Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma

F  M  W E –

This illustration from the British journal The Suffragette (1913) shows a mother with child in the vanguard of a demonstration for women’s rights.

F  M  W E – T M D

Ann Taylor Allen

FEMINISM AND MOTHERHOOD IN WESTERN EUROPE, 1890–1970

© Ann Taylor Allen, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6236–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Preface

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List of Abbreviations

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Introduction: From Destiny to Dilemma—Motherhood in the Twentieth Century

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1. “Aeons of Wrong”: Mothers in Prehistory and History

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2. From Patriarchy to Partnership: Feminism, Motherhood, and the Law in Western Europe, 1890–1914

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3. Employment or Endowment? The Dilemma of Motherhood, 1890–1914

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4. “The Right of the Child to Choose its Parents”: Motherhood and Reproductive Responsibility in the Prewar Era

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5. “The Value of Babies”: Mothers, Children, and the State in Wartime, 1914–1918

111

6. The Double Burden: Marriage, Motherhood, and Employment in the Interwar Years

137

7. “Conscious Motherhood”: Birth Control, Eugenics, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Interwar Era

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8. “The Right to be Happy”: Feminism and Child-Rearing during the Interwar Years

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9. From Motherhood to Sex Roles: The Postwar Era, 1945–1970

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Conclusion: A Continuing Dilemma

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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In memory of Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, 1926–1990 Mentor, colleague, friend

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ooking back over the fifteen years that have passed since I began the research for this book, I am truly grateful to a large number of people and institutions for the help and support that they have given me. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided a grant that enabled me to travel to libraries and archives in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The University of Louisville funded travel to Britain and a sabbatical leave. The Institute for Research on Women and Gender of Stanford University, where I spent a semester, gave me access to Stanford’s excellent libraries and a congenial atmosphere for thought and research. In addition, I thank my parents, Ann U. Allen and Franklin G. Allen, for the many forms of support that they have provided for all my endeavors. The staffs of many libraries and archives provided me with indispensable assistance. I thank David Doughan of the Fawcett Library of London (now the Women’s Library) for his advice, which was based on a wide and deep knowledge of the library’s materials and of women’s history, and for the sense of humor that enlivened my long days of research. I also received able assistance at the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. The Galton Society kindly gave me permission to see the records of the Eugenics Society, which are held at the Wellcome Library. Annie DizierMetz and the staff of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand provided friendly and collegial support for my research in Paris. I also thank the staffs of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris and of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for their help in tracking down materials. Annette Mevis and her staff received me hospitably at the International Information Centre and Archives of the Women’s Movement in Amsterdam. In Germany, I am obliged to the staffs of the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, the Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, and the Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnen-Verband. Finally, I thank the staff of the Ekstrom Library at the University of Louisville. Delinda Buie of the Special Collections Department applied for funding to acquire several microform collections, including the excellent Gerritsen Collection, that were crucial to my research. Jim Ryan of Interlibrary Loan helped me to find many important published sources. I thank Marja-Leena Hanninen and Sondra Herman for providing translations of sources, and Gail Chooljian Nall for compiling the bibliography. Many colleagues suggested or provided research materials, helped me to navigate libraries and archives, commented on portions of this work that were contained in lectures, conference papers, and articles, or read drafts of

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chapters or of the manuscript as a whole. A very incomplete list of these colleagues includes Marilyn Boxer, Sondra R. Herman, Tiina Kinnunen, Gisela Bock, João Esteves, Anne Cova, Susan Pedersen, David Lindenfeld, Kees Gispen, Gerald R. Kleinfeld, Thomas Trautmann, Michael Grossberg, Michael Schwartz, Francesca de Haan, Hugo Röling, Andrew Lees, Marjatta Hietala, Ulla Manns, Mira Böhm, Jürgen Zinnecker, Imbke Behnken, Lesley A. Hall, Pia Schmid, James C. Albisetti, Nancy Theriot, Julia Dietrich, Mary Ann Stenger, Eileen John, and Dawn Heinecken. Above all I thank Karen Offen, who gave generously of her time to support grant applications, to read manuscripts, to offer careful, honest, and demanding criticism, to suggest avenues for research, and to encourage me when I felt overwhelmed. I have benefited from her immense knowledge of European women’s history and from her friendship over many years. This book is dedicated to the memory of Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau. When I came to the University of Louisville as an instructor in 1971, Professor Tachau was the only other woman in the Department of History. In the early years of my career, she was a guide, mentor, and friend. A distinguished scholar of American constitutional history and an activist for the rights of women, Professor Tachau encouraged me to teach and study women’s history—a new and controversial field at that time. Whatever I have achieved in this field, I owe in some measure to her. Ann Taylor Allen Louisville, Kentucky

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IIAV BAK BL LAB WL BMD BHVP WLHM BDF BfM OV UFCS NUSEC CNFF GFEF WCG PCF SPD UDI UFF EES ES

International Information Centre and Archive for the Women’s Movement, Amsterdam Bundesarchiv Koblenz Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde Landesarchiv Berlin Women’s Library, London Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine Bund für Mutterschutz Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming Union féminine civique et sociale National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship Conseil national des femmes françaises Groupe français d’études féministes Women’s Cooperative Guild Parti communiste français Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Unione donne italiane Union des femmes françaises Eugenics Education Society Eugenics Society

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I            : F    D        D       — M              T         C      “A R H B” When Nora, the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, walked out the door of her comfortable home, her husband Torvald frantically sought to hold her back. “Before all things, you are a wife and mother,” he protested. “I don’t believe that any longer,” was Nora’s response, “I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are—or at any event, that I must try and become one.” Nora, the mother of three, aspired to autonomy for her own sake and for the sake of her children. In her present state of child-like dependence, she reflected sadly, she was “of no use to them.”1 As she slammed the door on her husband and children, Nora raised the question that this book will address: is it possible to be both a mother and an autonomous individual? This is what I will call the “maternal dilemma.” In the twentieth century, the maternal dilemma has emerged as one of the most intractable problems facing women in the West. Although the identification of womanhood with motherhood can be traced back to the beginning of human history, the conception of motherhood as a dilemma is relatively new. For without choice, there can be no dilemma. Only since the turn of the twentieth century has freely chosen motherhood been perceived as a realistic— though still often unattainable—aspiration. But the choice is too often between motherhood and other forms of self-realization. Women still assume the chief responsibility for the family, and do most of the work of reproduction and child-rearing. This “double burden” restricts their participation in economic, social, and cultural life and is now the major source of gender inequality in Western societies. Of course, many women never have children, but the tendency to identify womanhood with motherhood nonetheless shapes the environment in which they live and work. Motherhood is a central concern not just of women, but of the societies in which they live, which depend for their survival on women’s willingness to bear children. The solution of the maternal dilemma is an essential step toward the full realization of women’s rights of citizenship, which will be defined here to include not only participation in politics, but also equal opportunity in social, economic, and cultural life. Suffrage, said the French feminist Nelly Roussel in 1905, was not an end in itself, but a means to the

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higher end of ensuring “the natural right of every human being, to live autonomously and to develop all abilities in freedom.”2 In this book, we will look at the ways in which feminists who lived and worked in several Western European countries between 1890 and 1970 attempted to resolve this dilemma by creating a new role for mothers—one that would not restrict, but enhance, their development as individuals. The maternal dilemma was not, of course, invented by feminists. But it was they who defined it, explored it, stressed its importance as a social, cultural, and political issue, and placed it at the center of their theoretical analyses and political programs. Despite the central importance of this theme to the history of women and of feminism, it has often been neglected by historians, who are usually most interested in women’s entry into new areas such as politics, the professions, sports, and social life outside the family. Motherhood, many imply, was a “traditional” role, and feminists who emphasized it are often identified as conservatives whose contribution was minor, if not actually harmful. In their study of German women in the interwar era, Atina Grossmann, Renate Bridenthal, and Claudia Koonz emphasize the “dangers implicit in a feminism that celebrates separate spheres and differences between the sexes.”3 And Denise Riley charges feminists of earlier generations with emphasizing the “timelessly frozen properties of maternity” and constructing “a womanthing, objectified as a distortion.”4 But we shall see that in fact feminist discourses on motherhood were fixed neither on “timeless” and essentialist stereotypes, nor on “separate spheres.” On the contrary, they contributed to a remarkable process of transformation. At the turn of the twentieth century, many feminists extolled motherhood as the highest of human achievements. Indeed, claimed the influential Swedish author Ellen Key, it was “the most perfect realization of human potential that the species has reached.”5 In the political realm, this view was expressed through an ideology that historians call “maternalism,” which asserted the public importance of motherhood and child-rearing. Some even included life-giving motherhood with death-dealing military service among the rights and obligations of citizenship. By 1970, we note a conspicuous shift in both the content and the tone of feminist debates. Activists of that era continued to advocate the political and social rights of mothers and to explore the experience of motherhood and its place in each individual life. But most repudiated maternalism and aggressively refused to acknowledge motherhood as a universal female vocation, moral mission, or duty of citizenship. In fact, many regarded this as a stereotype that oppressed and confined women. In 1972, young activists of the French women’s liberation movement called upon women to free themselves from an ancient yoke. “The only rational attitude toward what society has made of motherhood is to refuse it,” stated one of their many manifestoes.6 Why this change in the space of less than a century? Why did the grandmothers’ exalted ideal become the granddaughters’ restrictive

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stereotype—a development that is all the more noteworthy in a period during which the medical and material conditions surrounding motherhood improved immeasurably? This book will answer this question by looking at the relationship between feminism and motherhood in its historical context— the massive transformation of family structure that occurred during the years from 1890 to 1970. The approach will be international and comparative, and will include the nations of Western Europe, focusing chiefly on Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands but including many others. Unlike most existing works on this subject, which are centered on public policy issues, this one will emphasize the connection between public policy and the familial roles of mothers. Of course, no single book could cover all aspects— legal, medical, moral, cultural—of the maternal role, so we will focus here on the questions that figured most prominently in feminist debates. What should be the legal status of mothers, and what changes in the law might be required to promote gender equality in the family? Was the child the responsibility of the individual mother, the married or unmarried couple, or the community or state? And if the latter, should the state be empowered to compel, to limit, or to prohibit parenthood? Was motherhood in itself an occupation deserving of compensation, or should it be combined with paid work outside the home? Were all women “motherly” by nature, or were some unfit for this responsibility and thus morally obligated to decline it? And, finally, how would women’s new aspirations to occupational or personal fulfillment affect the mother–child relationship? As its title indicates, this study focuses on the history of feminist movements, Western Europe, and motherhood. I will begin by briefly addressing these three concepts.

F Any historical consideration of such a diverse and controversial phenomenon as feminism must begin with a definition. The terms “feminist” and “feminism” were first used in the late nineteenth century by the French suffragist Hubertine Auclert, and by 1900 these terms were in use throughout Europe and in North and Latin America. From that day to this, their meaning has been disputed. As the historian Karen Offen has remarked, many historical works of the 1970s evaluated their subjects according to the authors’ own definitions of feminism, derived from the women’s movements of the late twentieth century. True feminists, these authors insisted, aimed for “equal opportunity for the individual irrespective of sex, familial considerations, or national concerns.”7 But most leaders of the first women’s movement, from its origins in the eighteenth century until 1960, took a positive view of the family, the maternal role, and the complementary male–female couple, and worked from a concept of “equality-in-difference.” Such activists were often dismissed as simply not feminist—a judgment that Offen rightly rejects as unhistorical.

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Offen divides feminist arguments into two types: the “individualist,” which stressed individual rights, and the “relational,” which emphasized cooperation, solidarity, and the complementary male–female couple. Encompassing both of these variations, Offen defines a feminist as a female or male whose ideas and actions . . . show them to meet three criteria: they recognize the value of women’s own interpretations of their lived experience and needs and acknowledge the values women claim publicly as their own . . . in assessing their status in society relative to men; they exhibit consciousness of, discomfort at, or even anger over institutionalized injustice (or inequity) toward women as a group by men as a group in a given society; and they advocate the elimination of that injustice by challenging, through efforts to alter prevailing ideas and/or social institutions and practices, the coercive power, force, or authority that upholds male prerogatives in that particular culture.8

Many people who will figure in this book put their major efforts into campaigns for the rights of children rather than of women. Others shunned the label “feminist”—religious women because of its secular, and socialists because of its middle-class, connotations. But under Offen’s broad definition most of these people qualify in some sense as “feminist.” Other historians emphasize the conflict rather than the basic agreement among feminist ideologies. Since their beginning in the eighteenth century, claims the well-known historian and theorist Joan Wallach Scott, feminist movements have been trapped in an intractable paradox, albeit one that is not of their own making. In Scott’s view, feminists usually begin by challenging whatever notions of gender difference are used to justify women’s subordination during a given era, and making a claim to equality with men based on a doctrine of gender-neutral human rights, or rights of citizenship. But such a gender-neutral doctrine always proves elusive, for in practice citizenship is associated with maleness (e.g., military service was commonly regarded during this period as an indispensable qualification for citizenship). And therefore feminists are forced to admit gender difference and to argue that women are entitled to equality on the basis of their distinctively female characteristics, thus creating a new version of female “nature” that eventually becomes so oppressive and limiting that a new generation of feminists challenges it in the name of equality (starting the process again).9 In practice, the distinction between arguments for gender equality and gender difference was often meaningless, for these arguments were often used interchangeably. And yet on issues concerning maternity, we will see that these two approaches dwelt uneasily together. For the mother identified herself both generically as a human individual and specifically as a woman. In the late nineteenth century, feminists demanded full and equal rights of citizenship for women. But a doctrine of rights that had been designed to fit the male citizen, an independent individual, could only with difficulty be adapted to the citizen-mother, who claimed rights to dependence as well as to liberty. And the mother–child relationship, which evolves from symbiosis through intermediate stages of dependence that must inevitably end in separation,

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had no counterpart in the male life-patterns upon which most normative understandings of human nature and politics were based. Many feminists solved this problem by claiming that motherhood itself was a vital service to the state, which deserved to be recognized by the granting of full rights of citizenship. But this maternalist ideology, which emphasized social solidarity, was often difficult to reconcile with individualist claims to equality and liberty. For feminists, motherhood inevitably involved a conflict between social and individualist aspirations, and this conflict will be a major theme of this book. The term “feminism” has also been problematized for imposing a false unity on a highly disparate set of people, ideas, and events.10 Female sex and gender do not in themselves confer a political identity, and those who speak for “women” in general always represent some particular group. In what follows, we will be concerned with a numerous and diverse array of individuals, not all of whom were women—for men, though in the minority, have always played a role in feminist movements. These individuals’ ideas and actions were shaped by many aspects of identity—not only sex or gender, but also nationality, class, religion, marital and parental status, and others. At no time does the term “feminism” denote a unified movement or a single orthodox ideology—it always refers to a complex and shifting process of coalition-building.11 Class conflict, which shaped the political life of this era, was often a major obstacle to this process. Both definitions of class and perceptions of class difference varied across national boundaries. In Germany, a hostile relationship between socialist and middle-class women’s groups prevented cooperation over most of our period. In France, Scandinavia, and Britain, cross-class alliances were easier to forge. Moreover, feminists in all the countries included in this study found it easier to work together across class barriers on issues concerning the family, motherhood, and child welfare than on many other issues. However, because of the far greater access of upper- and middle-class women to money, time, and media attention, their viewpoint usually had the greatest visibility—an asymmetry that will be noted at many points in the following chapters. Another difference that is important to feminists at present—difference in sexual orientation—influenced our period’s discourses on motherhood only indirectly. Although in fact many lesbians had their own children or raised the children of others, they were imagined during this era chiefly as unmarried and childless women. The lesbian mother became visible only after 1970. Although they were very aware of differences among women, feminists of this era did not share the preoccupation of present-day theorists with defining or deconstructing female identity. The identity to which they aspired was not chiefly that of woman, but that of citizen. And the audience that they addressed was not composed exclusively of women or of feminists, but included the general public. They rightly insisted that motherhood, the family, and reproduction were not just “women’s issues,” but vital aspects of national life that concerned both women and men. “Just as we need the human couple to call a new person into life,” wrote Hubertine Auclert, “in order to create an

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environment where that person can develop fully, both men and women are indispensable.”12 Feminists will be presented here as contributors to public debates that included a wide variety of speakers—politicians, military leaders, physicians, psychologists, creative writers, and many others.

