin in Arguments in 1960–61.

Although the New Left Review played a key role in disseminating heterodox Marxism, in the UK, it published very few articles on sexuality in the 1960s. The most substantial intervention was Juliet Mitchell’s 1966 essay ‘Women: the longest revolution’. Then a member of the editorial board, Mitchell (who would become a leading figure of second-wave feminism) examined the place of women in socialist thought, arguing that nineteenth-century socialist discussions by Fourier and Engels had largely disappeared from post-war left-wing discussions because of ‘puritanism, always strong on the Left’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Identifying sexuality as a crucial yet taboo dimension of women’s oppression, she insisted that ‘the meaning of sexual freedom and its connection with women’s freedom is a particularly difficult subject which few socialist writers have cared to broach’. Drawing on Beauvoir while criticizing the limited role of socialism in her analysis, Mitchell called for a more explicitly political approach to women’s condition. Although Mitchell denounced sexual oppression and the constraints of monogamy, she treated sexual liberation with cautious optimism: ‘The current wave of sexual liberalisation, in the present context, could become conducive to the greater general freedom of women. Equally it could presage new forms of oppression.’ Writing at a time when sexual attitudes and practices were quickly liberalizing in Britain, she pushed for a political version of a sexual liberation which would focus on a socialist reading of women’s oppression. Drawing on Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation, she warned of a risk of double-bind, seeing the potential for sex to be recuperated by capitalism: ‘New forms of reification are emerging which may void sexual freedom of any meaning.’ Imagining a proliferation of intimate arrangements like Kostas Axelos in Arguments,Footnote ⁶¹ she proposed socialism as a framework that would enable diverse forms of relationships rather than impose new norms: ‘Couples living together or not living together, long-term unions with children, single parents bringing up children, children socialized by conventional rather than biological parents, extended kin groups, etc. – all these could be encompassed in a range of institutions which matched the free invention and variety of men and women.’Footnote ⁶² ‘Socialism’, she claimed, ‘will be a process of change, of becoming’ – in a rhetoric which strikingly anticipated that of Deleuze and Guattari.Footnote ⁶³

Mitchell’s thinking was deeply marked by Wilhelm Reich. Though Reich was marginal in British circles during the 1960s, she first encountered his work in the anarchist circles she grew up in, and rediscovered it through transnational circulations: ‘the reemergence [of Reich] in the radical politics of the late sixties in Germany and France, and in the student movement here, brought back childhood memories of Reich which went back to the forties’.Footnote ⁶⁴ While the New Left Review promoted heterodox Marxists such as Althusser, Laing, and Sartre, Mitchell remained relatively isolated in advancing a political analysis of sexuality, and her article provoked debates in the editorial committee.Footnote ⁶⁵ Sheila Rowbotham later recalled similar ambivalence when she raised feminist issues within the British New Left: figures such as Dorothy and E. P. Thompson remained partly resistant to addressing women’s issues: ‘They were hostile in a rather sort of old-communist suspicion of feminism, really. They were for the emancipation of women but they were very concerned that an exclusively middle-class approach didn’t dominate.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Overall, the British New Left’s engagement with sexual and gender questions appears to have remained limited in the 1960s.

Alongside Beauvoir and Reich, Mitchell was influenced by R. D. Laing, the British psychiatrist himself associated with the New Left in the 1960s.Footnote ⁶⁷ His socio-political approach to mental health resonated with ideas flourishing on the left at the time. Drawing on French thinkers like Sartre, Genet, and Foucault, Laing analysed the psychological effects of familial and sexual norms, and, like Reich, interpreted the rise of fascism in the 1930s through the prism of social repression.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the 1960s, Laing was very interested in Reich’s ideas, yet he and Mitchell appear as exceptions within the British New Left.

In 1970, David Fernbach – closely attuned to continental European politics and active as a translator from France – argued in the New Left Review that Freudo-Marxism had had far less impact in Britain than in continental Europe and in the US. Reviewing Sexuality and Class Struggle by the German author Reimut Reiche, he suggested that the book confronted British Marxists for the first time ‘with the question of the relationship of sexuality to class struggle’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In his postscript to the English edition, Reiche himself expressed the hope that ‘English and American comrades [would] be able to relate the problems it deals with in their own political work’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fernbach endorsed this view, defending the legitimacy of Freudo-Marxism to his British audience:

