Wartime sexual coercion created a postwar moral crisis driven by demographic imbalance

Evidence

In the post-war period there has been a crisis of morals of unique proportions, but it took place in opposition to a form of coercion which had not been imposed in order to create habits suited to forms of work but arose from the necessities, admitted as transitory, of wartime life and life in the trenches. This pressure involved a particular repression of sexual instincts, even the most normal, among great masses of young people, and the crisis which broke out with the return to normal life was made even more violent by the disappearance of so many young men and by a permanent disequilibrium in the numerical proportions of individuals of the two sexes. The institutions connected with sexual life were profoundly shaken and new forms of enlightened Utopias developed around the sexual question. The crisis was made even more violent, and still is, by the fact that it affected all strata of the population and came into conflict with the necessities of the new methods of work which were meanwhile beginning to impose themselves. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1112

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1112
• XREF: connects to: War serves demographic goals even when militarily unwinnable — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 269