W E This will be an international and comparative history that includes all of the national cultures of Western Europe. The focus will be on Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany (the Nazi era, during which feminist organizations were prohibited, will be discussed only as it influenced developments in other countries and in postwar West Germany). The Scandinavian nations will also figure prominently. Southern European nations such as Spain, Italy, and Portugal will play a lesser role, partly because for a large portion of the period they were ruled by dictatorships that suppressed feminism, but they will also be included, as will smaller nations such as Switzerland and Ireland.13 The source material will include both original documents and the rich and copious body of secondary literature that has reconstructed the history of women in many nations. My aim is both to provide a synthesis of existing research and to place its results in an international perspective. The field of women’s and gender history has questioned many conventions of the discipline of history but has retained its focus on the national state. The past thirty years have seen the production of countless excellent works covering many aspects of women’s and gender history in individual countries—works upon which the present study depends. And their perspective is valid and illuminating, for the national state—its political structures, its distinctive geography, language, and culture, its economic and social systems, and not least its military fortunes—did much to shape the environment in which individuals lived and thought. But the national focus can also limit the explanatory power of history, for most major trends, especially those of the modern era, arise from forces that are international in scope. And we cannot simply assume that nationality was the only, or even the primary, marker of individual identity. Nations, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out, are not timeless and primordial entities— on the contrary, they are “imagined communities,” invented and sustained to fulfill their citizens’ need for a “sense of belonging.”14 These citizens may well have an equal or greater need to belong to entities smaller or larger than the national state. Among the former are families, cities, and provinces; among the latter are regions and other “imagined communities” linked by religion, class, race, gender, or other identities shared across national boundaries. During our period, the feminist movement was among the largest and the most closely knit of these international communities.15 To be sure, bonds of gender did not transcend those of nationality, and the dense network of feminist organizational life and intellectual exchange was disrupted by war

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and international rivalry. But international tensions could also stimulate communication, for feminists were loyal defenders of national honor and sought information about other countries in order to compete with them. And international dialogue, though it touched on all issues, was particularly intense on themes related to the family, child welfare, and the theory and practice of motherhood—aspects of life that, though they took distinctive forms in each national culture, were common to all. The international approach does not obscure or overlook the differences among nations—on the contrary, it illuminates these differences.16 The following chapters will center on ways in which ideas derived from an international movement—feminism—were received, implemented, modified, or rejected within specific national cultures. As the sociologist Theda Skocpol remarks, such comparisons can demonstrate difference by showing what variable features of each case affect the “working out of putatively general processes.”17 More than the study of a single nation, a comparative perspective can reveal what is truly distinctive to each culture and what cultures have in common. Why the focus on Western Europe? Traditional historical narratives treat the European nations as separate entities and stress their cultural differences and their conflicts. Within a historical perspective that centered on Europe or on Western civilization and took little account of other regions of the world, these conflicts loomed large. But with the end of European dominance and the rise of global politics, Europe was displaced from the center of history and reclassified as only one of many regions of the world. “Europe,” writes the historian of India Dipesh Chakrabarty, has been “provincialized by history itself.”18 From this global perspective, the European “province” is at least as notable for its common civilization as for its internal diversity—a perspective that the recent consolidation and growth of the European Union has powerfully reinforced. Among all the aspects of culture that Western European nations share, patterns of reproduction and family life have always been among the most distinctive. A “European marriage pattern” involving late ages at marriage and small nuclear-family households emerged in the early modern era, and during the period covered here the trend toward reduced birth rates that is known as the “demographic transition” occurred within about thirty years (from 1880 to 1910) in all the Western European nations with the exception of France (where it had begun much earlier, around 1820) and Spain and Ireland (where the process began later, in the 1920s). Throughout Western Europe, these statistical trends were accompanied by highly distinctive political processes, chiefly the building of welfare states, and by social change, especially in the experience of childhood, family life, and the status of women. These patterns diverged from those of Eastern Europe, where the demographic transition and its attendant changes came (on average) somewhat later, and from those of European settler societies such as Australia, the United States, and Canada, which differed from their mother countries in demographic composition, population trends, and political systems.19

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Although the turn toward comparative history is recent, the field of women’s and gender history has already produced some outstanding works in this field. Many of these are anthologies that include articles on individual countries but do not explicitly compare them. Synthetic works of comparison include Richard Evans’s early work on international feminism; Susan Pedersen’s pioneering book on family allowance policies in France and Britain; Alisa Klaus’s account of maternity policies in France and the United States; comparative histories of family policies in Germany and Sweden by Teresa Kulawik, Silke Neunsinger, and Wiebke Kolbe; and Karen Offen’s survey of European feminist movements.20 Among these authors, only Evans and Offen deal with more than two national cultures. Following the example set by these authors, this study will include smaller countries such as Holland, Belgium, and Ireland as well as the better-known “great powers.” Mindful of restrictions imposed by publishers’ page limits, the availability of research materials, and not least the patience of readers, I have no intention of providing a complete and systematic survey of events in all the countries that I have included. Instead, I will use selected examples to illustrate major trends.

M At the turn of the twentieth century, when our story begins, feminist rhetoric was pervaded by the exaltation of motherhood as the woman citizen’s most important right and duty. In our own time, historians’ responses to this tendency, which they have called “maternalism,” have covered a broad spectrum from vehement denunciation to fulsome praise. Some have pictured the maternalists as the misguided allies of militarist politicians whose aim was the production of cannon fodder. Richard Evans and Marie-Louise Janssen-Jurreit linked the history of German feminism to that of nationalism; Claudia Koonz to that of Nazism and the Holocaust.21 Anna Davin included British maternalists among the proponents of “imperial motherhood.”22 Karen Offen delivered a more nuanced judgment on French feminists, whose support of population growth, childbearing, and the maternal role she attributed to a pragmatic concern for survival in a highly natalist atmosphere—a kind of “raison d’état.”23 Other historians have condemned all tendencies to identify womanhood with motherhood, whatever their context, as a betrayal of feminism. “When the child becomes the sacred king of the family,” wrote the influential French theorist Elisabeth Badinter, “society, with the father’s full cooperation, will demand that the mother rid herself of her aspirations as a woman.”24 Recent works have called these negative judgments into question by stressing the many positive achievements of maternalist feminism. As such authors as Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have pointed out, maternalists played an important role in this era’s most notable trend in social policy: the invention and development of the welfare state.25 To be sure, the maternalists are sometimes criticized for their authoritarian attitude toward parents who did not meet their standards of proper child-rearing, and children whose

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behavior did not fulfill middle-class norms.26 However, these historians respect the idealism of women such as Hubertine Auclert, who aspired to transform the warlike “minotaur state” into a “motherly” commonwealth that would “nurture its citizenry, offering security and work to the healthy, assistance to children, old people, the sick and disabled.”27 Though both of these approaches are valid, their explanatory power is reduced by a longer chronological and broader international perspective. For if feminists’ concern for mothers and children was intended to serve militaristic ends, then why was this concern as passionate in neutral states such as Holland, Belgium, and Sweden as in bellicose France and Germany and imperialist Britain? And why was maternalist rhetoric as common among pacifists who opposed war as among nationalists who glorified it? And if maternalist ideology was designed first and foremost to serve a specific political end—the building of the welfare state—then why did the influence of the ideology decline as this end was achieved—in the 1920s and 1930s, when the first reform measures were implemented, and in the post–World War II era, when the growth of the European welfare states reached its highest point? Although it will draw on all the works mentioned earlier, this book will attribute the evolution of feminist attitudes toward motherhood chiefly to more fundamental trends—the demographic transition, declining birthrates and family size, and cultural changes affecting marriage, the status of women, the roles of mothers and fathers, and parent–child relations. Any discussion of the history of motherhood must start by considering a central question: to what extent is maternal behavior shaped by nature or instinct and to what extent by culture? This question is often obfuscated by a fallacious association of maternal instinct with the unconditional devotion that Western culture defines as “mother-love.” Badinter, the author of a book entitled Mother-Love: Myth and Reality, assumed that the very existence of unloving mothers ruled out any instinctual basis for motherhood, which she defined as a purely cultural phenomenon, a “human feeling . . . uncertain, fragile, and imperfect.”28 But in fact, although mothers of human and many other species bond with their offspring, in no species can maternal instinct be identified with altruistic and unconditional love. As the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy showed, mothers throughout nature often choose how many offspring they will rear, and their commitment to their progeny is contingent, dictated first and foremost by the pressure to survive in a given habitat. Among human beings, as among other mammals, “a mother’s emotional commitment to her infant can be contingent on ecologically and historically produced circumstances.”29 The variability of human maternal behavior—from murderous to adoring—is rooted in nature as well as in culture and history. From the Middle Ages until the beginning of the period under discussion, survival needs drove human parental behavior. Most parents assumed that children would contribute labor and earnings to the household, and thus prove to be an economic asset. High birthrates and large families were accepted though not always welcomed, and laws emphasized the duties of

10

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children to support their parents and the rights of parents to their children’s obedience, labor, and service. Recent research has refuted earlier claims— made by such historians as Philippe Ariès and Badinter herself—that parents of the early modern era did not love their children, and has presented us with many appealing examples of parental affection.30 However, parental love was not understood as altruistic or unconditional, but was firmly based on reciprocity. To cite only one influential example: the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes assumed that the mother–child relationship, like all other human ties, was based neither on sentiment nor instinct, but rather on the rational pursuit of self-preservation. “Again, seeing the infant is first in the power of the mother, so as she may either nourish it or expose it, if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the mother,” Hobbes wrote, “and is therefore obliged to obey her, rather than any other, and by consequence, the dominion over it is hers. But if she expose it, and another find and nourish it, the dominion is in him that nourisheth it. For it ought to obey him by whom it is preserved, because preservation of life being the end, for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience to him, in whose power it is to save, or destroy him.”31 Hobbes allotted no natural power over the child to the father (presumably because by himself he could not preserve its life), but derived paternal power from the husband’s “dominion” over the wife—a theory that would be contested by feminists of a later era. The first sign of change in these attitudes emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a wealthy middle class which could dispense with the labor of its children created a new kind of childhood involving education, age-appropriate play, and individualized nurture. This fortunate group redefined the care of its unproductive progeny as a work of selfless devotion, rewarded by emotional satisfaction rather than by economic gain. And, as an industrial economy removed fathers from the home, mothers assumed the task of child-rearing and human qualities that it required, which were declared to be natural to the female sex. Although its children were now not an economic asset but a liability, the middle class continued for a while to produce large families, probably because of male supremacy in the marital relationship and religious strictures against the discussion or practice of contraception. A notable exception to this general pattern was found in France, where people of all classes began limiting birthrates in the early nineteenth century— a practice that is often attributed to the partible inheritance laws introduced by the Napoleonic Code and the process of secularization that the French Revolution had initiated. In the families of the urban and rural working class, children remained important contributors to the family economy until the turn of the twentieth century. Only then did laws requiring school attendance and forbidding child labor remove large numbers of working-class children from the labor market and force their parents to support them for an extended period—a process that was not complete until the 1930s.32 Changing parent–child relationships were probably a major factor in the so-called “demographic transition,” or sharp reduction in birthrates that

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occurred in all Western European countries over a time-span of less than two generations, between 1880 and 1930. To give only a few examples: during these years birthrates in England declined by 52 percent (relative to the 1880 figure); in Germany by 54 percent; in Sweden by 48 percent; in Spain by 28 percent; in France by 25 percent. By 1930, France was no longer exceptional; in fact its birthrate in 1930 exceeded those of Britain and Germany.33 Recent historical research has challenged traditional explanations that identified industrialization, urbanization, or an increase in children’s survival rate as the causes of this trend. Though it first appeared in cities, it spread rapidly to rural areas; and its onset preceded the striking improvements in children’s life expectancy that were brought about in the early twentieth century.34 Cultural rather than economic or medical factors seem to have accounted for what the historian Hugh Cunningham calls “the most important transition to have occurred in the history of childhood.”35 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the spread of middle-class ideals of sheltered, educated, and carefully nurtured childhood to broad segments of the population.36 Children were revalued as priceless emotional assets. The longer duration and higher cost of child-rearing, which motivated the preference for small families, was due chiefly to parents’ own increased sense of obligation. The French suffragist Hubertine Auclert saw this as a sign of advancing civilization. “For the savage, the child is an asset,” she wrote, “but for civilized people, the child is a duty.”37 Other causes of the decline in birthrates were probably the loosening of the hold of religious beliefs and a rise in the status of women in marriage, trends that encouraged a more open discussion and cooperative practice of family planning by married couples.38 And the investment in children was public as well as private, for the state now regarded children as an important resource and child welfare, previously left to parents and private organizations, as its legitimate concern. This newfound official interest in children is often rightly attributed to anxieties about the effect of falling birthrates on military strength, which in this era depended on the number of soldiers that could be put into the field. However, the same public concern for the survival, health, and well-being of children emerged in states on the periphery of the great-power struggle, such as Holland, Norway, and Sweden, as in the major European powers. For a generation whose general tendency to anxiety and pessimism had been exacerbated by the decline in birthrates, the healthy, vigorous, and well-nurtured child promised vitality, regeneration, progress, and the survival of nations and cultures. Campaigns to prevent child-abuse, to improve health services, to provide pure milk, and to furnish recreational opportunities now received the support and encouragement of governments. Starting around 1890, a legal revolution reversed the traditional allotment of rights to parents and duties to children, giving children the right to proper care, health, and education, and parents the duty to provide these benefits. Parenthood was reconstructed as a kind of public function exercised for the benefit and under the scrutiny of the state, which (in the words of

12

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the British socialist H.G. Wells) had become “the Over-Parent, the Outer-Parent.”39 Of course, the new laws were often designed to supervise the poor and working-class households which did not meet middle-class moral and hygienic standards and were regarded as sources of disorder and criminality.40 But they also expressed the era’s idealism. “Mankind,” stated the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which was passed by the League of Nations in 1924, “owes to the Child the best that it has to give.”41 Feminists were not slow to point out that the new “century of the child” was also the era of the mother. Their unreserved enthusiasm for the collapse of the boundaries between family and state has often been criticized by historians for its insensitivity to privacy rights.42 However, nineteenth-century feminists associated the home more with confinement than with liberty. The definition of the home as a “private” sphere, separate from the public realm of the state, had been invented in the eighteenth century chiefly in order to exclude women from participation in politics.43 Throughout the nineteenth century, feminists had contested the doctrine of “separate spheres” by insisting that family and state were organically related. The one-sided dominance of men in public life, they claimed, had led to a catastrophic neglect of the values associated with the family— nurture, compassion, concern for the weak and dependent. And only the entry of women into public life could remedy this injustice. “Surely,” claimed an editorial in the British suffrage paper, Votes for Women, “woman by very reason of her oppositeness to man is needed for the right balance of any enterprise, be it domestic, municipal, national, or imperial.”44 If the state now aspired to be a parent, were not mothers its most qualified agents? If the state sought to limit the power of fathers, were not mothers, who were also victims of patriarchy, its natural allies? And if the state now created services for children, were not mothers best fitted to administer and lead such services? But mothers could do none of these things while they were deprived of rights in both state and family, including even the right to make decisions about their own children! The production and management of the state’s most important resource depended on the enfranchisement of women. Among the most honored of all citizens of the state, wrote the British Fabian socialist Mabel Atkinson, must be “the women who are rendering to it the greatest possible service, that namely, of ushering into the world its future citizens . . . Not least among the duties of that citizenship should be what Plato long ago demanded of his women guardians—that they should bear children for the service of the state.”45 The comparison of this contribution to its male equivalent, military service, became a cliché of feminist rhetoric. The mother, said the British activist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, “risks her life for the perpetuation and progress of the race. It is because women are resolved to be mothers in the highest, and no longer in the ignoblest sense of that term, that they now demand for themselves, and for each other, the fullest opportunity of self development.”46

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However, feminists who extolled motherhood as woman’s distinctive contribution to society—and they were many during the period from 1890 to 1914—had no intention of confining mothers to their conventional roles of dependent wife, domestic drudge, and sexual slave. Indeed, along with Ibsen’s Nora, they aspired to be both mothers and human beings. Their aspirations included not only political rights and legal equality, but economic selfsufficiency that would enable them to live free of male control, freedom to develop their talents, and above all control over their reproductive lives, which almost all feminists, even if they did not support birth-control movements, claimed in some fashion. Maternalist ideology and practice involved no return to traditional roles, but rather utopian visions of a world where motherhood would enhance rather than limit women’s freedom. No longer burdened with “the purely physical motherhood of the underdeveloped woman” of the past, wrote the German philosopher Helene Stöcker, the new woman will “be a fully-developed personality” who will choose motherhood “in the knowledge that she is using her powers in the most rewarding, the most individual way.”47 Whatever its value as a political strategy—and this will be explored in the following chapters—the pursuit of citizenship through motherhood was an intensely problematic undertaking. Only in some utopian world—perhaps the “mother-state” of Auclert’s dreams—was the aspiration to individual autonomy compatible with the duty of bearing children for the state. In the real world, governments regarded mothers chiefly as the instruments of policies designed to increase numbers or to meet other population goals. The notion of motherhood as a social function raised countless questions, most of which concerned the relationship between the social and individual dimensions of reproduction. If motherhood was indeed a service to the state, some asked, then should the state give financial support to mothers and children? In that case, did the state have the right to require parenthood, to regulate the number of children in each family, or to forbid certain people to reproduce? Should reproduction be a direct contract between the state and mothers—an arrangement that would encourage mother-headed families—or should the state encourage marriage? If the state supported children financially, then to whom did they belong? If the economic independence of mothers was the goal, then how should it be achieved—through the remuneration of motherhood as a paid profession, or through the provision of child care and other services that would enable mothers to remain on the labor market? And what should be the role of fathers—should they be distanced from their partners and offspring, or more intimately bound into the household? Still more controversial was the basic assumption that women wished to be mothers and that only the lack of proper support and assistance limited their will to bear children. To be sure, the twentieth century was marked by a trend toward the popularization of motherhood. Marriage rates tended to rise— more rapidly after 1930—and although family size shrank, the number of couples having children increased. Thus motherhood could appear, even to feminists, as the vocation of all or most women. “Women will always be wives

14

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and mothers, primarily and for choice,” stated a writer for the British suffrage newspaper, The Vote, in 1912. “No matter what profession or occupation a woman may take up, no matter how wide her scope may extend, she will always be a wife and a mother first—by nature, by choice, and by inclination.”48 In fact, feminists and others often assumed that the reform of the family to give mothers equal rights, and of the labor market to enable them to combine career and motherhood, would make childbearing attractive to able and emancipated women. However, other conditions undermined this belief in motherhood as women’s central mission. For as conspicuous a trend as the decline in family size was the drastically shortened period occupied by pregnancy, lactation, and the care of small children. A task that in the nineteenth century had consumed much of a woman’s adult life was now compressed into a much shorter period: the number of children born to the average British woman had decreased from six in the mid-nineteenth century to about two a century later, and time spent in pregnancy and lactation fell from fifteen to four years. Along with a greatly increased life expectancy, this trend left women many years of life after a the conclusion of their period of “active motherhood.”49 And were all women motherly? “Nature,” wrote the editorialist for The Vote in 1912, “designed us and fitted us to fulfill these duties, and what Nature makes, man or woman cannot counteract or change.”50 Indeed, many trends of our period reinforced this view of maternal duty, for both smaller families and increased investment in the individual child increased demands on mothers. But with increased pressure came increased anxiety— was maternal “nature,” unenlightened by science, a sufficient guide to proper child-rearing? Or could mothers actually be dangerous to their children? And was the small family, with its narrow environment and intense, jealous relationships, the optimum environment for children’s development? A still more basic issue was raised by the reappraisal of the value of children in emotional rather than economic terms—a cultural change that drove the demographic transition. For if the child was there only to make its parents happy, then childbearing was redefined from a religious obligation or an economic necessity to a choice, to be weighed against other pleasures and desires. Among these were the ambitions of women for economic independence and self-realization. Moreover, the higher value placed on children did not always encourage childbearing. In fact, it could be a deterrent. In 1906, H.G. Wells ironically remarked that one of the reasons that many families were discontent was “the enhanced sense of the child in middle-class life . . . There has come an intensified respect for children, an immense increase in the trouble, attention, and expenditure devoted to them—and a very natural and human accompaniment is the huge fall in the middle-class birthrate. It is felt that to bear and rear children is the most noble and splendid and responsible thing in life, and an increasing number of people modestly avoid it.”51

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Thus the prophecy, so confidently advanced by Ellen Key in 1914, that the twentieth century would see a “renaissance of motherhood” was not fulfilled. Striking improvements in the health and living conditions of mothers and children did not give motherhood a more important place in women’s lives or increase its social prestige. Instead, the significance of motherhood was reduced from a central aspect of identity to one of “women’s two roles.”52 After World War II, a rise in birthrates and a return to domesticity seemed for a while to reverse this trend. But by the mid-1960s, declining birthrates and an influx of mothers into the labor force signaled the redefinition of motherhood, from a life-long status to a role––a flexible and optional activity that could be chosen, combined with other identities, or refused. And the task of negotiating this complex life-plan was allotted to the individual woman. Having ceased to be a destiny, motherhood was redefined as a dilemma.

