Who knows what about sex? In early twentieth-century Vienna, who knew about sex, and who had the privilege of dispensing such knowledge, changed over time. In this book, Britta McEwen charts a fascinating shift in which the dispassionate medical doctor of the fin de siècle was displaced in part by the municipal administrator, social reformer, and “sympathetic layperson” of the 1920s. These latter dispensers of knowledge moved away from an older, medical sexological literature and advocated a politically founded regimen of “rational reproduction” and “personal responsibility” in sexual matters. McEwen's study brilliantly places sexual politics at the heart of Red Vienna in ways that previous historians have not; in it, sexual reform becomes a lens through which we see wider Viennese visions of the individual body in relation to the body politic.

Despite the time span suggested in its title, the book is above all a study of the Austrian first republic. Although the author briefly reviews the wide historiographical literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna, touches on the field of medical sexology, and analyzes contemporary and sex education publications from before 1914, she is interested primarily in changes that occurred after 1918. One way to think of the book is as a tour, cleverly arranged according to the different reading materials that constitute its source base. For example, a chapter on municipal hygiene programs relies on the writings of the top public administrator. A chapter on sexual education for children develops from competing socialist and Catholic teaching manuals. A chapter on women's knowledge of bodies and sex relies on advice pamphlets, columns, sermons, and clinic notes produced by and for women. A chapter on marriage counseling centers juxtaposes the city's mechanical checklist for a healthy marriage to Pope Pius XI's 1931 Casti connubii, which decried the genetic focus of contemporary marriage thinking. Finally, a chapter on erotica delves into the content and scandalous reverberations of Hugo Bettauer's journalism. Each chapter of the book becomes a reading room, where McEwen judiciously offers up samples of the key texts of the era.

Among the colorful cast of characters, the movers and shakers who compiled and transmitted the Social Democratic brand of sexual knowledge, none was more influential than Julius Tandler, head of the city's newly formed Welfare Ministry. McEwen seeks, if not to rehabilitate a figure tainted in historical hindsight by his commitment to eugenics (Menschenökonomie and Rassenhygiene in the parlance of 1920s Vienna), at least to place his thinking within his party's vision of an improved postwar world. Tandler and his colleagues in the SDAP interpreted class struggle as health struggle; only progress in the latter could ameliorate the former. In a particularly lucid analysis, McEwen outlines Tandler's dual concerns: he wanted both to improve the material conditions for individual citizens in the present and to ensure that their offspring would fare better in the future. Accordingly, McEwen uncovers stock eugenic concepts—unproductive members of society, sterilization, life unworthy of living—in Tandler's works. Although these measures were not ultimately employed, “they were well within the limits of the thinkable in interwar Vienna” (p. 48).

Other characters who anchor the study are the lesser-known husband and wife team Johann and Betty Ferch who founded the League Against Forced Motherhood. This association worked to decriminalize abortion and to make contraceptives available and affordable in Vienna and beyond. The pair employed neo-Malthusian arguments to convey their message of “reproductive responsibility.” Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in turn founded the Proletarian Sexual Advice Centers, which aimed to relieve a perceived Sexualnot in the late 1920s. Reich, who had broken with Freud in 1927, identified two types of sexual sufferers: those in need of advice for a specific difficult sexual situation, and those in need of care for longer-term sexual dysfunctions and neuroses. He argued that “sexual repression only secured the existing class structure” (p. 136), and like the Ferches, spoke with a new frankness that challenged both bourgeois norms and the Catholic church's self-appointed role as the arbiter of sexual morality.

Two of the most engaging sections of the book center on points of contact between municipal socialism and the wider culture of Austrian Catholicism. In one, McEwen provides close reading of sexual education manuals of socialist and Catholic provenance, noting that both camps sought to overcome older notions of purity founded on children's sexual ignorance. They both emphasized “sublimation via physical exertion” (p. 75) and sexual purity before marriage, but differed on the merits of coeducation and mixed-sex activities for youth. They similarly educated children on the “naturalness” of sex, which for interwar socialist reformers meant a heterosexual partnership between “coeducational comrades,” and for Catholics the sanctity of sexual relations within marriage by God's design. In short, the sexual education programs of socialists and Catholics were surprisingly similar.

A second unlikely place where Catholic practices surfaced in socialist circles in the 1920s was in the “office hours” of Vienna's various sex and marriage advice clinics. These clinics relied upon the “confessional mnemonic formula,” by which the priest extracted the details of sin, to get at the roots of a patient's sexual problems. For the clinics to function, patients needed to confess their health, desires, and histories. Any long-term progress in the socialists' program of “rational reproduction” started with individual Viennese men and women being willing and able to articulate their present sexual realities.

Despite convincingly demonstrating that sexual reform was at the center of the Social Democrats' political vision, McEwen leaves us with a rather traditional time line. Her study sticks very closely to the established chronology of high politics. With a brief look backward to the turn of the century, this history of sexual knowledge otherwise reinforces a standard 1918 to 1934 trajectory. The book has one significant blind spot: it wants to connect turn-of-the-twentieth-century sexual discourses to those of the 1920s and articulate a change over time. But except for a few scattered mentions, World War I does not figure in the analysis. The production and dissemination of sexual knowledge by military doctors and by wartime reformers concerned with health and reproduction among civilians was expansive and should be integrated into the story McEwen tells.

If any topic might allow one to break out of a high political mold, to blur the bounds of beginnings and endings, it might be the history of sexuality. Was sex under a Habsburg government different from republican sex? But in the end, as McEwen herself makes clear, this is not a history of sexuality. It is a history not of what individual Viennese people knew or didn't know about sex or about their sexual practices per se, but rather of the production and dissemination of sexual knowledge by a remarkable collection of reformers. McEwen is an intrepid researcher; the volume of materials she has uncovered about sex is nothing short of astounding. Her framing and analysis of it significantly deepens our understanding of the 1920s.