Grete Meisel-Hess Explained

Grete Meisel-Hess (18 April 1879, Prague – 18 April 1922, Berlin) was an Austrian Jewish feminist, who wrote novels, short stories and essays about women's need for sexual liberation.

Meisel-Hess lived in Vienna from 1893 to 1908. She viewed both anti-Semitism and anti-feminism as signs of degeneration which needed to be overcome by progressive politics.^[1]

She wrote for Franz Pfemfert's journal Die Aktion.^[2]

Works

• Die sexuelle Krise. Eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung, 1909. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul as The sexual crisis: a critique of our sex life, 1917.
• Die Intellektuellen [The Intellectuals], 1911
• Sexuelle Rechte, 1914
• Betrachtungen zur Frauenfrage, 1914
• Die Bedeutung der Monogamie, 1916

Secondary Literature

• Helga Thorson, Grete Meisel-Hess: The New Woman and the Sexual Crisis. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2022.

Notes and References

1. Alison Rose, Jewish women in fin de siècle Vienna, University of Texas Press, 2008, p. 100
2. Kevin Repp, '"Sexualcrise und Rasse": Feminist Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle', in Suzanne L. Marchand, David F. Lindenfeld, Germany at the fin de siècle: culture, politics, and ideas, p. 102