C O The following chapters will trace the stages of this process during the period from 1890 to 1970. The time period will be divided into four segments: the prewar era (1890–1914); the period of World War I (1914–18); the interwar era (1918–39); and the era of World War II and the postwar era (1945–70). The distribution of space reflects the amount and diversity of feminist activity in each of these eras. We begin our story around 1890, when the declining birthrates that marked the demographic transition brought motherhood and childrearing into the center of public debates that involved not only feminists but other leaders of public opinion. Chapter 1 will center on the historical analysis of the maternal role that was created by feminist scholars and activists around the turn of the century. Basing their research on new findings in the fields of anthropology and ancient history, these authors denied that patriarchal power and female subordination were universal and God-given patterns, and claimed on the contrary that in prehistoric times motherhood, regarded as the highest of human achievements, had justified a powerful position for women in family and state. But they disagreed on the implications of this prehistory for the present and the future. Was the ideal form of the family headed by a mother, or by an egalitarian male–female couple? Chapter 2 will trace the efforts of feminists during the period 1890–1914 to raise the legal status of mothers, both married and unmarried. Here again, the issue of family structure was important: should the family consist of mother and child, or of a parental couple and their children? Chapter 3 will examine the controversies that surrounded the economic status of mothers during the prewar era. Most feminists believed that the major source of women’s disadvantage was their economic dependence within the marriage relationship, and thus demanded some form of economic independence for wives and mothers. But how could economic self-sufficiency

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be reconciled with the burdens of pregnancy and child-rearing? Some recommended that motherhood, itself a useful job, should be financially supported by the state; others that mothers should work for a living, supported by state-funded child-care facilities and other services. Both of these solutions removed motherhood from the private sphere and reclassified it as a “social function.” Chapter 4 looks at the implications of this new definition of motherhood for the reproductive rights of women—if childbearing was a public duty, should mothers have the freedom to choose or refuse it? Did the state have the right to regulate reproduction, or to prohibit it in some cases? Discussions of birth control in the prewar era also concerned the allocation of power within the family: should reproductive decisions be made chiefly by mothers themselves, or by the married couple? In chapter 5, we will look at the trauma of World War I as it affected feminist movements and their approaches to the private and public implications of reproduction. The war’s effects were paradoxical. Catastrophic loss of life raised the value placed on the individual child and thus resulted in important new measures designed to safeguard the lives and the health of mothers and children. The employment of mothers in traditionally male-identified occupation permitted a new independence. But the disruptions of wartime produced a powerful longing for the restoration of the male-headed household, the nuclear family, and the return of mothers to the home. Chapter 6 deals with the new domestic ideal, centering on companionate marriage and full-time motherhood, that developed during the interwar era. During these years, feminists went against the trend of public opinion by proposing an alternative version of the maternal role that combined commitments to child care and to a job or career—a position that was particularly controversial when the depression of the 1930s prompted new attacks on married women’s employment. Chapter 7 covers the birth-control movements of the interwar era, and the new ideal of marital bliss and parent–child intimacy that birth-control activists created. A new emphasis on the private joys of marriage and parenthood undermined the maternalist view of reproduction as a form of public service. Faced with new population policies, feminists debated the role of the state in encouraging, controlling, or prohibiting motherhood. Chapter 8 looks at the implications of smaller family size for the mother–child relationship. Was the intense commitment of mothers to their children’s well-being beneficial or harmful to the individual child? Psychologists, endowed with a new authority, took the lead in criticizing traditional maternal practices, and feminists used these new theories to justify a new approach to parenthood that permitted greater freedom to both mothers and children. Because of a decline in the influence of feminism and the occupation of many European countries by the Axis powers, the period of World War II saw little feminist activity. Chapter 9 will discuss the results of the war for the postwar era, when an official ideology that stressed domesticity and full-time motherhood was soon discredited by an influx of mothers into

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the labor market, the popularization of birth control and small families, and a new emphasis on individual happiness that challenged the traditional primacy of motherhood in the lives of women. And the conclusion will point out that the maternal dilemma still persists as a problem for women, men, and nations in the present.

Bust of Nelly Roussel and her daughter, Mireille Godet, by Roussel’s husband, Henri Godet, 1911. The original is in the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris.

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“A       W     ” : M        P           H     T M-A Ibsen’s heroine, Nora, aspired to emerge from her sheltered “doll’s house” and to become an autonomous human being as well as a wife and mother. But was such a thing possible? Scholars looked to the past for answers to this question—often with dismal results, for history and prehistory seemed to show that woman’s subordination was universal throughout time and space. “Aeons of wrong, ere history was born,” wrote the British reformer Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, With added ages passed in slight and scorn, Maintained the chains of primal womanhood, And clogged in turn man’s power of greater good.1

Other feminist authors often painted the same depressing picture. In the opinion of John Stuart Mill, in “the very earliest twilight of human society . . . every woman . . . was found in a state of bondage to some man.2 And motherhood had cemented woman’s domestic servitude, for male control of reproduction was widely assumed to be a universal feature of human social organization. The French historian Ernest Legouvé remarked that woman had often been deprived of her “honor as creator of life,” the creative role in reproduction having been ascribed to fathers.3 Evolutionary theory, which purported to discover the origins of human society among present-day “primitive” peoples, yielded still more discouraging results. The human male in the “savage state,” wrote the great Darwin, kept his female “in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal.”4 Indeed, lamented Odette Laguerre in the French feminist paper La Fronde, the most convenient argument against gender equality was that “during all of history and among all peoples the man was the natural chief of the familial group. We must therefore believe that he is made to command and the woman to obey.”5 The greatest obstacle to any change in the economic, political, or familial position of the mother was the belief that her subordination in the patriarchal family was dictated by nature and therefore necessary and inevitable. In the

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latter decades of the nineteenth century, however, new interpretations of human prehistory and history challenged this widely accepted idea. Patriarchy was not a universal aspect of human civilization, declared some scholars, and mothers had not always lived a life of abject dependence—they had once been independent, self-supporting, and even powerful. Feminists found this an exhilarating message, for if the father-headed family was not a God-given and universal order, but merely a political arrangement that had risen in response to historical circumstances, then it might also come to an end. Far from an arcane and cloistered pursuit, the new research was widely discussed in and outside academic circles, and often provided the indispensable theoretical basis for political campaigns for the rights of mothers. But like any body of theoretical knowledge, the history of the family had complex and ambiguous implications. If patriarchy was an evanescent family structure, then what should replace it: a family headed by a mother, or an egalitarian male–female couple? And what would be the consequences of patriarchy’s demise? This question aroused enough anxiety to set off an anti-feminist backlash. This chapter will first look at the intellectual context in which this new knowledge was produced and then at these feminist and anti-feminist interpretations. The debate on the origins of the human family went back at least to the seventeenth century, when the exploration of the New World brought Europeans into contact with cultures that seemed to them to represent an earlier stage in human development, perhaps even a “state of nature.”6 For example, the seventeenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes doubted that patriarchy was the primordial form of the family, for “in the condition of mere nature, where there are no matrimonial laws, it cannot be known who is the father, unless it be declared by the mother, and therefore the right of dominion over the child . . . is consequently hers.”7 And the Enlightenment philosopher Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel attributed the subordination of women to male aggression rather than to any law of nature.8 Some feminists of the early nineteenth century insisted that the primacy of the mother–child bond, already ordained by nature, must also be recognized by law. In the 1830s, French Utopian Socialist women proclaimed that “woman is the family, and the child should bear her name!”9 But with the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848, a massive counterrevolution arose to discredit such dangerous notions. This conservative movement enlisted some of the era’s most prominent scholars in the defense of patriarchy and other traditional forms of authority.10 In 1861, the British jurist Sir Henry Maine declared on the basis of a massive study of Western legal traditions that the human family had always and everywhere been ruled by fathers. The Roman legal tradition, which Maine considered the origin of all Western law, divided society into the private realm of the household, ruled by the father’s authority (or patria potestas) and the public realm of the state, in which his role as head of household entitled the father to citizenship. Maine did not consider this form of the family immune to historical change—on the contrary, he noted that the marriage relation in his own time had evolved “from status to contract.”11

M        P           H    

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It can be counted among the ironies of history that the first important challenge to Maine’s theory emerged from the same mid-century conservative movement. The Swiss legal historian Johann Jakob Bachofen ascribed all progressive movements, feminism presumably included, to the impious disrespect for tradition that pervaded contemporary society. Born in 1815 into the mercantile patriciate of Basel, Bachofen studied law in several European countries. Among his teachers was German legal scholar Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a romantic theorist who presented law as the expression of the history and spirit of a people. Much of Bachofen’s research was conducted in the British Museum, home of the Elgin Marbles that showed the mythical struggle of the Amazons, as well as in many Italian cities. When the democratic movements of the 1840s in Basel threatened the position of his class, Bachofen withdrew from his public offices into the comfortable life of a wealthy independent scholar.12 In search of the cultural roots from which his own generation had been (in his opinion, disastrously) torn, he returned to the classical world, and particularly to the archaic period of Greek civilization, which preceded the classical civilization of Athens by a century or more. When Bachofen began his work in the 1850s the modern fields of archeology, anthropology, and ethnology hardly existed. Troy, Mycenae, Knossos, and the cities of Mesopotamia were as yet un-excavated, and a pre-Darwinian conception of human prehistory (which according to the Bible dated back only to 4004 BC) placed ancient Greek civilization among the earliest of human cultures. By comparison to what later became available, Bachofen’s source material was extremely limited, and this was one of the reasons that later generations of scholars rejected his methods as outdated and unscientific. So have today’s feminist scholars, who are particularly critical of his use of mythology as a historical source—an approach that is discredited today.13 But despite the limitations of his chronological and scholarly scope, Bachofen was in some ways ahead of his time. A product of nineteenth-century romanticism, he also anticipated the much later insights of psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Certainly he regarded myth as a historical source, but not for a factual history of events—in fact, he regarded the positivist methods that were fashionable in his day with the utmost contempt. Rather, he used mythology as a guide to the deep structures of consciousness which, much more than political or economic developments, he considered to be the true “lever of history.” Such meanings, encoded in symbolic language, could not be grasped by the pedantic labors of philologists and historians but only by intuition: “the shorter path of the imagination, traversed with the force and swiftness of electricity.”14 Bachofen’s interpretive method in fact resembled present-day deconstruction; it attended not only to the content of classical texts but even more to the gaps, silences, and inconsistencies that had resulted from an editing process by which (or so he believed) a later generation had expunged the traces of an earlier narrative. Bachofen’s method would later commend his work to feminist scholars who found his picture of a historical record riddled with omissions, distortions, and silences all too credible. But they were even more fascinated by his

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results, published in 1861 in an erudite and hefty volume which contained many quotations in the original Greek.15 The earliest forms of human society, he announced confidently, had been based on what he called mother-right (Mutterrecht), a legal system that was based on matrilineal inheritance and a female-headed family structure. An elaborate evolutionary narrative explained this system’s rise and fall. In its earliest stage of development, Bachofen speculated that the human race had lived, not as had previously been thought in patriarchal families, but in a state of sexual promiscuity under the auspices of the goddess of lust, Aphrodite. As the physical fact of paternity was not understood, households were headed by women, and children legally belonged to their mothers alone. Bachofen depicted the mother–child bond poetically as the first social tie and thus as the basis of all moral sensibility: in that dark time, he reflected, woman must have been “the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all devotion, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead.”16 Bachofen pictured this first era as one of male dominance, in which men sexually exploited women. But he speculated that under these Hobbesian conditions women found their lives altogether too nasty, brutish, and short, and used their moral ascendancy to force men into marital and familial ties, thus initiating a second period in which women dominated politics as well as the family. This was a period of genuine “matriarchy,” in which a matronly elite presided over a settled agricultural culture marked by reverence for the earth, nature, and female deities: “an air of tender humanity,” Bachofen wrote wistfully, “permeates the culture of the matriarchal world.”17 However, in a thinly disguised reference to his own revolutionary period, Bachofen recounted how this peaceful culture was shaken by a revolt of its male subjects. Amazon warriors, who took up arms to defend female rule, were soon converted to the new cult of the fertility god Dionysus—a divine rock star who drove his female votaries into wild ecstasies of drunkenness and lust. “How hard it is at all times,” Bachofen primly reflected, “for women to observe moderation.”18 The forces of patriarchy were victorious and ushered in a higher stage of civilization, which replaced the ancient cult of mothergoddesses with the worship of gods—particularly of Apollo, who symbolized the “heavenly light” of rationality. Rational too was the dominance of fatherhood, defined as a legal relationship, over the fleshly and material mother–child bond. “The triumph of patriarchy,” Bachofen concluded, “brings with it the liberation of the spirit from the manifestations of nature, a sublimation of human existence over the laws of material life.”19 Bachofen’s text can be and (as we shall see) often was read as a classically Victorian narrative of progress that justified both patriarchy and conventional notions of male and female nature. “Bachofen’s matriarch,” complains the anthropologist Joan Bamberger, is “a far cry from today’s liberated woman.”20 But like the classical texts on which his work was based, Bachofen’s own book contained a subtext that subverted its ostensible message. In fact, Bachofen lent scholarly authority to the highly disruptive idea that the dominance of man over woman was not a God-given order but a

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political arrangement, contingent like others upon time, place, and culture. And this system of domination could never be entirely secure, for a female insurgency always churned beneath the surface of patriarchal society. Moreover, Bachofen’s account of the fall of the matriarchy was tragic rather than triumphal: a conservative dislike for modern times spoke through his poetic elegy for the pious, peaceful, and rural matriarchal world. And Bachofen was in fact no proper Victorian, for as a romantic he reveled in all that was grotesque, marvelous, and fantastic, and portrayed women in the unconventional roles of bloodthirsty Amazons, wise rulers, Dionysian revelers, even poetic Lesbians. Feminists would later find much inspiration here. Bachofen’s weighty tome was decisively rejected by the classical scholars of his era, but before his death in 1882 he lived to see some of his basic ideas confirmed by the new field of anthropology. In the 1860s, as the historian Thomas Trautmann has observed, a “time revolution” that replaced the Biblical chronology with an immensely lengthened estimate of the age of the human race undermined the conception of the classical world as the earliest of human societies. Anthropologists now shifted their attention from the Greek and Latin classics to existing non-Western societies, and took those that they designated as “primitive” as models of the early stages of human evolution. While invalidating Bachofen’s temporal perspective, this change buttressed his central conclusion. Though they observed no examples of true “matriarchy,” anthropologists often encountered female-headed family structures and gender roles that differed from those of Europeans. They concluded that female dominance and matrilineal family structure were characteristic of the low stages of human development, and patriliny and male supremacy of the higher stages. Dismissing Bachofen’s improbable account of a war between men and women, the anthropologists struggled to come up with an explanation for this transition. The American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan attributed it to the accumulation of property in the hands of men; and the Scottish John Ferguson McLennan to the custom of bride capture, which by removing women from their own kinship groups and isolating them amid their captors’ families made them subject to patriarchal control.21 Whatever its cause, this transition was widely accepted in the 1880s as a stage in a universal evolutionary process which had culminated in the apogee of human history—the emergence of modern Western civilization. But in fact, the extension of the temporal perspective ultimately undermined this confident narrative of progress. For who could fathom the depths of prehistory, in which so many cultures had vanished without a trace? The German-born socialists Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were enthusiastic readers of anthropology, particularly of the works of Morgan. In his treatise, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels started from Morgan’s theory that the age of primitive matriarchy had been marked by gender equality and communal ownership of property, and that patriarchy had resulted from men’s forcible assertion of private ownership in land and slaves. Engels insisted that this “world-historical defeat of the female sex”

