Among gender historians, Cornelie Usborne is well known for her pioneering work on the politics of reproduction in Weimar Germany. In her engaging new book, Usborne returns to one of the central problems of Weimar-era population policy, abortion. Her main focus is on the experiences and actions of ordinary people—and especially aborting women and lay abortionists of both genders—rather than on the “public discourse” of state officials and social reformers. As Usborne points out in her introductory chapter, the political battles over the penal code's antiabortion paragraph form merely the “dramatic context” of a “history from below” seeking “to make visible the web of meanings attached to terminations of unwanted pregnancies in everyday life” (p. 4). One of the book's central objectives is to document the agency of aborting women, whom contemporaries as well as historians frequently cast as passive victims of desperate economic circumstances and sinister quacks. Abortion, Usborne argues, “was not necessarily deadly,” and women's own view of it “was often in opposition to the dominant discourse” (p. 17). To retrieve ordinary women's experience, Usborne relies on the methodology of the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), as well as on recent theoretical approaches to the history of the body by Kathleen Canning and others that combine discursive analysis with an appreciation of the body's significance as a site of material experience and agency.
The first part of the book examines representations of abortion in popular culture and contrasts them with the medical and economic realities of abortion in 1920s Germany. Chapter two highlights the ubiquity of the topic of abortion in Weimar-era theater, popular literature, and film. The chapter covers a range of examples, from famous antiabortion plays such as Friedrich Wolf's Cyankali. Paragraph 218 (Potassium Cyanide. Paragraph 218) to cultural sources that have received less attention from historians such as Martin Berger's silent film, Kreuzzug des Weibes (Woman's Crusade, 1926). Usborne uncovers important tensions in cultural discourses about abortion. While male playwrights, screenwriters, and directors tended to confirm predominant stereotypes of abortion as deadly and female abortionists as evil—thereby often underlining the alleged dangers of unchecked female sexuality—their work nevertheless drew public attention to the injustice of women's private plight of unwanted pregnancy.
Chapters three and four debunk many of the dominant myths about abortion reproduced in Weimar mass culture. They do so by relying heavily on evidence carefully extracted from court records from Prussian, Saxon, and Bavarian archives. Usborne shows that illegal terminations of pregnancy performed by gynecologists were not necessarily less hazardous than those offered by lay abortionists, in part because medical students did not receive systematic instruction in abortion methods. Medical malpractice in this area rarely incurred criminal punishment. Lay abortionists were responsible for a significant number of injuries and deaths of aborting women, yet Usborne suggests that most lay abortions probably were safe (especially since those cases that resulted in serious complications are overrepresented in the judicial records). Chapter four provides rare and colorful information on lay practitioners, their class backgrounds, genders, careers, techniques, and fees. Again, the evidence challenges predominant assumptions. Thus, for instance, in contrast to popular perceptions that posited the abortionist as exclusively female, we encounter numerous men who performed commercial abortions, including one World War I veteran who had deepened his knowledge of female anatomy after infecting his wife with venereal disease and helping her apply vaginal douches. Most professional operators seem to have come from the lower-middle classes, and many were midwives or nature therapists. Nonlicensed practitioners charged considerably less than physicians. They also came from class backgrounds similar to those of their clients, which helps to explain further why most women preferred lay abortionists.
The second half of the book focuses on women's own experiences and popular attitudes toward abortion. Chapter five uses court records to examine how women accused of providing or having illegal abortions explained their decisions. Usborne's reading of these judicial sources is quite masterful and eloquent, resulting in fascinating and often surprising stories about ordinary women's reproductive knowledge and practices. She is mindful of the pitfalls of taking women's testimony at face value, since defendants likely misrepresented certain facts to avoid punishment. Women's voices are often mediated by court clerks, though the legal records also contain documents produced by the defendants themselves (letters, diaries, etc.). Usborne demonstrates that ordinary women often were quite well informed about the biological facts of conception. The precise way in which many recorded their menstrual periods suggests a “rationalized” approach to sexuality. Yet, coexistent with the use of standard medical terminology in accused women's testimonies were lay concepts of early pregnancy as “blocked menses” that defied predominant scientific beliefs as well as ascriptions of moral guilt. The 1924 “monster trial” of ninety-three defendants from seventeen villages near Limburg in Hesse-Nassau, which is the subject of chapter six, underlines the persistence of “traditional” popular attitudes toward abortion amid Weimar's cultural and political modernity. Usborne uses the trial records to shed light on the ways in which rural Germans adapted to the pressures of the postwar inflation by maintaining their sense of Eigensinn, “an obstinacy or determination to do it their own way and if necessary go against the way of the state when this appeared hostile” (p. 180). Most of the accused showed little remorse; nearly eighty percent of the defendants appealed against their sentences, many successfully so.
The conclusion explores in thoughtful ways the complicated relationship between continuity and change in Weimar-era attitudes toward gender and reproduction (there is relatively little archival evidence on the Nazi period). As Usborne points out, “[i]n the interventionist Weimar welfare state young women's bodies became both a site of intervention and of power, to be disciplined by stringent regulation and to be rewarded materially and symbolically” (p. 214). The intense public debate about women's reproductive role, in combination with postwar gains in civil and political rights, energized women to defy restrictive antiabortion laws. Politicians and legal professionals adjusted. Despite the persistence of significant patriarchal structures in German society, a 1926 reform reduced penalties for aborting women, and a 1927 decree legalized therapeutic abortion. After 1924, police raids on lay abortionists declined markedly compared to the imperial period.
In certain ways, the continuities in cultural attitudes toward abortion Usborne highlights in the bulk of her book—for instance, the persistence of predominant discourses associating unregulated female sexuality with death—suggest the importance of political rupture after 1918. While Weimar-era changes in cultural beliefs about gender seem to have been more uneven and limited, constitutional reform and female enfranchisement marked more palpable shifts emboldening women and providing them with new leverage. In this context, it is perhaps regrettable that the book says so little about the intense political conflicts over abortion reform during the Weimar years. It also would have been interesting to hear a bit more about whether the improved accessibility of contraceptives during the 1920s affected abortion rates. Yet, these are minor criticisms. In writing a richly detailed, immensely readable history of abortion “from the bottom up,” Usborne has added vital new insights to our understanding of women's reproductive choices during the Weimar Republic. Her book presents new possibilities of combining discursive and material analytical approaches to the history of the female body that are sure to inspire others and move forward the scholarly debate.