Fernbach attributed Britain’s relative indifference to the comparatively limited audience of the Frankfurt School, the absence of a strong Marxist theoretical tradition, the less urgent necessity to use psychoanalytical concepts to understand Nazism (unlike in Germany), and the isolation of psychoanalysis more generally. While defending Reiche’s book, Fernbach criticized his focus on class alone: looking with hope to the American context which saw alliances between gay liberation, women’s liberation, and the student movement, he implicitly called for what might now be described as a more intersectional approach.Footnote ⁷²

As the feminist movement developed, the dynamic of rupture and continuity with the student movement unfolded in Britain much as it had in France. Many historians argue that feminists challenged the patriarchal assumptions underlying the sexual revolution: the pill could reinforce women’s sexual availability (as Hera Cook suggests), sexual violence was largely ignored within liberal sexual cultures in the 1960s, and the sexualization of cultural productions harmed women. Sheila Rowbotham, a key organizer of the Ruskin College Conference – one of the first major intellectual events of the British Women’s Liberation Movement – saw second-wave feminism as a break with earlier left-wing movements. Targeting leftists in general (rather than sexual revolutionaries), she rejected male students’ references, insisting that women needed to define their own political language: ‘Before we choke on Engels “On the Family” and have any old shit stuffed down us by the left-wing hawkers of ideas in the market place … let’s lash out now!’ For her, ‘life style and sexuality [were] crucial’ to politics,Footnote ⁷³ and she embodies an early version of feminist discourses where sexuality was central:

This focus on sexuality partly reacted to a broader context of permissiveness where sexual freedom was increasingly discussed in society at large but where heteropatriarchal norms endured.

Yet early feminism also drew on earlier activism and on the student movement, echoing developments in France. Jeffrey Weeks argues that ‘it was as much the contradictions of the counterculture as its example which influenced the sexual liberation movements of the late 1960s and 1970s’, stressing the links between the New Left, feminist and LGBT movements.Footnote ⁷⁵ Reich continued to circulate in some feminists circles in 1970s Britain, as shown by the inclusion of his books among a list of ‘books from the women’s movement’, alongside Alexandra Kollontaï, Shulamith Firestone and Sheila Rowbotham in a 1974 Socialist Woman advertisement for London’s Red Books library.Footnote ⁷⁶

Throughout the 1970s, socialist feminists continued to reflect on their relationship with other movements. The expression ‘straight left’ became popular in feminist and LGBT movements to qualify a form of leftism which ignored gender and sexuality, yet socialist feminists did not view themselves as external to the left. Many had participated in the student movement ‘qua student rather than qua woman’ and insisted on ‘the cross fertilisation of ideas and experiences’ between the student movement, the Women’s Liberation movements, working-class-oriented Claimant Unions, etc.Footnote ⁷⁷ The tension between structural and personal analysis was central to these debates, with a complex rethinking of boundaries between the private and the public, the personal and the political.Footnote ⁷⁸ Lesbian Left captured this dilemma in 1977:

Consciousness raising mattered deeply but, already in the early 1970s, some feminists regretted that the knowledge it generated ‘had not been made collective’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Questions such as ‘What are we trying to do in our emotional relationships and how does this relate to the struggle against the family?’Footnote ⁸¹ remained unresolved. In the late 1970s, similar tensions shaped the group Gay Left, which emerged partly from the Gay Marxists group in reaction to its narrow economic focus.Footnote ⁸² Drawing on Mitchell’s critique of puritanical Marxism,Footnote ⁸³ Gay Left pushed for ‘pulling that analysis down to the gut-level of personal, lived experience’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The resulting mix of rupture and continuity between 1960s activism and the feminist and LGBT movement resembles the French context. While early figures addressing sexual matters within the New Left since the mid-1960s, such as Sheila Rowbotham and Juliet Mitchell, created bridges between these milieus, the marginal place of sexuality within much of the British left produced a narrative of break.

Despite the vibrancy of the British New Left in the 1950s and 1960s, sexual matters remained surprisingly peripheral, and revolutionary sexual politics circulated less visibly in the UK than in France. Several factors may explain this: Britain’s potentially greater social liberalization compared to other European countries in the 1960s (with growing discussions of sexual pleasure, strong secularization, and countercultural dynamism),Footnote ⁸⁵ which might have made sexual issues less politically polarizing; the absence of a fascist past, or of a past of collaboration with the Nazis, limiting the appeal of Freudo-Marxist analyses centred on explaining authoritarianism; and the weaker influence of Marxism and the Communist Party (compared to France, Germany, and Italy), which meant that the New Left did not define itself in explicit opposition to a powerful Marxist orthodoxy, as in France, and that the language of revolution might have been less widespread in the UK. Consequently, the political stakes of sexuality were perhaps less sharply drawn.