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had opened a dark age of exploitation and inequality.22 Engels and his disciples, including the German August Bebel and the French Paul Lafargue, used this version of prehistory to justify their polemic against what they termed “bourgeois marriage.” Arguing that the first people had lived in promiscuity, the socialist theorists contended that marriage was no God-given order but merely a self-serving arrangement whereby male property-owners ensured orderly inheritance by establishing control over women and children. Certainly, the socialists did not advocate a return to mother-right, which they regarded as a primitive stage in social development. Nonetheless, Engels’ theory inspired several generations of feminists, both socialist and liberal, to affirm that patriarchy was not a permanent and universal, but on the contrary an evanescent and culture-bound phenomenon which would give way to more egalitarian forms of marriage and the family.23 As the war of ideas continued, conservative scholars mobilized anthropological and historical evidence to defend traditional values—including marriage, religious sexual morality, and male supremacy—against this socialist menace. A potent weapon in the conservative arsenal was Darwinian theory, which in the later years of the nineteenth century was applied to the analysis of human culture. The widely read British sociologist Herbert Spencer denied that the mother-headed family could have ensured the survival of its offspring. He argued that only fathers could adequately protect women and children, and therefore that patriarchal monogamy was “the natural form of sexual relation for the human race.”24 Another prominent authority was the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, who in a well-received book on the origins of the family published in 1891 (and later in many revised editions) asserted that the innate tendencies of all male animals, especially of those of the human species, would always have dictated some form of marriage: “from what we know of the jealousy or all male quadrupeds, promiscuous intercourse is utterly unlikely to prevail in a state of nature.”25 At the turn of the twentieth century, progressive anthropologists retreated from some of their more controversial claims but not from their feminist and socialist sympathies. They dismissed the possibility of true matriarchy—that is, the political dominance of women—but insisted that the women of the past had often played a powerful and productive role in their households and communities. In a book that was widely cited in both Europe and North America, the American anthropologist Otis Tufton Mason asserted in 1899 that prehistoric women had been the chief creators of human culture. Mason argued against his Darwinist opponents that not only competition, but also cooperation had furthered the survival of human groups. Maternal tenderness was the first civilized value. “All the social fabrics of the world are built around women,” Mason concluded. “The first stable society was a mother and her helpless infant, and this little group is the grandest phenomenon in society still.”26 By 1900, ethnological data was so profuse as to undermine any attempt to identify fixed and universal patterns, whether in sexuality, family life, gender roles, or any other aspect of culture. “All history proves,” declared the British

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novelist Mona Caird, “that there is, perhaps, no set of ideas so fundamental that human beings have not somewhere, at some period of the world, lived in direct contradiction to them.”27 The resulting turn to cultural relativism would shape the intellectual life of the twentieth century. Because many thinkers at the turn of the century were devastated by this erosion of cherished beliefs, customs, and ideas, the characterization of this period as an “age of anxiety” has become a cliche of history textbooks. But, like other dominant paradigms of intellectual history, this characterization of the fin de siècle is centered on male literary, artistic, and academic elites. Feminists did not share this foreboding—rather, many rejoiced that they lived in an era when even such a formidable institution as patriarchy was open to question. As a character in a pageant by the British suffragette Cicely Hamilton declared in 1910, “ ’tis good to be alive when morning dawns.”28 “Queen of the Family”: The Mother as Matriarch Like every rich and complex work, Das Mutterrecht could support a wide variety of interpretations. One of these was offered by Bachofen’s account of the age of classical matriarchy, when women dominated both state and family. This model found minority support among feminists of every country but was most fully elaborated in France and Britain. However, French and British theorists pursued different political agendas: the French emphasized social solidarity and the creation of a motherly state, the British the empowerment of the individual woman through the winning of suffrage and other political rights. In France, many socialist theorists of both genders aspired to return to what Engels had portrayed as the original family structure—a unit consisting of a mother and her dependent children. Aline Valette, one of the earliest female socialist authors, started from a critique of Marxism. Marx had emphasized productive labor, the paid work performed chiefly by men, but had made no mention of the reproductive labor that was performed by women. Had the majority of women whose labor consisted wholly or chiefly of reproduction (housework and child care) no role to play in the class struggle? Valette argued on the contrary that both workers and mothers were victims of the same injustice: just as men had been cheated of the true value of their productive labor by capitalism, women’s “product,” children, had been appropriated by men. Alongside the class struggle she placed the struggle against sex oppression, and insisted that woman “the producer of humanity” must be restored to the “role that she deserves.” 29 Valette called on the state to recognize and support a family structure in which mother and children lived independently of male control.30 An advocate of gender equality in politics, education and the workforce, Valette also exalted gender difference and hoped that women, when fully enfranchised, would infuse the nurturing spirit of motherhood into public life.31 French feminists of the middle and upper classes, who had far more time for research and discussion than their working-class contemporaries, showed

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an even greater enthusiasm for the history of the family. The central role in publicizing and developing the new knowledge was undoubtedly played by the eccentric and single-minded Céline Renooz. Born in 1840 to a wealthy family in Liège, Renooz had only the usual conventual education and was married in 1859. The marriage, which produced four children (all of whom died early of tuberculosis), was miserable, and Renooz eventually set up an independent though economically precarious household in Paris. Meanwhile she pursued her intellectual interests, which centered on the fashionable subject of the origin and evolution of life. In 1878, while reading at the Bibliothèque Nationale, she developed the novel theory that the true evolutionary origin of the human race was in plant life, the head corresponding to the root ball, and the body to the trunk and branches of trees (in fact, she showed that a human being resembled a tree turned upside down).32 Like other theorists of her era, Renooz argued against Darwin that true nature of human beings was not competitive, like that of many animals, but cooperative, like that of the plants which (or so she seemed to believe) lived in peace and harmony.33 We should hardly be surprised that Renooz’ theories were rejected and ridiculed by the male scientific establishment. Her intense, even paranoid anger at her critics seems to have triggered another theoretical insight, this time into the pervasively masculine bias of all existing knowledge. Although by no means the first or only critic of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “our androcentric world,” Renooz stood out among her contemporaries as the advocate of an alternative feminist science designed to liberate woman “from all the infamous historical lies and to rehabilitate her glory.”34 In a series of voluminous works, Renooz laid out a history and psychology of gender relations. She drew on many of the era’s popular theories, particularly those of the British biologists Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson, who argued from Darwin’s theory of sexual selection that the reproductive biology of males, human and animal, was “katabolic”—wasteful of energy— whereas that of females exhibited the “anabolic” tendency to conserve and create energy. The psychological consequences were impatience and instability in males, patience, stability, and “integrating intelligence” in females.35 Considering that these traits entitled women to the supreme role in religion, culture, and society, Renooz affirmed Bachofen’s glowing picture of a long prehistory when woman was “queen of the family” and “in charge of everything that requires patience, prudence, logic, perseverance.”36 She concluded that the only advantage possessed by the inferior sex, physical strength, had enabled men to overcome this peaceable and glorious regime and to establish an order that still bore all the marks of the destructive male psyche. Following Bachofen, Renooz charged that males had consolidated their hegemony by rewriting history to obliterate all traces of women’s former greatness. “In order to justify his power,” she declared, “he (man) claimed that it had always existed.”37 In 1897 she founded the Neosophical Society (Société Néosophique), which was dedicated to the recovery of women’s history, and created a complete two-semester course in the subject. Some of the

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topics included the “golden age” of matriarchy, women in ancient societies and in world religions, witchcraft and the persecution of witches, the renaissance debate on women’s status (querelle des femmes), and women in the modern world. A prospectus for this course, which she taught in her home in the Rue du Bac, stated that only serious students were welcome and that the tuition was twelve francs per semester.38 The development of this new science and its application to various contemporary issues became the central aim of a new group founded in 1898, the French Group for Feminist Studies (Groupe Français d’ Études Féministes, or GFEF). Its leader was Jeanne Oddo-Deflou, a self-educated intellectual who, when her family had refused to allow her a classical education, had taught herself Latin and Greek. The group created a scholarly field devoted to the study of women—in fact, what we know now as “women’s studies.” Among its first decisions was to commission a translation into French of the substantial introductory chapter of Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht—certainly one of the first translations of any portion of the work—which appeared in 1903. They translated only this portion, explained Oddo-Deflou in her preface, because the entire work would have been too long and expensive to be accessible to most women. Oddo-Deflou did not affirm all of Bachofen’s ideas: she took issue with his assertion that the victory of patriarchy had brought the reign of enlightenment, and objected that on the contrary it had opened a new era of oppression, marked by “atrocities from which the world has suffered too long, the most cruel wars, the most violent hatred.”39 The translation, which was sent to women’s organizations in several other European countries, caused a considerable stir in the French feminist community.40 A series of front-page articles in the most widely read feminist newspaper, La Fronde, edited by the prominent leader Marguerite Durand, indicated that the new science of women’s history was of interest to a wide feminist public.41 Many feminists used historical arguments to support legal reforms that would ensure the right of mothers to equal rights with fathers, or even to supreme authority, or puissance maternelle. The suffrage leader Hubertine Auclert defended the mother’s right to give the child her name. She further suggested that a humane republic that cared for all its citizens might more appropriately be called matrie (motherland) than patrie (fatherland).42 And she envisaged a nurturing society that was not unlike Bachofen’s organic and peaceable matriarchy. “When she becomes a citizen,” Auclert argued, “the French woman will fulfill her duties even better, because her role as an educator will create unity within the human collective, and her maternal solicitude will embrace the entire nation.”43 The socialist Nelly Roussel cited the research of the GFEF to argue that “at a certain time, woman enjoyed much more extensive rights that she has today.”44 The new history inspired high-flown claims. The scholarly evidence accumulated over the past forty years, wrote Jeanne Oddo-Deflou, “establishes that periods where women were predominant really existed, and that they were very different from our own. . . . According to certain authors, the

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Matriarchate was a veritable golden age. The fortunate lives of a people who practiced pure and tender virtues were marked by peace, unity, and fertility. In physical health and spiritual serenity, they enjoyed the favor of the benign regime to which they had voluntarily submitted.” When free of the political and intellectual domination of the more brutal sex, women would not simply imitate their oppressors. “Men will never persuade them,” she predicted confidently, “that they must throw off their sex in order to end their servitude. They will hate men’s blind egotism too much to imitate it.”45 But not all French feminists shared this nostalgic longing for the lost golden age—indeed, commented the journalist J. Hellé, the arguments between the “Bachofistes” and the “anti-Bachofistes” often became heated.46 Renooz, whose own overbearing personality refuted her theories about innate female humility and selflessness, arrogantly complained that many prominent feminists did not greet her messianic message with the proper reverence.47 Among them was the brilliant and acerbic Madeleine Pelletier, one of very few who developed a principled critique of the ideology of gender difference. To Pelletier, the Bachofen fad was all too typical of French feminists—a group led by women who were afraid to endanger their privileged position as the wives of rich men by advocating radical causes such as woman suffrage. What safer fantasy for such respectable ladies than the return of the matriarchy, when women had sought no higher honor than motherhood? Of course, this caustic critique hardly took into account the very substantial interest in matriarchal theories among socialist women, most of whom were hardly leisured socialites. Drawing on a wide knowledge of archeology and anthropology, Pelletier bitterly denounced the fashionable infatuation with mother-goddesses—such cults, she pointed out, had flourished in societies in which actual women had a very low status. “Future societies may build temples to motherhood,” she concluded, “but only to lock women into them.”48 In Britain, as Carol Dyhouse has observed, the history of the family was also a prominent theme of discussion in such avant-garde circles as the Men’s and Women’s Club, a mixed society of free-thinkers founded in the 1880s, and the Fabian Women’s Group. Socialist writers such as Karl Pearson and Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling publicized Engels’ picture of a matriarchal prehistory.49 Mona Caird, a member of the Men’s and Women’s Club who was widely read in anthropology, took the discussion in a militantly feminist direction. She speculated that the mother-headed family had developed when “agriculture was women’s industry, while men went out hunting.” Accepting Bachofen’s idealized view of the matriarchy as a “golden age” of peace and harmony, she rejoiced that “at the very outset . . . something other than mere force was the director of the earliest human relations.”50 Caird claimed that the mother–child bond was the only familial bond that had been and still was recognized by all human cultures and that paternity was a much more recent concept. “For many centuries after the father had become head of the family . . . he rested his claims upon the children solely on the fact that the mother was his property, not upon the fact of his fatherhood.”51 In an era

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when such forms of patriarchal power were on their way to extinction, Caird demanded for the mother “a moral right to final authority over her children.”52 But Olive Schreiner, another member of the Men’s and Women’s Club who had grown up in South Africa, responded to these claims with skepticism, for her observation of male supremacy among African peoples had convinced her of the universality of the patriarchal family.53 Another British milieu in which matriarchal theory flourished was the Theosophy movement, which gained many female devotees during this era. Theosophy, pioneered in Britain by the colorful Russian immigrant Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and her disciple Annie Besant, promoted the cults of ancient and modern mother-goddesses as an empowering alternative to patriarchal Christianity. Inspired by an idealized version of Hinduism and Buddhism, theosophists exalted the spiritual over the material aspects of experience, and some believed that the bygone era of matriarchy had been guided by an ethic that rated chastity and spiritual communion above carnal sexuality.54 The suffragist leader Frances Swiney, president of the Cheltenham branch of the National League of Woman Suffrage Societies, became a Theosophist in 1900 and in 1907 founded a society, which she called “The League of Isis.”55 For Swiney, who was a reader of Bachofen as well as more recent anthropological and ethnographic literature, the Egyptian goddess embodied the glories of a blessed age when the conditions surrounding marriage, sexuality, and childbirth had been infinitely superior to those of the modern era. Swiney’s best-known treatise, The Bar of Isis, invoked the authority of the great goddess, who had allegedly forbidden sexual intercourse during pregnancy and lactation, to justify an ethical code that placed the welfare of mothers and children above the sexual needs of men. In ancient Egypt, which Swiney imagined as a matriarchal culture, the mother had chosen “her mate, the time of childbearing, and regulated under the strictest tabu the number of her offspring.”56 The victory of patriarchy had brought with it the primacy of the “abnormal and fostered sexuality of the human male,” which had undermined the health of women, children, and the population as a whole by making women’s bodies into the “refuse-heap of male sexual pathology.”57 Swiney, whose works were widely reviewed and translated, refuted the popular argument that women who gained the rights of citizenship would be incompetent or unwilling mothers. “Poor biology, what illogical hypotheses are put forth in they name!” she exclaimed. Prehistoric mothers, she insisted, had been the best of citizens, whose wise rule had enabled the first people to “progress from the sub-human to the human.”58 Unlike their French contemporaries, who associated the matriarchal age chiefly with maternal nurture and social solidarity, British suffragists emphasized the political and economic power that ancient women supposedly had exercised. Another theorist who was widely cited in British suffrage periodicals was the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In an address entitled “The Primal Power,” published in the suffrage journal The Suffragette, Gilman painted a vivid picture of the free, skilled, and benevolent woman of the

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prehistoric age. “In those first, rude beginnings of humanity, it was the woman who invented industry, the woman who began needle-work, basketwork, work in clay, the cradle of all industry as well as the cradle of the child was in the hands of the woman. . . . In those days, she was a head.” Only “the overturning of the order of nature” had precipitated “an artificial order in which, for the first time, the male ruled over the female.” Woman suffrage, Gilman explained, would restore women’s control over motherhood: “in honor of her motherhood, she must be mistress of herself . . . By what law, by what right have the mothers of the world been made the servants?” The mothers of the future would “choose the best for the father of our children,” and create “a nobler motherhood than the world has ever seen.”59 Images of the matriarchal age raised the dread specter of female hegemony. A popular British novel of the 1880s, H. Rider Haggard’s She, featured an ancient goddess, known by the formidable title of “She-who-must-beobeyed,” who threatened to come to England and depose that rival matriarch, Queen Victoria—a horror that was averted by the valiant exploits of the novel’s two British heroes.60 Another, Walter Besant’s The Revolt of Man, portrayed a matriarchal dystopia of the future in which women subjected men to a reactionary and oppressively religious regime.61 The violent suffrage militancy that broke out in Britain between 1909 and 1914—a terrorist strategy that called for damage to property, though not to people—could not but exacerbate these fears. In his novel, Ann Veronica, published in 1909, the novelist H.G. Wells attacked the suffrage movement through the hysterical figure of Miss Miniver, who incited orgies of vandalism with epic tales of warrior queens and Amazons. “The primitive government was the Matriarchate. The Matriarchate!” she told her stone-throwing, window-smashing cohorts. “The Lords of Creation just ran about and did what they were told.”62 The debate on the origins of patriarchy gave hope to women even in Spain, where no organized feminist movement as yet existed. The Countess Emilia Pardo Bazan was a Spanish novelist, poet, and feminist who had translated the works of John Stuart Mill and August Bebel. Many scholars, she wrote in 1892, now considered that the subordination of women was not ordained by God, but was only a “sad episode in the history of progress, in which each step forward is taken in blood and tears. . . . In the dark caves of prehistory, the bestial force of the male subjugated his female companion . . . And the old tales and fables of the Amazons, Valkyries, and warrior women . . . indicate that women did not always submit, and were sometimes ready to repay force with force.” She hoped that this liberating knowledge would discredit the “somber and fearful pessimism” that excluded one half of the human race from the progress made by the other half and denied to women “every kind of dignity and happiness, except as the adjunct of her husband and children.”63 “ Thus love began”: The Mother as Parent But many feminists found the mythical mother-age unappealing—their ideal was not female supremacy, but gender equality. And they, too, cited

