When in England during the 1860s legislation was passed to regulate and monitor prostitution in the vicinity of the barracks and in navel towns (Contagious Diseases Acts, CDA) groups of women and men mostly from nonconformist and middle-class backgrounds formed a vociferous alliance to fight such regulation of prostitution by the state. They perceived the CDA as legitimising immorality and as an infringement of women’s civil rights. Under the leadership of the charismatic Josephine Butler the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA) was founded in 1869 to co-exist with the male-dominated National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. The members of LNA called themselves Abolitionists in reference to the early-nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement. Employing a combination of religious, moral, liberal and early feminist arguments the Abolitionists soon also began campaigning against an international white slave trade (trafficking of women). After the repeal of the CDA, Butler founded an international organisation (which became the International Abolitionist Federation, IAF) to establish links with likeminded groups throughout Europe to end state regulation of prostitution, stop the white slave traffic, improve social morality, and also fight for greater political participation for women.

In Imperial Germany, the Abolitionists’ campaign resonated briefly with the Innere Mission (Protestant Home Mission) and, during the late 1870s, also with some members of the women’s movement, including Gertrud Guillaume-Schack, Lina Morgenstern and physician Franziska Tiburtius. In 1880 they founded the first Abolitionist organisation in Germany, the Deutscher Kulturbund (German Culture Association) which, due to police prosecution, only existed for a short time. It took another two decades before the Abolitionists’ ideas found more support and a sizeable movement was founded around 1900. One of the reasons for this delay can be seen in the different cultural context of Germany where women’s organisations interested in the Abolitionists’ reform ideas were by and large non-denominational, and male-dominated Protestant social purity groups demanded a complete ban of prostitution.

Based on contemporary publications and extensive archival research including the private papers of key players, newspaper cuttings and the papers of the IAF in Geneva, Kretzschmar presents an exhaustive account of the Abolitionist movement from its second start in 1899 until its end in 1933, but it is regrettable that she does not pay much attention to the early attempts to establish an abolitionist organisation. One also would have wished to see a clearer distinction between the contemporary language of her sources and an analytical terminology for a historical investigation.

Kretzschmar situates the German Abolitionist movement in the wider international context of the IAF and reveals a close international network of women collaborating in their attempt to lobby against state regulation of prostitution, trafficking of girls and young women, and to fight for greater political influence and social equality for women. However, she brushes aside the important religious aspects of a complicated story of cultural transfer between Britain and Germany.

The first chapter outlines the wider context of sexual morality and the double moral standard as well as the principles of regulation and state control of prostitution. Here, Kretzschmar relies mostly on normative sources and her overview remains patchy and generalising, ignoring class differences for instance. In the subsequent four chapters, she describes the Abolitionist movement from three different perspectives. In a micro-perspective she looks closely into the development of local Abolitionist organisations, focussing on Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Munich. Kretzschmar explains differences between the regional organisations with different policies and styles of leadership. She then takes a meso-perspective which focusses on the organisation of the German umbrella organisation, its key players, policies and activities.

The subsequent two chapters investigate the networks of the German Abolitionists’ umbrella organisation and its involvement in social policy debates of Imperial and Weimar Germany (i.e. social purity and sexual morality, white slave traffic, and the abolition of state regulation of prostitution in 1927) from a macro-perspective. Based on the personal papers and correspondence of leading abolitionists, Kretzschmar highlights their close collaboration in the women’s movement as well as their international networking across Europe. She emphasises the importance of such personal connections and friendships between women which helped to convince others of the aims of the Abolitionists in terms of public morality and social purity issues.

In the second macro-chapter Kretzschmar argues that the influence of the German abolitionists on social and public health policies was far more extensive than historians have acknowledged so far. This, she claims, is particularly true when assessing the Abolitionists’ influence in the debates leading to the Venereal Diseases Act which abolished state regulation of prostitution in 1927. Although Abolitionists indeed contributed to some governmental meetings, the extent of their influence is not clear at all. Kretzschmar’s claim about a decisive political influence of the Abolitionists mostly relies on what they claimed about their achievements in their publications. Her argument would have been more compelling if it had been corroborated by an analysis of the political decision-making processes. More convincing is Kretzschmar’s analysis of the impact of social welfare activities of regional Abolitionists’ organisations, e.g. for unmarried mothers or in supporting women to leave prostitution.

Kretzschmar’s approach would have benefited greatly from a discourse analysis which would have allowed her to provide a better founded judgement of the extent of the influence of the Abolitionists’ campaign on politics, culture and society. For instance, she seems to ignore that from around 1900 many physicians and later also public health officials became disillusioned about the effectiveness of state control of prostitution in terms of public morality and public health and demanded reforms. To them the definition of what constituted a prostitute for the purpose of an effective state surveillance appeared to have failed as women entered and subsequently left prostitution depending on their economic situation. These women tried to avoid registration which made the task of the vice squads increasingly impossible. Many physicians began to argue for a policy change towards medical surveillance of men and women who were having promiscuous sexual relations and therefore were perceived as threatening public health. The drive to abolish state regulation of prostitution and replace it with a medical surveillance policy of the promiscuous, hence, was also motivated by demands by these very powerful voices, amongst them physicians, public health officials, and left-wing and liberal politicians.

Kretzschmar demonstrates in her book an increasing engagement of women in political and socio-cultural debates – although the exact impact on policy-making and cultural transformations remains unclear. Not all changes in attitudes towards prostitution and sexual behaviour in the Weimar Republic can be ascribed to the Abolitionist movement which, in the end, only was one of the many voices in discourses about prostitution, sexual behaviour and morality, and social policy – and certainly not the most powerful one as a more comprehensive analysis would have revealed. Overall, though, Kretzschmar has done an admirable amount of research and provides a wealth of information about the Abolitionist movement.