V

The limited impact of radical sexual politics in the UK seems to reinforce the argument that the relationship with orthodox Marxism and communist parties was a crucial feature of radical sexual politics in Europe and the US after the war. The example of Italy can serve to test this hypothesis. After the Second World War, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the strongest communist party in Western Europe. Italy was also firmly Catholic in the 1950s and1960s, which made the PCI ‘so fearful of displeasing the Catholic Church and offending its working-class constituency that it never challenged the sexual conservatism propounded by the postwar church’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Led by Palmiro Togliatti and close to Soviet positions, the PCI embraced conservative family values to appeal to Catholic voters despite their widespread anticommunism. The Union of Italian Women, dominated by communists, for instance, focused on economic matters and did not address issues such as divorce, abortion, or sexuality.Footnote ⁸⁷

There was no place to discuss homosexuality within the PCI either. In an article on the French writer André Gide, published in the daily newspaper L’Unità, Togliatti depicted Gide’s homosexuality as a proof of his political irrelevance: ‘To hear Gide dwell on the problem of relations between parties and social classes, one is tempted to invite him to deal with pederasty, in which he is an expert, and to drop these rather complicated matters, in which he understands absolutely nothing.’Footnote ⁸⁸ In this discursive framework, homosexuality and communism appeared mutually exclusive. And indeed, in 1949, the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was expelled from the party for ‘moral indignity’ due to his homosexuality.Footnote ⁸⁹ Although expelled, Pasolini remained committed to his communist beliefs and continued as a fellow traveller, contributing to the weekly PCI magazine Vie Nuove from 1959. Its editor-in-chief, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, actively defended Pasolini’s column, which he envisioned, according to her, ‘as an act of contestation of communist moralism, which he qualified of “old maid’s morals” which smelt like the rancid ideology of orthodox Marxism’.Footnote ⁹⁰ From the mid-1960s, Vie Nuove increasingly opened up to diverse views on youth culture, but this shift occurred too late to retain the support of young people.Footnote ⁹¹

From the late 1950s, a revival of heterodox Marxism emerged in Italy with both the operaist movement and the student movement that constituted the Italian New Left.Footnote ⁹² Intellectuals and activists who challenged the PCI also contested its social conservatism. Critical ideas about family structures and social norms circulated widely, with references to R. D. Laing and Herbert Marcuse.Footnote ⁹³ Reich was also influential for a number of Italian intellectuals, especially for the psychologist Luigi de Marchi, who played a decisive role in introducing him to an Italian audience. De Marchi wrote the introduction to an Italian publication of Reich’s text in 1961 (Teoria dell’orgasmo e altri scritti) and published a major monograph on him in 1970 (Wilhelm Reich – Biografia di un’idea). The idea that the sexual and the political revolutions were intertwined structured most of De Marchi’s 1960s publications, notably Sesso e civiltà [Sex and civilisation] (1960), Sociologia del sesso [Sociology of sex] (1963), and Repressione sessuale e oppressione sociale [Sexual repression and social oppression] (1964). De Marchi developed a political analysis of sexual repression, targeting both Catholics and communists for their shared ‘sex-phobia’.Footnote ⁹⁴ He and his then wife, Maria Luisa de Marchi, became important opposition figures: they opened the first centre for sexual and contraceptive counselling in 1956 and were prosecuted for it.

The feminist and communist intellectual Maria Antonietta Macciocchi similarly perceived her interest in sexual politics as a challenge to the PCI’s orthodoxy. While she remained a party member, she opposed its socially conservative currents and became increasingly critical of communist attitudes toward sexuality and marriage. In her autobiography (1983), she quoted Reich to denounce the denial of the body in Togliatti’s communism.Footnote ⁹⁵ Looking back, she contrasted the ideal of the ‘communist couple’ with the practices of 1970s Italian feminism, especially consciousness-raising groups, which she saw as a means ‘to break, up to a certain point, the silence, the most silent silence, that of Communist women’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Further research could explore the complex relationship between opposition figures, operaist groups, the PCI, institutional politics, and New Left organizations, and the role that sexual matters played in these conflicts. Given the operaists’ broader critique of the PCI, sexual issues were likely to have been part of that critique. The figure of Goffredo Fofi is telling in this respect. Active in the extra-parliamentary left, he wrote for the New Left journal Quaderni piacentini, and he also translated the erotic novel Emmanuelle in 1968, using profits from its mass-market sales to fund more political and marginal publications. These examples illustrate how, in the Italian context, attempts to discuss sexuality often aligned with opposition to the orthodox PCI.