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Bachofen, who (along with many later researchers) had clearly designated the period of mother-right as a primitive stage in human development. In most countries, the majority of feminists insisted that the evolution of the family should not lead backward toward matriarchy, but lead forward toward equality. The earliest example of a full-fledged debate on this subject occurred in the Netherlands, where (as we shall see in chapter 2) the rights of unmarried mothers and their children became a heated topic of discussion in the 1890s. Nellie van Kol, who had spent much of her life in the East Indies and was thus familiar with the diversity of marriage customs among human cultures, wrote in a review of Bebel’s Woman in Past, Present, and Future that the time of mother-right had been “a good time.” She held up the autonomy of the prehistoric mother as an inspiration to her modern counterpart: “independence must be the watchword of women, for herself and for her child.”64 But Wilhelmine Drucker, leader of the major Dutch feminist organization, the Free Women’s Association (Vrije Vrouwenveriniging) and editor of the periodical Evolutie, decisively rejected all such fantasies. A review of Frances Swiney’s The Awakening of Woman, probably by Drucker herself, poured the icy water of common sense on Swiney’s overheated rhetoric. “The basis of Swiney’s theory is motherhood,” stated the reviewer, “and the fact that women have always been mothers, and have not gained the slightest advantage from this seems to make no difference to her at all.”65 Though she believed that all human societies had passed through a matriarchal stage, Drucker idealized neither the era itself nor its female rulers. Deploring the misuse of history by certain “exalted, womanly feminists,” Drucker objected that by nature mothers were no better parents than fathers—after all, in many places and times (including, of course, the present) some mothers killed their children. For both sexes, good parenting was an art, not an innate instinct.66 Moreover all systems—whether headed by women or by men—that placed children under the absolute power of their parents were for Drucker the expressions of a “raw egotism” that must be superseded by a more enlightened approach to child-rearing. “The law . . . must place the welfare of the child, and of the new generation, above that of fathers and mothers, and must break with the old conception of parental rights and replace it with new standards of parental duty, which oblige parents to provide for the needs of their children and grant powers of guardianship only to those who are thought competent to exercise them.”67 Drucker allotted parental responsibility equally to both mothers and fathers, who she believed should act as parents whether or not they were married to the mothers of their children. “An individual without a father,” she asserted, is “not imaginable . . . and where nature, wild as it is . . . has neglected to identify the parental couple, it is the holiest task of the human race, which . . . has the responsibility and the will to make laws, to come to its rescue and to fill this gap.”68 Parents performed their duty under the vigilant eye of the state: “the state should act as the watchful guardian of youth and not only . . . of children born outside wedlock, but of all children.”69 In Belgium, Louis Frank, a lawyer who was also a leader of the national feminist organization, likewise used historical arguments to advocate gender

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equality. “Marital authority is not a natural institution that originated in a process of free consent and mature reflection,” he declared, “it is the product of a brutal reaction. It resulted from events that are unknown to our historical traditions.”70 Frank hoped that the abolition of this atavistic regime would result in a more egalitarian form of marriage, which might also serve that important policy objective, population growth. In the Anglo-Saxon nations, where women had made greater progress toward emancipation than on the European continent, family life flourished. “It is there,” Frank claimed, “that marriages are most numerous, that men marry at the earliest age, and that families produce the greatest number of children.”71 A more radical vision of gender equality and cooperation was developed by the influential author and lecturer Ellen Key. Key was born in Sundsholm, Sweden in 1849 and began her career in that country, but by the 1890s had become an international figure who found a far more sympathetic reception in the English- and German-speaking countries than at home. Key asserted that most prehistoric women had not been matriarchs, but had been “on a par with domestic animals, well or ill treated as they.”72 But the prehistoric mother had nonetheless been an agent of progress. Like Bachofen, Key defined “the first ‘social order,’ ” as “the mother with her offspring. . . . The child became more and more the centre of her thoughts and her deeds.”73 Despite its disadvantages for women, Key believed that the evolution of the patriarchal family had conferred many benefits, for it had created fatherhood: “a great forward step in his [the father’s] ethical development, in that it awoke in him a desire to protect those dependent on him.”74 And out of this protective impulse, the bond between the parental couple had arisen. “Thus love began.”75 Heterosexual love was the basis of family life. Because existing marriage customs did not always recognize the importance of love, Key demanded their replacement by a new system that would give full freedom of sexual choice to both sexes. Though she defended the right of single mothers to bear and raise children, Key’s ideal was always the two-parent household, with or without legal marriage. In the future, she confidently predicted, “we will call a child who has received its life from healthy and loving parents and is raised with wisdom and love ‘legitimate,’ even if its parents live in a totally free union.”76 Key influenced the ideology and practice of an organization known as the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz or BfM) which, although based in Germany, soon acquired an international visibility. The group originated in two separate initiatives: one by a group of prominent feminist intellectuals that included Helene Stöcker, and the other by a former schoolteacher who called herself Ruth Bré (her real name was Elizabeth Bonness). Stöcker, born in 1869 in Elberfeld, was among the first women to receive the doctoral degree from a German university. She combined a career in secondary-school teaching with membership in scientific and sexual reform associations, and traced her awareness of the sexual victimization of women to a childhood reading of Goethe’s Faust: “it is no coincidence,” she wrote, “that the entire tragedy of human existence is revealed to

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Faust at Gretchen’s prison.”77 Dissatisfied with the reluctance of even the forward-looking leaders of the League of Progressive Women’s Organizations (Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine) to confront the problems of reproduction, motherhood, and sexual morality, Stöcker planned in 1903 to found a new organization dedicated to sexual reform. These plans were pre-empted by Bré, who founded the League for the Protection of Mothers (BfM) in 1904. Herself of illegitimate birth, Bré called for the resettlement of unmarried mothers and their children on the land in matriarchal communities supported both by their members’ own labor and by the state.78 Only through total emancipation from the patriarchal family, Bré declared, could the ancient “right to motherhood” be guaranteed.79 Though she joined Bré’s group, Stöcker considered its founder a “totally undisciplined person” who was “a little crazy.”80 Disagreements among the leadership soon led Bré to withdraw from the organization, which Stöcker and her colleagues re-founded in 1905.81 Under Stöcker’s leadership, the group rejected Bré’s matriarchal utopianism. Stöcker explained that the transition from the matriarchal to the patriarchal age had brought mixed results: “it gave men the right and duty to support his legitimate children, but condemned woman, who until then had enjoyed an equal status, to the most absolute subordination to men’s will.”82 In order to remedy this millennial injustice, the group called for a “new ethic” which would promote the equal rights of women, the welfare of mothers, and the dignity of female-headed families. But, as Stöcker stated in the introductory editorial to the first issue of the group’s journal, “the holy trinity of father, mother, and child” would always “be the highest ideal.” The League rejected the ethic of chastity that still predominated in the women’s movement and unabashedly affirmed heterosexuality, both in and outside of marriage. And parenthood was the highest fulfillment of sexual love: “People will always look beyond physical pleasure and reproduction for a spiritual intimacy, a growing togetherness, a common responsibility for children.”83 Further support for this “new ethic” came from some leaders of the German socialist women’s movement, many of whom were also members of the League for the Protection of Mothers. Among the most internationally influential of all German feminist authors was Lily Braun, an aristocrat who shocked her family by joining the Social Democratic Party in 1895. Braun’s book, The Woman Question: Its Historical Development and its Economic Aspects, which was first published in 1901, was translated into several languages and discussed by feminist groups, both middle-class and socialist, in many Western countries. Braun’s historical narrative, like that of Key, started with the matrilineal family of prehistory but described this as a dark and primitive period. The introduction of monogamous marriage and patriliny represented only “a station on the way to the cross” for the woman, who became property along with her children.84 This subordinate position was no longer acceptable to the modern woman. “Once the female has turned into a human being, that is, an individual personality, with views, judgments, and life goals of her own, then she has been spoiled for the average marriage.”85

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Though she shared the aspirations of Stöcker and Key to an egalitarian form of marriage—“the union of two equal, intellectually and morally mature people”—Braun doubted that this ideal could be realized in practice. For, even if such a happy couple found each other, who could guarantee that their relationship would last? “Given the heightened possibilities for friction in modern marriages,” Braun presciently feared that “their long duration would become more and more exceptional.”86 Hundreds of questions arose, Braun concluded, “foremost, what happens to the children?”87 The German moderate feminist movement, consisting chiefly of the middleclass groups associated in the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF), regarded this critique of marriage with suspicion. Not only did it offend the religious sensibilities of many members, but it also threatened the security of the great majority of women who depended on marriage for their economic survival. An alternative feminist history of the family was developed by Marianne Weber, a leader of the BDF whose scholarly volume, Wife and Mother in Legal History, was published in 1907. Both Marianne Weber and her famous husband, the sociologist Max Weber, repudiated the League for the Protection of Mothers for the “crass hedonism” of its sexual ethic.88 Concerned that nostalgia for a matriarchal “lost paradise” might undermine marriage, Marianne Weber devoted an entire chapter to a refutation of Bachofen and Engels.89 Matrilineal family structures, she argued, had not been universal at any stage of civilization, and where they had existed they had by no means ensured a high status or independent existence for women—on the contrary, matrilineal families were usually headed by the woman’s male relatives. And marriage had not enslaved but, on the contrary, advanced women by guaranteeing their own security as spouses and the legitimacy of their children as their fathers’ heirs. But Marianne Weber nonetheless shared the assumption that patriarchy did not represent a God-given order, but an arrangement that had served its purpose and was now outmoded. She advocated a new, egalitarian form of the family that guaranteed the equal rights of both partners to control of children and property and could be dissolved through divorce by mutual consent.90 In Austria, the debate took a similar course.91 The sexual reformer Grete Meisel-Hess, who before her move to Berlin was among the founders of the Austrian branch of the League for the Protection of Mothers, looked back to the age of the Amazons, when “women had a kind of psychological independence of men that seems to us really fabulous,” but added that contemporary Amazons aspired to cooperate with men rather than to conquer them.92 Marianne Hainisch, a leading member of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine), acknowledged that patriarchy had brought the “most cruel sexual slavery,” but warned against the “siren-song of free love” and advocated “a fair marriage law that respects the welfare of a child who has two parents.”93 A complex synthesis of these two positions was created by Rosa Mayreder, also a prominent member of the League of Austrian Women’s Organizations and of the League for the Protection of Mothers. In Vienna, then a center of

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psychology and psychoanalysis, it was fashionable to see gender relations as the expression of subconscious and instinctual drives. According to Mayreder, the deep-seated drive of men to dominate females arose from their uncertainty about paternity—an anxiety that the claims of modern women to selfdetermination could only exacerbate. The result, Mayreder feared, could well be a renewal in the present of the conflict described by Bachofen: “the long suppressed struggle between fatherhood and motherhood, that ended with the defeat of the female sex.”94 The only solution that she could offer was the transformation of the patriarchal family into a union of equals, in which the controlling patriarch would become a nurturing father. Mayreder concluded that love would always be “the surest, the most valuable, the most reliable guarantee of paternity.”95 Thus whereas most feminists of this era agreed that the family had been shaped by history, they disagreed on the course that its evolution should take. While some advocated a return to the female-headed households that they associated with the matriarchal stage of development, most looked forward to further development toward a new, egalitarian form of the two parent household. This can by no means be dismissed as a conservative defense of existing marriage customs, but on the contrary was often linked to a thoroughly modern defense of the right to true love and sexual fulfillment, even outside the limits set by church and state. Certainly, the struggle against the still formidable and pervasive manifestations of patriarchy would be long. But its utopian goal was reconciliation, not victory: “we will then reach the apex of human potential,” said Stöcker, “where the silly, trivial quarrel of the sexes will be silent.”96 The Destructive Mother In the years before World War I, the great increase in the membership and influence of feminist organizations provoked a backlash against feminism. Among anti-feminists, Bachofen’s imaginative picture of a matriarchal age and a war between men and women could arouse terror as well as fascination. The psychological theories of this era reconceptualized the battle between the sexes as a conflict within each individual psyche, and Bachofen’s story often provided a metaphorical framework for the exploration of the human subconscious. In the psyche, as in prehistory, Dionysus contended against Apollo, instinct against reason, id against superego, and indulgent maternal love against stern paternal authority. Among this era’s best known texts was Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, which was translated into at least ten languages and exercised an influence far beyond the author’s native Vienna. Weininger, a young philosopher who became famous not only for his misogynist and anti-Semitic classic but for his suicide (at the age of twenty-three) soon after its publication, was among the first theorists to take the battle of the sexes from the historical into the psychological realm. He warned gloomily that the moral fabric of Western civilization was menaced by the emancipation of women and Jews—groups

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which he associated with weakness, decadence, and sexual anarchy. These forces of disorder threatened the self-confidence of the Western male, and thus of Western civilization itself. Weininger implicated mothers in this sinister threat, for beneath their professions of selfless devotion lurked a voracious will to domination. Quite unlike Bachofen, who had extolled the altruism of the mother–child bond, Weininger insisted that mother-love was a selfish urge to preserve “an unbroken connection between the mother and everything that has ever been umbilically linked to her,” and thus to destroy her son’s individuality. The mother was the enemy of growth, maturity, and rationality, and the price of her love was eternal childhood.97 This strange polemic may well have been directed at the Cosmic Circle, a group of academics, authors, and artists, some quite well known, who met in Munich between 1897 and 1904 under the leadership of the poets Stefan George and Alfred Schuler, the philosopher Ludwig Klages, and the classical scholar Karl Wolfskehl. This group, who made Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht into their cult classic, called for the destruction of patriarchy, and with it the repressive and life-denying civilization of the West. These readers of Bachofen did not endorse feminism, which they rejected along with all the other trappings of modern civilization. In fact, they recommended that women should return to their primordial roles as mothers, lovers, and priestesses. Rather than to the powerful matriarchy, the Cosmic Circle looked back to the primal period of promiscuity, which they imagined as a golden age of men’s liberation—a time when a healthy and polymorphous sexuality had flourished without the constraints of marriage, normative heterosexuality, or paternal responsibility. In carnival balls that were chronicled by the novelist Franziska zu Reventlow, who was among its members, the group recreated the Dionysian revelries and other ancient fertility rites, and guests appeared in drag as Aphrodite and the Great Mother. As the symbol of a program that aimed to rejuvenate Western civilization through a new paganism that would liberate the bracing forces of sex, race, and blood, they chose an ancient sun sign, the swastika.98 The popularity of this group seemed to justify the fears expressed by Marianne Weber and others that matriarchal fantasies could serve antifeminist purposes. But in an era when women’s movements approached the height of their influence, even this reactionary discourse could be given a feminist “spin.” Otto Gross, a psychiatrist who was Freud’s most gifted pupil, was a prominent member of the Munich group and a reader of Bachofen and Engels. Gross turned his teacher’s doctrine on its head. Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex had shown that beneath its respectable surface the patriarchal family was the scene of forbidden sexual wishes, tension, and conflict, all of which could have catastrophic effects on the child’s psychological development. But, his pupil charged, Freud had failed to draw the logical conclusion—that patriarchy, the product of usurpation and violence, must be abolished and replaced by the mother-headed family that was “natural” to the human race.99

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In 1908, Gross was treated for morphine addiction at a psychiatric institution in Zürich, the Burghölzli, by the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who at that time was still a disciple—though an increasingly skeptical one—of Freud. The treatment seems to have changed the physician more than the patient, who soon resumed his drug habit. Jung, the rebellious son of a Protestant pastor, was convinced by Gross that psychoanalysis, when rightly practiced, could lift the curse of sexual repression and create a healthier approach to sexual morality. Freud regarded the Oedipus complex—the (male) child’s incestuous attraction to his mother—as the basis of all personality development. The prohibition of this desire by the boy’s father was the origin of the sexual repression and guilt that tormented the mature man. But—as Jung asked Freud in a letter of 1912—was this really a universal, and thus inevitable, pattern? After all, it could not have existed in the matriarchal period of human civilization, when no tie had existed between father and son: “in fact, there was no such thing as a father’s son.”100 Freud, who had already rejected Gross, obviously feared that psychoanalysis might be co-opted by a sexual radicalism that he considered a threat to social order. He responded by asserting the universality of patriarchy. “Most authors regard a primordial state of promiscuity as unlikely. . . . It seems likely that there have been father’s sons at all times.”101 During the years from 1911 to 1913, which saw Jung’s decisive break with Freud, both men constructed theories that made the conflict between maternal indulgence and paternal order a central theme of psychology, as it was of prehistory and history. Jung’s Wandlung und Symbole der Libido (published in English as Psychology of the Unconscious), published in segments from 1912 to 1913, provided an alternative to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex by attributing the male patient’s fantasies about his mother not to an incest wish but rather to a more general longing to escape the problems of adult life and to return to the blissful security of infancy. This seductive fantasy-world was dominated by a powerful mother-figure, who appeared in mythology— which Jung regarded as the expression of a “collective subconscious”—as the mother-goddess or Great Mother. Like Weininger, Jung regarded maternal power with considerable fear and aversion. Too great an attachment to the “destructive mother” condemned whoever was too weak to resist it to permanent infantilism and neurosis: “and there is no doubt,” Jung concluded, “that there is nothing that so completely enfolds us as the mother.”102 Only by overcoming this fatal attraction could the individual attain adulthood. Meanwhile Freud defended the universality of patriarchy in a volume entitled Totem and Taboo, published in 1913. Like Jung, Freud based his conclusions on mythology, but also on the speculations of anthropologists about human prehistory. He started from Darwin’s theory that human beings, like some other primate species, had originally lived in patriarchal groups where, in the absence of an incest taboo, a dominant male had monopolized all the females and driven away the adolescent males. At some point the latter, crazed by desire for the females, had combined to kill the father. Freud speculated that

