Cornelie Usborne is Professor emerita of History at Roehampton University and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, London. She has published widely on the history of women, reproduction, birth control, sexuality and medicine in Modern Germany. She is the author of The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany. Women¹s Reproductive Rights and Duties (London: Macmillan and Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) and she edited, amongst others, `Picturing the Past', the special issue of the journal Cultural and Social History (with Charlotte Behr and Sabine Wieber, December 2010); Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine. Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe (with Willem de Blécourt, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Gender and Crime in Modern Europe (edited with Margaret [...], London: UCL Press, 1999).

List of Plates

Preface

Chapter 1. Towards a Cultural History of Abortion

Historical perspectives

Cultures of abortion in Weimar Germany

Chapter 2. Cultural Representation: Abortion on Stage, Screen and in Fiction

Abortion in the movies

The novel Gilgi and the female reader and spectator

Socialist plays and novels

Abortion pathologized

Chapter 3. Medical Termination of Pregnancy: Theory and Practice

The case of Dr Hartmann

Abortion in the medical discourse

Divided opinion within the medical profession

Medical blunders and legal practice

The case of Dr Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann

Financial considerations

Medical attitude and medical power

Women's experience

Chapter 4. Abortion in the Marketplace: Lay Practitioners and Doctors Compete

The anti-quackery campaign

Self-induced abortions

Lay abortionists

Gender and the abortionist

The careers of 'wise women'

The safety record of quack abortionists

Methods and money

Class differences and shared culture

Chapter 5. Women's Own Voices: Female Perceptions of Abortion

The construction of the criminal in abortion trials

The experience of abortion

'Blocked menses' (Blutstockung) as a popular lay concept

Advertising abortifacients

Women's sensory perceptions

Chapter 6. Abortion as an Everyday Experience in Village Life: A Case Study from Hesse

Rural communities in decline

Female communication networks

Reproductive Eigensinn

Rebellious women and men

Relations between the sexes

The career of a successful abortionist

Denunciation

Conclusions

Chapter 7. Abortion in Early Twentieth-century Germany: Continuity and Change

Gender roles and gender relations

The blurring of boundaries

Continuity and change

Abortion in Nazi Germany

Continuity with Imperial Germany

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index