As in the German and French contexts, the memory of fascism also shaped Italian radical sexual politics. Dagmar Herzog argues that the sex-rights activist Luigi de Marchi ‘advocated for the right to contraception specifically as a postfascist imperative’.Footnote ⁹⁷ He made this argument particularly forcefully during his 1965 trial, insisting that remnants of fascist legislation had to be repealed. Interested in Reich’s analyses of the psychological structures of fascism, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi likewise framed sexual repression as key to understanding Italian fascism. In La Donna Nera: Consenso femminile e fascismo (1976), she argued that sexual repression had sustained Italian fascism.Footnote ⁹⁸ The reference to the memory of the war thus constitutes another similarity between Italy and other continental European contexts.

As in other Western European countries, Italian feminist and gay and lesbian movements emerged in the 1970s through an ambivalent engagement with earlier sexual politics. Italian feminists began addressing new topics and developing new collective practices such as consciousness-raising, while remaining broadly committed to linking their claims to communist and Marxist politics. Italian feminism was particularly intertwined with the New Left in the 1970s.Footnote ⁹⁹ Gay activists from Fuori! vehemently rejected Reich because of his stigmatization of homosexuality. In his article ‘Contro Reich’ [Against Reich] (1973), the activist Angelo Pezzana recounted that when he first read Reich’s Rivoluzione Sessuale at age twenty-two in 1962, he discovered a novel political reading of homosexuality, but also a continued stigmatization. On the one hand, Reich refused to interpret homosexuality through moral categories; on the other hand, he still treated it as an illness. By 1973, Pezzana was able to challenge Reich’s authority and to express surprise at his popularity:

Reich remained influential among politicized psychologists, particularly for his therapeutic methods. From 1974, a group from the Centro Studi Wilhelm Reich, based in Naples, published the Quaderni Reichiani. Against Reich’s widespread popularity, Pezzana argued that gay people should speak for themselves, and therefore spoke out as a homosexual man against Reich’s theories, positioning his critique as a rupture with the student movement and the New Left that had preceded him.

The Italian case confirms the crucial role of communist conservative positions on sexual matters in shaping radical sexual politics, as a form of leftist heterodoxy. However, Italian radical sexual politics also developed specifically against the Catholic Church. The religious factor was more central in Italy than in France because of the PCI’s unparalleled closeness to the Church. Finally, the memory of fascism shaped the Italian reception of Reich’s theories on sexual repression in ways that parallel discussions about the memory of the war and the Occupation in France and discussions on Nazism in 1960s Germany.

VI

With its strong student movement and the centrality of the memory of Nazism, how does West Germany compare to France? New Left ideas played an important role in the development of the West German student movement. Women had little agency within the SDS, where sexuality was mostly approached through injunctions to sexual availability,Footnote ¹⁰¹ and discussions of sexuality by radical activists largely aligned with the liberal expertise of sexologists and mainstream experts.Footnote ¹⁰² Yet a more explicitly political version of sexual politics also circulated in West Germany in the 1960s: ‘the “sexual revolutionaries of the student movement” […] insist[ed] upon the fundamental interconnectedness of sexual and social questions’.Footnote ¹⁰³ This was the case, for instance, in Reimut Reiche’s 1968 book on sexuality and class struggle, which drew inspiration from the Sexpol movement of the interwar period.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Reiche, a member of the SDS and its president from 1966, was particularly interested in homosexuality, a topic he addressed as a sociologist in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The ‘outpouring of Reich bootlegs’ published between 1965 and 1970 also testifies to the widespread enthusiasm for this kind of politicization of sexuality in West Germany.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Dagmar Herzog relates this strong circulation of radical sexual politics to the role played by the memory of Nazism. Antiauthoritarian ideas resonated powerfully with a generation eager to confront the legacy of Nazism and to understand the nation’s compliance with fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. The central factor shaping West German sexual politics therefore appears to be the memory of Nazism, rather than a critique of communist puritanism.