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a short matriarchal interregnum might have followed the father’s death. But eventually, stricken by remorse, the males had renounced sexual access to the females and elevated the murdered father to a god, whom they periodically appeased through a ritual feast. Freud thus traced the origin of civilization to “this memorable criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, religion.” And civilization rested on patriarchy, for God had “always been, at bottom, just an exalted father.”103 In each individual, according to Freud, this “memorable crime” was replicated through the Oedipus complex and its resolution. In fact, the stages of child development that Freud identified corresponded to Bachofen’s stages of prehistory: a period of maternal nurture, permissiveness, and uninhibited sexuality (infancy) is ended through the imposition of the law of the father, in the form of the incest taboo, which Freud and others identified as the primal law. The Freudian “id,” or instinctual subconscious, was in some sense the repressed matriarchy, and the superego the ascendant patriarchy. Only submission to patriarchy could complete the transition from infancy to adulthood. But these new arguments for patriarchy were not left unchallenged. In 1913, the year in which Totem and Taboo appeared, the British suffragist Catherine Gasquoine Hartley told the same story, but used it to demonstrate the evanescence rather than the necessity of patriarchy. Hartley, a former teacher and widely read journalist, was as well qualified for this intellectual task as was Freud, for both were amateur anthropologists and both had read the same body of literature.104 Though accepting the same Darwinian picture of the primal family as Freud, Hartley criticized the assumption, found in the books that both had read, that the women of the group would have played a wholly passive role in the development of culture. On the contrary, she proposed that women, who must have objected to the patriarch’s sexual molestation of their daughters, probably enforced the first incest taboo. Through their unity and superior numbers, they were able to oppose his “egoistical” authority and assume the leadership of the group. And thus, she continued, religion and morality must have developed in the context of matriarchal rather than patriarchal rule. However, the matriarchs undermined their own benign regime by encouraging their sons to marry women outside the group. This led to the emergence of the nuclear family, in which males had gained the authority that they still exercised. But Hartley pointed out that patriarchy was not a God-given order, but a transitional arrangement. And contemporary developments, especially that of the women’s movement, paved the way for a new age of equality. “We stand in the first rush of a great movement,” she wrote in 1914. “It is the day of experiments. We are questioning where we have accepted, and are seeking out new ways in which mankind will go . . . will go because it must.”105 The Intellectual The matriarchal theories of this era have often been attributed to a mere sentimental nostalgia for an era of female rule.106 But on the contrary, their

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impact was energizing. To be sure, the debate on the origins of the family reached no definitive conclusions—it produced a multiplicity of discourses, both feminist and anti-feminist. However, the significance of the debate did not lie in the answers, but in the very act of questioning. If the patriarchal family was not the permanent creation of God or nature, but the transitory product of historical development, then it was open to revision like any other political arrangement. And if motherhood had not always entailed subordination—if it had once even qualified women for leadership—then it would once again be possible to combine the role of mother with that of worker, citizen, and autonomous individual. The hope that the maternal dilemma could be resolved provided a new stimulus to feminist thought and intellectual life. “It is the intellectual,” proclaimed an editorial in the French paper L’Entente, “who will free the Mother . . . It will be the intellectual who will open her eyes to her abjection and servitude. It will be the intellectual who will free her and make her into a citizen.”107 The new theoretical insights provided the basis for a more confident, innovative, and assertive political practice. “Our knowledge of historical development,” wrote Helene Stöcker, “helps us to understand what we must demand today.”108 But the implications of this historical knowledge were complex and controversial. Should the family of the future be based on the mother–child bond or on the married couple? Was the goal of legal and economic reform to make the mother independent, or to bind her more closely into the marital relationship? If the mother was to be independent, then who should support her family? She herself—in which case, who would care for her children? Or the state, which by assuming the guardianship of its children had become what Wilhelmine Drucker called “a great family, which now includes all previously autonomous families and reckons among its members all who live on its soil?”109 And psychologists—including Freud and Jung— raised further disturbing questions about the maternal role and the mother–child relationship. Was mother-love the basis of civilization, as some feminists contended? Or was it, on the contrary, a primitive and irrational force that might actually threaten civilized values? All of these questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow.

This German cartoon, entitled “Population Increase” (1913) uses figures of children to illustrate the population growth rates of Germany and England from 1871 to 1914. Berlin: Hofdruckerei, 1913 (?): Poster Archive, Hoover Institution.



F    P          P          : F        , M        ,       L    W       E     , – T L   F If the fields of history and anthropology offered examples of strong and independent mothers, then feminists could hope that the maternal dilemma was not a permanent aspect of the female condition, but might be someday be resolved. The first step toward raising the status of mothers was to change the laws that kept them in subjection. At the turn of the twentieth century the legal status of wives and mothers was debated not only in legislatures, courtrooms, and feminist publications, but also in literary works which presented two pictures of the feminist mother-heroine, the triumphant and the tragic. In the widely read Dutch novel, Hilda van Suylenburg, published in 1898, the eponymous heroine completed her legal studies, opened a feminist law practice, married her soul mate, and happily gave birth to their daughter, Jeanne. “Oh, Maarten,” she exclaimed to her husband in the novel’s closing scene, “it is no wonder that women are crazy about these little cherubs . . . maybe the emancipation of woman means the awakening of women to real spiritual motherhood.” To which he dutifully replied, “Emancipation is a blessing, because it has helped to make my Hilda what she is.”1 No such happy ending was in store for Herminia Grant, the heroine of the notorious novel The Woman who Did (1895), by the British author Grant Allen. Though she wished to become a mother, Herminia refused to marry her lover, Alan. “My conscience won’t let me,” she insisted. “I know what marriage is, from what vile slavery it has sprung, on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed, by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained . . . I can’t embrace it, I can’t be untrue to my most sacred beliefs.”2 We do not know whether Hilda’s Jeanne will become a warrior maiden; but Herminia’s daughter, appropriately named Dolores, will suffer for her mother’s principled choice. This chapter will look first at the historical context in which the debate on marriage laws took place and then at the debate’s two major themes: the status of the married and of the unmarried mother.

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In their defense of women’s rights in the family, feminists used arguments based on both gender equality and gender difference. Although some historians stress the discrepancy between these two approaches, in this case there was no contradiction.3 The mother’s argument for equality rested on the fact that her role was different from, and complementary to, that of the father. Nature ordained that fathers could not produce children alone; culture that mothers played the predominant role in child-rearing. But a partnership that was necessary both to nature and culture was disregarded by the law. “The law of this and most other countries,” wrote the British Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, who was her nation’s foremost reformer of family law, “contravenes common sense, humanity and justice, by dealing with every child as the offspring of one parent solely.”4 When the parents were married, the one parent who was recognized by the law was the father. In 1900, legal systems in every country still constructed the family as the private realm of the father: he alone controlled its internal affairs and acted as its public representative. Because paternity was uncertain, the law had created an artificial certainty by linking paternity to the formality of marriage. Within marriage, men were assumed to be the fathers of their wives’ children. Fathers controlled the minor child’s property, education, and employment and had the right to punish any transgression of their authority.5 Even if the mother survived him, the father controlled his children through an appointed guardian after his death. But when the parents were not married, the law made the mother the sole parent. Outside of marriage, paternity was denied (for paternity suits, where they were allowed, established a support obligation but no blood relationship). Unlike paternity, the law recognized maternity as a “natural” and certain fact. The “illegitimate” child belonged in most respects to its mother, who was alone responsible for its care.6 But this responsibility carried few legal rights—in fact, in most countries, unmarried women were denied rights of legal guardianship over their children. By 1890 a new legal doctrine—the rights of the child—provided a new basis for an assault on the solid citadel of patria potestas. Governments now regarded children as a national resource, indispensable to economic growth and military strength, and for the first time actively intervened to create medical and social services to save infant life and to promote child development. This trend in public policy is often attributed to the panic caused by falling birthrates, which threatened military strength during a period of intense national rivalry—a concern that was very important in the rival military powers, France and Germany.7 But child welfare was also an important issue in the Netherlands, which still had a high birthrate, and in countries such as the Scandinavian states and Switzerland that were on the periphery of the European great-power struggle.8 If children belonged to the state as well as to the family, then parental care became a public duty rather than a private right. “The child did not ask to be born,” wrote the French child-rearing experts Odette Laguerre and Ida Sée,

F    P          P         

43

echoing the views of countless contemporaries. “The simple fact of having brought the child into the world does not give the parents any rights over him. It creates only obligations. . . . Giving life is nothing. We have to work to make that life a benefit . . . This is why the essential duty of the parents is to assure that children have health and education, the conditions under which they can fully develop.”9 Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, laws that regulated child labor and required public schooling imposed the first legal limits on paternal authority. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the realm of the father was increasingly open to public scrutiny. Dominant conceptions of the parent–child relationship shifted to emphasize the rights of the child and the duties of the parents, both mother and father.10 New legislation in many European countries made child abuse or neglect a crime that could be punished by the removal of parental rights. In France and Britain, laws that enabled the state to remove a child from an abusive home were passed in 1889, in Germany with the adoption of the Civil Law Code in 1900; in the Netherlands as part of a series of measures known as the “Children’s Laws” (Kinderwetten) in 1901.11 Child-welfare activists such as Laguerre and Sée rejoiced that “the so-called rights of fathers, which so long were held to be untouchable and sacred” were limited by the law.12 In fact, these laws applied to both parents, and because they were designed chiefly to control poor families, many of which were mother-headed, were frequently enforced against mothers. Though they sometimes criticized the biased application of the laws, feminist social reformers nonetheless played a conspicuous role in advocating and enforcing them. For example, Frieda Duensing, a lawyer who was active in feminist organizations, headed the “Center for Youth Welfare” in Berlin and campaigned for a broader definition of, and stiffer penalties for, child abuse.13 In the Netherlands, the Dutch affiliate of the National Council of Women held a conference in 1904 to advocate the strengthening of the laws that protected children.14 The tendency of child-welfare advocates, many of whom also supported temperance movements, to identify alcoholism as the most important cause of child abuse showed class bias, for this was a vice that was associated with working-class men. Nonetheless, public support for laws against child abuse was not confined to liberal feminists or to the middle class—on the contrary, it was very strong among socialist women. One of the most prominent of these, the German Lily Braun, attributed the fact that “the percentage of proletarian children who die in the first year of their lives is incomparably higher than that of the children of the affluent” to paternal vices as well as to poverty. “The children suffer silently, and yet the cry for help of hundreds of thousands of unhappy children reaches the ear of those who bore them,” she exhorted women of all classes. “Oh, do not refuse to hear them.”15 While the new doctrines of children’s rights undermined paternal authority, they enhanced the public image of the mother. After all, the mother’s role had always involved obligations rather than rights, and the culture of the time portrayed her as the custodian of the child’s best interests. Nation-states of

44

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the era now gave mothers and children a new priority. For the first time, mothers became major recipients of public services, including maternity insurance, prenatal care, and child health services. Social reformers who worked to moralize working-class behavior regarded the mother—described by the Belgian lawyer Louis Frank as “sober, economic, orderly, and ceaselessly at work”—as their natural ally.16 In Spain, where there was as yet no broad support for women’s political rights, political and cultural leaders nonetheless stressed the importance of educated, patriotic mothers to the welfare of the state.17 In Norway, the movement that won independence from Sweden in 1905 portrayed the new nation as a home headed by “strong fathers and helpful mothers.”18 The feminists’ campaign to improve the status of mothers in and outside marriage had substantial support among social reformers, male and female, across the political spectrum. And the image of motherhood that these feminists constructed often fit the preoccupations of these reformers: patriotism, family stability, the strong and provident state. At the same time, some of their more utopian aspirations—which involved the restructuring of the family—clashed with this sober agenda. As we saw in chapter 1, feminists developed two major ideas of the post-patriarchal family. The first envisaged an egalitarian male–female couple; the second a matriarchal family unit consisting of a mother and her dependent children, in which the father played a peripheral role and financial support came from the state. In discussions of family law, these two views overlapped and intersected.

“T L  M P  S”: T M  M “Despoiled of her noblest prerogatives and deprived of all rights over the fruits of her womb, who legally belong to the father . . . the lowest and most pitiable of slaves.”19 The words in which the socialist activist Nelly Roussel described the legal status of the French wife and mother could have been applied to her counterparts in all Western European societies at the turn of the twentieth century. The Napoleonic Code, a model for the legal codes of France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and some Swiss cantons nominally recognized the rights of the mother by providing that “until majority, the child remains under the power of father and mother.” However, the Code immediately stipulated that “during the duration of the marriage, the father exercises parental power.”20 The limited authority that the mother was able to exercise was “masculine power deferred.”21 As a widow she exercised guardianship only with his permission, for he could appoint another guardian in his will whom she was obliged to accept. If the widow remarried, the Napoleonic Code required that a family council, composed of relatives from both sides of the family and a justice of the peace, should determine whether she would remain her children’s guardian. Needless to say, no such restrictions were imposed on a widowed father. A divorced or legally separated woman might be allowed the physical care of

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45

young children, but the father retained legal custody. “I do not exaggerate,” concluded a speaker at the 1908 National Congress for Women’s Civil Rights and Suffrage in Paris, “when I say that the mother of a normal family who is not a widow, nor separated, nor divorced, nor married to an insane or criminal husband has no legal rights over her children.”22 This legal definition of parental roles was increasingly out of step with the realities of family life. Throughout the nineteenth century urbanization and industrialization had removed men’s work from the home and enlarged the mother’s de facto authority over children and household. Historians of culture conclude that by the turn of the twentieth century the influence of middle- and upper-class mothers on their children, and especially on adult sons’ choice of careers, was on the increase.23 Lower-class mothers were often both the caretakers and the employers of their own children, who worked for them in home industries, and thus exercised considerable power.24 Most feminists fully shared the culture’s high estimation of the importance of the mother–child bond. The demand for equality of parental rights dated back at least to the 1830s—when a campaign initiated by Caroline Norton gained for British mothers who were legally separated from their husbands the right to care for (though not to have legal custody of ) their young children—and was included in the programs of the earliest feminist organizations.25 The 1890s saw an upsurge of feminist organizing, including the formation of many new national associations. Among the groups that campaigned for the rights of mothers were the Swedish Fredrika Bremer Association (Fredrika-BremerFörbundet), founded in 1884, the French League for the Rights of Women (Ligue Française du Droit des Femmes), founded in 1892, the Belgian League for the Rights of Women (Ligue Belge du Droit des Femmes), founded in 1893, the Dutch Free Women’s Association (Vrije Vrouwenvereeniging), founded in 1889, the Committee for the Improvement of the Social and Legal Status of Women in the Netherlands (Comité tot Verbetering van den Maatschappelijken en den Rechtstoestand der Vrouw in Nederland), founded in 1894, the German League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine), founded in 1896, and the Swiss League of Swiss Women’s Associations (Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine), founded in 1900.26 The first generation of female lawyers—such as the Belgian Marie Popelin, the French Maria Vérone, the Swiss Emilie Kempin, and the German Marie Raschke27—played an active role in educating the public on the legal issues. The prominence given to the rights of wives and mothers reflected an important change in the demographic composition of women’s movements, which in the nineteenth century had represented chiefly the minority of single career women but now sought to recruit the majority who were married. Not only the predominantly middle-class national women’s organizations, but also the working-class women who were active in socialist women’s groups, supported the reform of marriage and the family. The issue of mothers’ rights was high on the agenda of international feminist congresses such as the one held in Paris in 1896, which resolved that “the rights of mothers should be equal to those of fathers.”28

46

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Among the most conspicuous advocates of the rights of mothers was the British Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, who in 1886 prevailed upon James Byrne, a Member of Parliament who was her political ally, to introduce a bill on child custody into Parliament. In its original form, Elmy’s draft bill provided for “the equality of right and duty of both parents, of father with mother, of mother with father—in all aspects of child-rearing.”29 But Parliament, though willing to grant mothers the right of guardianship after the father’s death, insisted that families must have a head and refused to give mothers equal authority during the father’s lifetime.30 Thus the rights of mothers continued to be a feminist issue. In a leaflet of 1913, the British National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies recruited wives and mothers to the suffrage cause by pointing out that in California, where women had the vote, mothers and fathers now had equal rights over their minor children. “Many of the hardships under which wives and mothers suffer in Great Britain may well be removed when our legislators are no longer negligent of or oblivious to the interests of women,” the author of this leaflet concluded.31 In Germany, a committee of experts who were charged with developing a uniform legal code for the newly unified nation submitted a draft for parliamentary approval in 1888. In 1896, as the final passage of this new legal code drew near, the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine) created a Legal Committee to evaluate its section on family law.32 This committee’s report set off the group’s first mass protest campaign. The laws of Germany, proclaimed a leaflet addressed to “German women and German men,” still condemned the married woman to “powerlessness over her fortune, powerlessness over her children.”33 Though its language allotted the responsibility to child-rearing on both father and mother, the German Code of Civil Law (like the Napoleonic Code) provided that in case of disagreement, the father’s will must prevail. Married women still languished in what the Swiss lawyer Emilie Kempin (who by this time had moved to Berlin) called “the rusty fetters of a thousand-year old tradition.”34 Even more than their single sisters, emphasized Marie Stritt, a member of the Legal Commission, wives and mothers deserved “full independence and civil equality” for the sake of family, state, and “all the new social obligations . . . that the woman of the present is called upon to fulfill, and which she can only fulfill as a free human being.”35 In other European countries, some new codes of law likewise theoretically recognized parental equality but in fact upheld paternal authority. In 1912, under pressure from women’s organizations, a new legal code that created a uniform set of laws for the Swiss confederation substituted parental for paternal power. But the Swiss code added what the legal expert Gertrud Woker called a “fossilized rat’s tail”—that in case of parental disagreement, the will of the father must prevail.36 Women’s groups in Austria and Italy were not able to gain even these limited concessions.

