Morality Society

Moral societies also came into being in Germany at the end of the 19th century . They served to fight against " immorality ", which primarily meant prostitution , turned against state regulation of prostitution and advocated the " moral protection" of young people.

The “XVI. General Conference of German Moral Associations ”, which took place in Cologne from October 2 to 4, 1904, had the program items, among other things,“ The Influence of the Different World Views of Our Time on Public Morality ”,“ Alcoholism and Immorality ”or“ Drifting and Danger of homosexuals ”. The immediately following two-day “International Congress against Immoral Literature” was attended by delegates from many European countries and received approval and support from the highest circles, e. B. the Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and the Prussian Minister of Justice. The participants came mainly from the clergy and the bourgeoisie. The Cologne Carnival was also accused of "shameful hustle and bustle".

Hanna Bieber-Böhm (1851–1910) with her association "Jugendschutz" founded in 1889 was a pioneer of the moral movement in Germany . The morality movement in Germany emerged from the campaign initiated in England by Josephine Butler against the state “ Contagious Diseases Acts ”, which held prostitutes, but not their male customers or pimps , responsible for the spread of venereal diseases . Like Butler, the German feminists, but also women and men of the most diverse political and religious convictions, criticized the “state as supreme pimp” under the slogan “ Abolitionism ”, an abbreviation for “the Abolition of the State Regulation of Vice”. Abolitionism called into question social and sexual conventions that had not previously been publicly discussed, including the notion of the “natural” sexual urge of men, the social obligation of women to “sexual purity” and “modesty” and of prostitutes as opposed to bourgeois ones Housewife and mother.