How does the situation in West Germany contrast with East Germany and with countries of the Eastern bloc? At first glance, communist state politics, the impossibility of overt dissident activism, and the strong state control over private lives produced a radically different context. Yet East Germans also found ways to distance themselves from the state norms and expectations.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Josie McLellan has shown that sexual politics were not as sharply divided between East and West as one might assume. Some East Germans even perceived their sexual lives as freer than those of West Germans. Still, looking beyond official state discourses about communist love and gender equality nonetheless challenges the narrative of a state-led sexual and gender emancipation. Heterosexual and monogamous norms remained dominant from the 1950s to the 1970s, with normative representations, medical control, and surveillance regulating female, gay, and lesbian sexuality. McLellan nevertheless shows that the absence of a free public sphere paradoxically fostered strong and united activism, especially among gay and lesbian activists.

In Eastern European countries, where no free public sphere existed either, sexual progressivism tended to manifest through expert knowledge – sexology, psychology, and demography – rather than through social movements.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The ideal of gender equality and the discourse of heterosexual companionship were initially at the heart of state socialist projects in many Eastern bloc countries. Promoting women’s emancipation through work and criticizing the institution of marriage functioned as markers of distinction from Christian capitalist regimes in the West. However, these socialist ideals were increasingly questioned in the 1960s, ‘when most socialist countries switched from emancipatory discourses and policies to maternal and familial measures’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In contexts where these positions could not be publicly challenged, changes in sexual attitudes were more often driven by experts than by organized political contestation.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Experts' discourses undoubtedly played a significant role in transforming sexual norms and practices. While Dan Healey has shown that the USSR repressed homosexuality,Footnote ¹¹¹other scholars argue that homosexuality was still discussed by doctors, jurists, educators and politics officials rather than being entirely silenced.Footnote ¹¹² Recent research has explored the construction of queer selves in various Soviet states.Footnote ¹¹³ Further research could investigate more broadly the role played by discourses on sexual freedom within discourses on political dissidence in the Eastern bloc.

VII

Three main contextual features shaped the development of radical sexual politics in European and North American countries in the post-war decades: the memory of the Second World War, the opposition to orthodox communism, and the ambivalent dynamics between the student movement and feminist and LGBT activism. While these were international and transnational phenomena, the French context is singular in its combination of these three features: the memory of the Occupation, the opposition to the PCF, and the gradual emergence of a strong student movement from 1965 shaped French revolutionary sexual politics, making them especially dynamic, widespread, and influential. The French case’s particular intensity – its sustained theoretical engagement with Reich, Marcuse, and Kollontaï, its early post-war emergence in heterodox left circles, and its eventual mass diffusion through the student movement – partly explains why the French May ’68 became so central to transnational representations of sexual-political revolt. The French articulation of sex and revolution was not simply more visible, it was more thoroughly theorized as a structural political problem requiring revolutionary transformation. The expression of revolutionary sexual politics found a particularly political, structural, and Marxist form in the French context.

Yet this comparative analysis also exposes the resonances and circulations of these structural sexual politics beyond France, especially in the US, Italy, and West Germany. Future research might productively explore how texts, activists, and ideas moved between these contexts, and what role translation networks, international conferences, and exile communities played in disseminating Freudo-Marxist thought, but the comparative analysis of this article already shows that each context generated its own forms of radical sexual politics, shaped by specific configurations of political landscape, religious influence, and memory. The British case demonstrates that a vibrant New Left could emerge without centring sexuality as a crucial terrain of political struggle. The Italian case shows how the combined weight of communist orthodoxy and Catholic conservatism could generate radical sexual politics even more oppositional than in France. The German cases reveal how the memory of Nazism and the experience of state socialism produced distinct approaches to linking sexuality and politics. This comparative article reveals that what we call the ‘sexual revolution’ encompassed partially different phenomena across national contexts.

Further investigation could refine our understanding of the various national contexts, but a distinction between two groups of countries appears. In France, Italy, and West Germany, sexuality became clearly integrated into structural critiques of capitalism and authoritarianism, articulated through Freudo-Marxist frameworks that linked sexual repression to economic exploitation and political domination. Structural analysis of sexual repression also circulated in the US, but cultural discourses had a greater prevalence in the US and the UK, driven by youth counterculture, therapeutic discourse, and changing attitudes toward individual responsibility. This distinction matters because it suggests that the historiographical debates about whether a sexual revolution ‘really happened’ may be asking the wrong question. Understanding the sexual revolution as a specific intellectual and militant project rather than a spontaneous societal transformation makes it possible to trace theoretical innovations, political mobilizations, and circulations without being trapped in evaluating whether ‘real’ liberation took place. The French case stands out not because France experienced more sexual freedom than other countries, but because a particular constellation of factors enabled sexuality to become durably politicized there in a distinctively structural, Marxist, and revolutionary register.