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47

Though in agreement on their goal—parental equality—feminists disagreed on its ideological rationale. Some argued that the mother’s relationship to the children was closer and more important than that of the father. “This mother, who has played the principal role in the birth, this mother who can at no time and under no circumstances doubt her maternity—for paternity is only an act of faith, based on confidence in a woman’s fidelity—this mother who has carried this little creature for nine months in her womb . . . who has formed it of her own flesh and blood . . . who has merged her life with its life . . . who has fed it with her own milk . . . this mother must passively stand by and submit to the acts and the deeds of the father,” exclaimed Maria Deraismes.37 Such reformers asserted that child-rearing was a uniquely female vocation. By allowing the father’s will to override that of the mother, argued the German Olga von Beschwitz among many others, the Civil Code negated “the experience and the understanding of the mother, which in this area is greater than that of the father, whose work often removes him from the home and the children.”38 The Swedish Maria Cederschiöld, who headed the Legal Committee of the Swedish National Council of Women, noted that “in our day, the opinion gains ground that woman is more suitable than man for the task of raising the new generation. The more the raising and education of children is entrusted to women, the more unnatural must it appear that the mother does not have equal power with the father over all decisions concerning her children.”39 But others advanced a more gender-neutral definition of parental rights and duties that emphasized democracy and equality of rights in the home as well as the state. “Contemporary society, which is evolving toward the form of an egalitarian democracy, must be based on a family constituted according to the laws of equality, not the laws of despotism,” declared Louis Frank, a co-founder of the Belgian League for the Rights of Women.40 “The authority of parents over children is much more of an obligation than a right . . . and the organization of that power by the law must have as its sole end the interest and the happiness of the child,” stated Marie Popelin.41 In a pamphlet written for the Italian National Council of Women (Consiglio nazionale delle donne italiane), Valeria Benetti-Brunella expressed her organization’s hope that “the arguments from justice and civility which have brought down political absolutism will also overcome legal despotism in the family.”42 In Spain, Adolfo Posada, the scholar whose book entitled Feminism (published in 1899) lent academic prestige to the cause of women’s rights, suggested that “power in the family should be in law as it is in fact in well-regulated families: a power of both spouses.”43 The feminists and their allies were among the agents of a transformation in family structure which, though still incipient, was of great importance in the development of Western civilization. In law and in public consciousness, the old model of the family, in which the father alone possessed both rights and authority, gradually gave way to a new model of a community of separate individuals whose rights were guaranteed by the state. Of course, this model

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still met with much opposition. Paternal power was sometimes defended by women. At the French National Congress on the Rights of Women of 1908, a delegate objected that although mothers actually made most child-rearing decisions, they relied on the authority of fathers to back them up.44 Some critics also questioned the new and untried notion of equal parental rights. For what would happen if the parents disagreed? The German legal scholar and activist Marianne Weber, who was the author of an authoritative book on the legal status of women, proposed that in case of disagreement between the parents the mother should make decisions about daughters, and the fathers about sons.45 Other theorists invoked the authority of the state as guarantor of the rights of the child. In case of irreconcilable parental disagreements, they stipulated, both parents should submit to the authority of a guardians’ court.46 This was an unprecedented, and deeply controversial limitation of paternal authority. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy remarked that conflict between parents was perhaps unavoidable: “nature herself established the Dual Control when she gave to every human child two parents.” She justified the intervention of the courts by arguing that the welfare of the child should go before the rights of the parents—a provision that was in the spirit of an age when “the dignity and worth of even the youngest child, as an independent human being, is becoming gradually recognized.”47 These efforts to improve the status of the married mother met with considerable resistance from politicians and prominent public figures in the great European powers. Most of them did not accept feminist claims that the empowerment of mothers would promote family stability and the welfare of children. On the contrary, they regarded feminism as a subversive force that undermined the family, and with it population growth, and national strength. For example Jacques Bertillon, influential leader of the French populationist movement, attributed declining birthrates partly to the erosion of paternal power, which he proposed to reinforce by the payment of a subsidy to fathers who produced large families.48 But on the periphery of the European great-power struggle there was more room for change. In Portugal, where a revolution temporarily conferred influence on women’s organizations, the revisions of family law were somewhat more substantive. In 1908 Ana de Castro Osorio and her colleagues founded a new feminist organization, the Republican League of Portuguese Women (Liga Republicana das Mulheres Portuguesas). In 1910, after the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic, the League successfully lobbied for new laws on marriage, divorce, and the protection of children. These laws stipulated that “the marriage relationship is based on freedom and equality,” and provided that at least one important family matter, the decision to permit the marriage of underage children, should require the authorization of both parents, or a judicial decision in case they could not agree.49 The greatest progress toward equality of parental rights occurred in the Scandinavian countries. All except Finland were constitutional monarchies, where representative bodies were elected by a democratic franchise which in

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Finland as of 1906, in Norway as of 1913, and in Denmark as of 1915 included women.50 The early success of woman suffrage movements gave public visibility and support to the reform of marriage and the family. In 1909, a Scandinavian Committee for Family Law, which included members from all the Nordic countries, was formed to set guidelines for a new legal code. In the ensuing discussions, women’s organizations played a conspicuous advisory role. A model code equalized parental responsibilities in all areas of child-rearing except the control of children’s property, which in all countries except Finland was reserved for fathers until the 1950s. Although the new laws were not passed in any Scandinavian country until the 1920s, they traced their origins to the turn of the twentieth century.51 Organizational programs emphasized that the goal of the woman’s movement was not (as was often charged) to discredit, but to redeem marriage. “The unity of marriage must rest on both spouses’ acknowledgment of each other as equal partners,” stated the program of the League of German Women’s Associations in 1907.52 “The ideal form of marriage,” wrote the immensely influential Swedish author, Ellen Key, “is a free union between a man and a woman, who wish through their love to benefit each other and the human race.”53 But in each country, minorities dissented from this dominant view. They insisted that the two-parent family, though the most common, was by no means the only possible family structure. Substantial numbers of feminists favored a return to what they considered the original and “natural” form of the family—the mother–child unit. This tendency was particularly strong in France, where important groups such as the French Group for Feminist Studies (Groupe français d’études féministes), and highly visible activists such as the suffrage leader Hubertine Auclert and the socialist Nelly Roussel called for the recognition of the mother-right family. Auclert declared that the child should bear the name of the mother; why, she asked, should the woman “who has formed the child in her body be less entitled to give the child its social identity than the father?”54 “To center the family on uncertain paternity rather than certain maternity,” said Roussel, was “to exalt the easy contribution of the father above the painful and sacred work of the child’s true creator.”55 The British author Mona Caird, who claimed that the law based the father’s power over his children only on “the fact that their mother was his property,” likewise insisted that “the mother has a moral right to final authority over her children.”56 These arguments for the mother-right family arose in the context of the heated discussion, of the status of the unmarried mother and her child, and to this controversy we shall now turn.

“C  D  T”: T S M However disadvantaged the position of the married mother, she was fortunate by comparison to her unmarried sister. “An invisible mark of disgrace, inflicted upon them by an unjust and harsh morality, divides them from the

50

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others,” remarked the German social reformer Adele Schreiber of unmarried mothers. “Ashamed and humiliated, they must defy all natural laws and deny their motherhood.”57 In many literary works, the unmarried mother appeared as a martyr (in the words of the Italian poet Ada Negri, “A saint, not a sinner . . . crowned with diadem and thorns”) to the hypocrisy and injustice of the patriarchal family and of the Christian code of sexual morality.58 The status of the mother in marriage had been a constant, but fairly subdued theme in feminist politics; by contrast, that of the unmarried mother became a pivotal issue around which coalitions rallied and fractured. Unlike the laws on the status of the mother in marriage, which were basically similar throughout Western Europe, the laws on “illegitimacy” differed widely according to country, and will therefore be examined separately. But one feature was common to all: the denial of a familial relationship between the child of unmarried parents and its father. Unless a father chose to recognize a child born to him outside of marriage (in Britain, not even then), the child had no right to use the father’s name, to belong to the father’s family, or to inherit from this family. Even paternity suits, in countries (chiefly those of Germanic language) where they were allowed, could not definitely establish biological relationship and its attendant rights. These laws were often attributed to the inexorable will of nature, which had made paternity uncertain, but in fact expressed the all too human interest of men in protecting themselves from the embarrassing and costly consequences of their premarital and extramarital relationships. The laws were also intended to discipline sexual behavior—not that of men, of course, but that of single women. If paternity suits were made easy, objected a German jurist in 1862, the result would be not only the “undermining of the morality of the female sex,” but the disruption of respectable households by “shameless wenches and their misbegotten brats.”59 In an era of high birthrates and high death rates, when statistics on infant mortality were not even recorded, the children themselves were considered expendable. But this point of view changed conspicuously in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, when children were perceived as an important and dwindling national resource. Concern for the survival of children turned the attention of public health authorities to rates of illegitimacy, which (due to cultural differences that were far too complex to explain here) varied widely: around 1900 about 3 percent of all births in Ireland and the Netherlands, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in France, 12 percent in Sweden, and 14 percent in the German-speaking part of Austria were to unmarried parents. These figures (low by comparison to those of the late twentieth century) do not convey the scope of the problem as seen by child-welfare activists, most of whom worked to provide services in large cities. Because of the tendency of pregnant girls from the countryside to migrate to cities in search of such services, rates of illegitimate birth were extremely high in many cities: in 1911, about 20 percent of all births in Leipzig, 22 percent in Copenhagen, 24 percent in Paris, and 30 percent in Munich and Stockholm were to single mothers.60

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By all statistical measures the situation of these children was catastrophic. Around 1900, when the mortality rate for all infants under one year of age was high, “illegitimate” infants died at half again the rate of their “legitimate” age mates. In Germany in 1901 19 percent of all “legitimate” but 33 percent of all “illegitimate,” in Denmark 10 percent of all “legitimate” but 20 percent of all “illegitimate,” in Italy 16 percent of all “legitimate” but 23 percent of all “illegitimate” children (and 37.5 percent of the mostly “illegitimate” children placed in orphanages) died during their first year.61 Those who survived were considered likely to become the vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes who formed the “army of evil” so feared by urban reformers and social-purity advocates.62 The modern state could no longer consider these children expendable, for it needed, in the words of the French author and humanitarian Alexandre Dumas the younger, “all the human beings whom nature indifferently creates and destroys.”63 The need to change the laws that affected unmarried mothers and children was thus widely acknowledged, but the complexity of their situation made solutions difficult. Assuming that premarital sex was taboo for women, feminist novelists usually portrayed middle-class single mothers as unconventional feminist heroines and their working-class counterparts as the victims of rich and heartless seducers.64 In fact, most were neither heroines nor victims, for the moral code of the urban or rural working-class cultures from which they came often condoned sexual relations between unmarried people as long as pregnancy resulted in marriage. The fact that the expected marriage had not taken place could be due to many causes, not just to the father’s intentional desertion—in many cases, he simply could not afford to found a household. Some unwed mothers lived, or wished to live, in two-parent families, in which the father was known. In other cases, the mother headed her own family and had, or wished to have, no contact with the father. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the plight of the single mother, once an all but unmentionable topic, became a prominent theme of feminist publications. The Austrian feminist newspaper, Neues Frauenleben (New Life for Women) publicized a case of a governess who was turned out on the street by her employer when she went into labor and then refused admission to the local hospital; “and so occurred an unbelievable event, which brings shame to our era—she gave birth without help on the steps of the house, on an evening when the temperature was fifteen degrees.”65 Public awareness of this problem was highest in France. In the 1890s, some Parisian maternity hospitals allowed women to give birth without revealing their names, and the Mothers’ Mutual Societies (Mutualités Maternelles), insurance plans that were organized and funded by women’s labor unions, gave help to married and unmarried mothers alike.66 In the Netherlands, a pamphlet written in 1897 by a young woman who signed herself only “Amalasuntha” urged her compatriots to follow the French example. She pointed out the injustice of the moral standards that punished mothers for sexual behavior that was tolerated and condoned in men—even assuming that the unmarried mother had made a mistake, she deserved help, not

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rejection.67 In 1897, a group of reformers that included many feminists founded the Mutual Society for the Protection of Women (Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming), which provided various forms of assistance to destitute mothers. By 1902, this organization had eight branches in various cities and by 1911 it supported several homes for unmarried mothers and their children.68 The German League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz, or BfM), founded in 1904 (its early history was reviewed in the previous chapter), sponsored shelters and other services for single mothers and children, and by 1908 had branches in ten German cities and a membership of 3800 (very large for such a radical group). Affiliates of the League were founded in Austria in 1908, and in Sweden in 1911.69 In Switzerland, a group that called itself the Association for the Protection of Women and Children (Verband für Kinder- und Frauenschutz) began in 1911 to provide similar services.70 The members of these and many other groups realized that these charitable measures were by no means sufficient, and launched highly visible campaigns for the reform of the laws that condemned single mothers and their children to an outcast existence. In Britain, a reform campaign began and ended in the 1890s. British laws were harsh indeed: the child of unmarried parents was “filius nullius,” the son of no one, who belonged legally neither to the mother’s nor to the father’s family, and was entitled to inherit from neither side. The mother, who acted as guardian, was permitted to sue the father only if her own resources were inadequate and then for only a very small fixed sum, which was not in any way related to his income. Unlike that of any other nation, British law did not permit the legitimation of the child, even by the subsequent marriage of the parents.71 In 1893, an association that called itself the Legitimation League was founded by a group of anarchists and feminists with the ostensible purpose of advocating legal reforms, which would permit the legitimation of children born outside of marriage. But in fact the group was much less interested in the welfare of children than in the defense of nonmarital sexual relationships, or “free love.” “We do not believe that the State has any concern with the relations of the sexes in the first place; and in the second place, we do not consider—even if it were right for the State to interfere—that it should make the contract binding for life,” declared the group’s secretary, Oswald Dawson.72 The League gained notoriety by supporting Edith Lanchester, a former teacher who openly set up housekeeping with her lover and was thereupon kidnaped by her father and committed to an insane asylum. Physicians attributed her obvious insanity to “over-education” and perhaps also to the pernicious influence of the best-selling novel, The Woman Who Did.73 Most British feminists were exceedingly skeptical about this group and about “free love,” which they identified with promiscuity. As Elaine Showalter points out, Allen’s controversial novel met with more skepticism than approval within the women’s movement. The prominent suffrage leader

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Millicent Garrett Fawcett condemned the tendency “to link together the claims of woman to citizenship and social and industrial independence with attacks on marriage and the family.”74 Female letter-writers to the Legitimation League’s paper, The Adult, often expressed concern about the consequences of nonmarital relationships for children. The Adult responded with a symposium entitled “The Question of Children”—a question which a frequent contributor, R.B. Kerr, admitted that “some advocates of sex freedom” were “inclined to shirk.” As a solution, Kerr proposed that the state must grant a subsidy to every mother of dependent children. “For maternity is a great public service,” he insisted. “Nothing will do but to make maternity a profession; to pay it as liberally as other professions are paid; . . . and to make the woman who practises it entirely independent of the vagaries of any individual whatsoever.”75 A female contributor, Mary Reed, called this a hare-brained scheme which, if put into effect, would be more likely to benefit irresponsible fathers than their wretched children. She pointed out that under existing conditions a woman who entered a nonmarital union “has now the choice of remaining childless or of accepting the final responsibility of the children she bears. Is this a solution?” she skeptically asked.76 In fact the Legitimation League lasted only a few years and at its dissolution in 1898 had done nothing for the status of illegitimate children. Until World War I British feminists gave this issue less attention than those of other countries. The rate of illegitimacy in Britain was low (about 5 percent of all births), and the absence of military conscription, which made the sheer numbers of the rising generation less important than on the European continent, diminished the impact of the natalist arguments that buttressed continental campaigns on behalf of the “illegitimate.” In the countries whose legal systems were based on the Napoleonic Code, the issue gained much higher public visibility. For unlike the British legal code, which at least in theory allowed paternity suits, the Napoleonic Code forbade them; “la recherche de la paternité est interdite,” declared the infamous Paragraph 340. During the nineteenth century, legal systems based on the Code were in force in France and in many nations that had earlier been included in the Napoleonic empire: Belgium, the Netherlands, the western lands of Germany, several cantons of Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Thus the debate on this provision was international in scope. In the 1870s, French legislators who were appalled by their country’s recent defeat by Germany claimed that the law forbidding paternity suits contributed to the high rates of infant mortality that, combined with low birthrates, sapped military strength. All of the French feminist organizations founded in the 1890s made the “recherche de la paternité” one of their most prominent issues. Opposition to Paragraph 340 was a cause that transcended class lines. The middle-class French Group for Feminist Studies took the lead in formulating alternative legislation, and socialist leaders such as Léonie Rouzade, Aline Valette, and Nelly Roussel missed no opportunity to

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excoriate the “bourgeois morality” that victimized unmarried mothers and their children.77 Between 1883 and 1900, Gustave Rivet, a left-wing radical deputy from Grenoble, introduced four proposals to modify the law into the Chamber of Deputies (the last of which, in revised form, finally became law in 1912). Rivet was supported by male colleagues—among them René Viviani, Paul Strauss, and Maurice Viollette—who denounced the law as a disgrace to the French nation.78 But how should the law be modified? On this question, French feminists disagreed among themselves and with their male allies. For the latter, the goal was the encouragement of marriage, two-parent families, and responsible male behavior. They insisted that fathers must take responsibility for their illegitimate children by giving them, insofar as possible, the same status as children born into marriage, including the right to bear the father’s name and to inherit from him. Paternal recognition conferred paternal authority, which empowered the father to remove the child from the mother’s custody (in 1907, this law was changed to give parental power to whichever parent recognized the child first, but if both recognized the child simultaneously, the authority was given to the father). The laws proposed by these legislators assumed male innocence and female mendacity, and thus set high standards of proof. They all required plaintiffs to give evidence of rape, kidnaping, a false promise of marriage, or a paternal relationship acknowledged in writing. Mothers who led a “notoriously immoral life” were not regarded as credible plaintiffs. And the proposed laws made an exception for married men, whom they did not require to support children conceived in adultery. The purpose of the law, said its proponents, was to encourage new marriages, not to disrupt existing ones by violating the rights of “legitimate” wives and heirs. Children of incestuous unions were also excluded.79 Most French feminists objected that these provisions were intended to protect fathers more than mothers and children. A vocal minority set off a heated debate by objecting that the legalization of paternity suits was not the best solution to the problems of the unmarried mother and her child. At an international conference held in Paris in 1900 Maria Pognon, a founding member of the National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes françaises), declared that “this research into paternity is a violation of the mother’s dignity,” and would “force the man to defend himself by blackening the reputation of the mother.” A better solution, she proposed, would be to establish a national maternity fund which would directly subsidize the mother and child.80 Although Pognon’s proposal was rejected by the majority of this conference, some influential feminist leaders agreed with her. Paternity suits, remarked Nelly Roussel, could only be a provisional measure, for their ultimate effect would be to “consolidate patriarchy.” “Only maternity is certain,” she insisted “Therefore, the child belongs to the woman, and should carry the name of the mother and depend only on her.”81 The French government took an important step toward supporting mothers by passing a law in 1904 that provided some financial assistance to indigent unmarried mothers.82

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But most French feminists still believed that the delinquent father, though unworthy of the name or the powers of a parent, must be induced to support his child. In 1903 a group of feminists led by the National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes françaises) and the French Group for Feminist Studies introduced an alternative legislative proposal, which required merely a reasonable presumption (based on the existence of a sexual relationship with the mother at the time of conception) rather than a “proof ” of paternity, gave the child a monetary support payment rather than rights of inheritance from the father, did not exclude children of adultery and incest and, most importantly, left parental power with the mother.83 Similar to the laws that were current in some Germanic-language countries of Europe, this law would have made the unmarried mother the head of a matrilineal household. The feminists’ political allies in the Chamber of Deputies, however, objected that such a law would not serve their purpose: to encourage marriage and responsible fatherhood.84 The law that was passed in 1912 required written proof of paternity, forbade the recognition of children of adultery or incest, and in addition provided for a heavy penalty for the plaintiff whose attempt to prove paternity was unsuccessful, and who therefore was automatically suspected of perjury.85 This law could benefit only a small minority of illegitimate children. In Belgium and the Netherlands, both of which had legal codes based on the Napoleonic Code, the debate on the paragraph forbidding paternity suits followed a similar path. In 1894–95 the Belgian lawyer Louis Frank, a cofounder of the Belgian League for the Rights of Women, gave a course on women and the law at the University of Brussels.86 Frank called the statute on illegitimacy in the Belgian civil code a “barbarous violation of the rights of the child” and a “revolting injustice toward the mother” who bore “all the responsibility for an act committed by both parents.”87 The first program formulated by the Belgian League for the Rights of Women in 1897 demanded the right to investigate the paternity of children born to unmarried women. A law of 1908 allowed paternity, including inheritance rights, to be judicially recognized in cases that involved rape or abduction, and required support payments in other cases. As in the French law, men who were married at the time of the alleged pregnancy were immune to paternity suits: here, too, the rights of the “legitimate” family took precedence over those of children born outside it.88 In the Netherlands, the issue of paternity stimulated a broad debate on sexual morality and family structure. In the journal De Vrouw, a group led by Marie Mensing and Nellie van Kol asserted woman’s right to free love and to motherhood outside of marriage. This group, which historian Selma Sevenhuijsen associates with an “autonomous” form of feminism, urged that no mother should be forced to undergo the humiliating procedure of suing a delinquent father for child-support. Instead, she should be supported either by a community of women (as in the French Mothers’ Mutual Societies) or by the state. All children, insisted van Kol, were members of the “great national family, which is as legitimate as any other.”89

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But Wilhelmina Drucker, the editor of the journal Evolutie and the head of the major Dutch feminist organization, the Free Women’s Association (Vrije VrouwenVereeniging), called this approach romantic and irresponsible. Drucker, born in 1847, was a child of unmarried parents who had been deserted by her father and knew from personal experience how much economic hardship and social discrimination were suffered by the “illegitimate.”90 She insisted that the real issue was the welfare of the child rather than the rights of the parents. “Parental duty,” she wrote, “defines the position of two individuals, who have merged their identities in a third human being.”91 Drucker believed that the child had a right to know its father, partly because an awareness of heredity and blood relationship served individual and social interests. She argued that the unmarried mother must be legally required to reveal the father’s name, and that the father should assume the same responsibility as he would have toward a child born in wedlock.92 In 1908, a new Dutch law required support payments from men who could reasonably be presumed to have fathered children, but did not make the child a member of the father’s family. Guardianship over the child could be exercised by the father or the mother (whichever recognized the child first) or by the state. If he could prove that other men might reasonably have fathered the child, the putative father could escape support obligations.93 This outcome did not meet the expectations of feminists. Reformers in other countries where laws were derived from the Napoleonic Code also raised the issue of unmarried paternity. In Italy, Anna Maria Mozzoni, the founder of the League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests (Lega per la promozione degli interessi femminili) in 1881, had by the 1890s become a supporter of the Italian Socialist Party. But the male leadership of the Party was not sympathetic to her version of feminism. As a member of a committee formed to propose a law permitting the investigation of paternity, Mozzoni was disturbed when some of her socialist colleagues declared that such laws would be only a provisional measure, to be superseded by a “matriarchal utopia” in which motherhood was supported by the state rather than by individual fathers. “That mothers do, and must do, everything possible for the welfare of their children is clear,” remarked Mozzoni, “but my opponents have not shown me why they want to emancipate men from their responsibilities.”94 In 1909 a reform proposal was introduced into the Italian parliament with the backing of the Italian National Council of Women, who denounced the “egotism of the male, which has not yet developed into the conscience of the father,” and urged Italian legislators to restore their nation’s honor by following the example set by so many other nations.95 But the revised measure was not passed. In Portugal, under the influence of the Republican League of Portuguese Women, the law was modified to permit some paternity suits in 1909.96 In Switzerland, where each canton had its own legal code, only those that had belonged to the Napoleonic Empire—chiefly French-speaking cantons in the West—prohibited paternity suits. When the first unified legal code was

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drafted for the Confederation, feminist organizations launched a major campaign for the reform of these statutes. Their success was very limited: the new legal code of 1912 allowed paternity suits in some cases, but (like the French law) exempted married men and those who alleged that the child’s mother had led an “immoral life” from support obligations.97 The Germanic legal traditions of Europe gave the unmarried mother and her child a marginally higher status than did the Napoleonic Code and the national codes derived from it. According to the laws of Germany (as of 1900) the unmarried mother was entitled to sue the putative father for the payment of the expenses of her delivery and for the support of the child until adulthood, usually until the age of sixteen. Such a claim required only the presumption, rather than the proof, of paternity: a man who had sexual relations with the woman at the time of conception could be identified as the father, and the burden was placed on the man to disprove paternity rather than on the woman to prove it. Unlike the French law that made membership in the father’s family the result of a successful paternity suit, the Germanic laws ruled out any blood relationship to the father, but defined the child as a full member of the mother’s family. Some French feminists admired these laws, but their German colleagues pointed out that they provided few real advantages. For the support obligation was low—usually based on the mother’s, rather than the father’s standard of living––and easy to evade. According to a principle cumbersomely known as the exceptio plurium concumbentium (“exception in the case of many partners”) a man could evade a support obligation by proving that other men might possibly have fathered the child. In this case, the child was punished for the mother’s alleged misbehavior by being deprived of support.98 In Germany as elsewhere, debates on this issue split the feminist movement. In 1896 the League of German Women’s Associations, which represented the mainstream woman’s movement, gave special mention to these laws in their protest against the provisions of the new Civil Code. “The unfavorable circumstances under which these unfortunate children live,” stated Olga von Beschwitz in her summary of the organization’s position, “results in the early death of a very large number, and the moral corruption of others.” The organization demanded that fathers be held accountable: support payments should be set according to the father’s rather than the mother’s standard of living, support must continue until the child was twenty-one rather than sixteen years of age, and above all the pernicious exceptio plurium must be repealed.99 The putative father, remarked the legal scholar Marianne Weber, could hardly complain if he were burdened with the support of someone else’s child, for he had assumed that risk when he entered the relationship with the mother.100 The organization also demanded that the guardianship of the child, which was assigned to the maternal grandfather or to a public agency, should be granted to the mother herself, but that she should be provided with an advisor to support her paternity suit.101 Most moderate feminists stopped short of integrating the child into the father’s

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family—a measure that they feared would threaten the rights of “legitimate” wives and children. But the League for the Protection of Mothers took a more radical position. The group’s founder, Ruth Bré, who was herself of “illegitimate” birth, declared that unmarried mothers must be saved from the indignity of paternity suits by admission to an all-female community, supported by private funding and if necessary by the state. Like the Dutch Wilhelmina Drucker, however, Helene Stöcker refused to consider a revival of the archaic mother-headed family. “A woman and a child,” she declared, “can never be a complete family.”102 But rather than defend the existing form of the two-parent household, legal marriage, Stöcker and her colleagues reconfigured the discussion by discarding the entire concept of “legitimacy.” Parenthood, they asserted, should not require the permission of church and state, and the child’s rights should in no way depend on the marital status of the parents. Why, after all, should some children receive more support from their parents than others? The organization’s manifesto demanded that children, whether born inside or outside marriage, should have the same rights in regard to both father and mother, and that no member of such a family should be subject to legal discrimination or social ostracism.103 The leaders of the League combined a strong defense of individual liberty with an expansive vision of the state. Children were the nation’s future, the group’s manifestoes declared, and public policy should place the survival and welfare of the new generation above the protection of an outmoded and cruel religious morality. To the claims of physicians that the children of unmarried mothers were likely to be genetically inferior, Stöcker and her colleagues responded that, on the contrary, these children were “a powerful source of national strength,” because most were born to lovers who were “in the bloom of youth and health.”104 The group called upon the Imperial, state, and local governments to aid these families through social insurance benefits, which should be distributed without regard to marital status. The League’s defense of free love and unmarried motherhood was bitterly rejected not only by conservative pastors and politicians, who sometimes summoned the police to prohibit public appearances by the group’s spokespersons, but by the more respectable feminists of the League of German Women’s Organizations. The leader of that organization, Helene Lange, reproached Stöcker and her colleagues with undermining the family and the very foundations of social order: “The women’s movement, within which women have become conscious of their responsibilities,” she declared, “can only emphasize one point. It will always regard the strengthening of the moral and social position of women, who are more devoted than men to the ideal of restricting sexual activity to marriage, as the solution of the ‘sexual question.’ ”105 A similar debate was carried on in Austria, where the law corresponded to that of Germany except that theoretically all the men who came into question as fathers could be made to support a child. The mainstream League of Austrian Women’s organizations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine) which

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was headed by Auguste Fickert, demanded that the child of unmarried parents should have rights of inheritance from the father and that nonmarital unions should have legal recognition.106 Both philanthropic and practical work on behalf of unmarried mothers and their children was carried out by the Austrian League for the Protection of Mothers, which was founded in 1911.107 However, in neither Germany nor Austria did these campaigns result in significant improvements in the legal status of unmarried mothers and their children during the prewar period. In Scandinavia, campaigns to change the laws regarding “illegitimacy” met with greater success. Since the latter years of the nineteenth century, Scandinavia had been a center of child-welfare activism. In Sweden Frida Steenhoff, who was the first to announce the “century of the child,” insisted that every child must have a right to life, health, and education, regardless of the marital status of its parents. Another Swedish woman, Ellen Key, declared that every healthy woman, married or unmarried, had the right to become a mother, and carried this controversial message to a wide international audience in Europe and North America.108 Norway, where women won the right to vote in 1913, was the first country actually to pass a new law on the status of “illegitimate” children and provided an important example for other Western countries. The Norwegian law was introduced into the legislature 1909 and finally passed in 1915. It was named the Castberg Law for its author, the social-democratic Minister Johan Castberg, who was influenced by his relative, the activist Katti Anker-Møller.109 She herself favored state support for all mothers, regardless of marital status.110 But other Norwegian feminists were reluctant to let the father evade his responsibility, insisting that (in the words of a spokesperson at the 1910 International Congréss of Women in Toronto) “before the duty of the municipality goes the duty of the father.”111 And in fact the legislation, when passed in 1915, represented a compromise between these two positions that was weighted toward paternal responsibility. In cases where paternity could be established, the “child of unmarried parents” (deliberately so named to avoid the pejorative term “illegitimate”) was entitled to carry the father’s name and to inherit from him. The father could be identified either by the mother herself (who was legally required to give his name to the authorities) or by other evidence that he had sexual relations with the mother at the time of impregnation (this term was used instead of the usual “conception” to stress the father’s responsibility). If several men came into question, all were responsible for paying a portion of the child’s maintenance. The child’s status differed from that of a “legitimate” child in only two important ways: the child normally lived with the mother, who was responsible for its care, and was entitled to financial support from the mother as well as the father. In the Germanic legal tradition, the Norwegian law integrated the child into the mother’s family. In most respects, the Norwegian legislators validated the new ideal of the egalitarian couple who shared responsibility for the children in their care—a responsibility that was guaranteed by the state, which assumed some aspects

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of legal guardianship.112 An innovative aspect of the Norwegian law was that the responsibility for establishing and collecting support payments was given not to the mother herself, but to the local governmental authorities, who were empowered to enforce compliance. Recognizing that in some cases paternity would be impossible to establish, the law also provided for a municipal subsidy for indigent mothers and children.113 In this survey of international debates among feminists on the status of the unmarried mother and her child, we have seen that two discourses overlapped and conflicted, one centered on a matrilineal and mother-headed household, and another on an egalitarian parental couple, which even in the absence of legal marriage shared responsibility for their children. As both the Norwegian and the French cases suggest, the latter tendency prevailed. Lawgivers placed the major support obligation on fathers, and involved the state chiefly as the enforcer of that obligation. Most feminists affirmed this solution; only a few pointed out that it was often the least realistic of all. Among these was the level-headed legal Camilla Jellinek, who in 1902 had founded a network of counseling centers (Rechtsschutzverband für Frauen) in which female volunteers provided legal advice to women throughout Germany. Jellinek had assisted with hundreds of paternity suits, and had come to the conclusion that the notion of paternal responsibility “was fine in theory, but in fact a fantasy.” In the vast majority of cases, she complained, the father “cannot be found, or if he is found, has only enough money to support himself, or he has gotten married and has only enough to support his family, or even if he is required to pay, he changes his address so often that collection becomes impossible.”114 Jellinek approved of the role that the Norwegian law allotted to the state in collecting child support payments from fathers. But she was exceedingly skeptical about the provisions that established the child’s rights to support and inheritance from the father’s family. Most of these fathers, she pointed out, were not rich seducers, but as young and poor as the mothers of their children, and were unlikely to be able to fulfill their obligations. Jellinek concluded that for the sake of the children, who should not suffer for the imprudence of their parents, some form of state support for such families was the only solution. Even if the father never repaid the state, she concluded, “fully recovered mothers and healthy children would fully compensate the state for its support.”115 During the prewar period, feminists in several Western European countries joined a campaign that had two objectives: to transform marriage into an egalitarian and cooperative relationship, and to raise the status of unmarried mothers and their children. They hoped that both of these reforms would contribute to the resolution of the maternal dilemma by rescuing mothers from the subjection of marriage and the outcast disgrace of “illegitimate” child-bearing and recognizing them as free citizens. But this era’s debates also raised problems which would continue to beset policymakers throughout the twentieth century. For given that motherhood was now a public concern, how should the state support mothers? Indirectly, by encouraging monogamous

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marriage, vindicating the rights of married women, and enforcing paternal support obligations? Or directly, by recognizing and subsidizing mother-headed households? And which of these arrangements would do the most to promote the freedom and dignity of mothers? These questions would become even more important in the context of the debate on the economic basis of motherhood, which will be the subject of the next chapter.

The kindergarten of the Pestalozzi-Froebel House, an educational institution in Berlin. (Photograph from Clara Richter, Bilder aus dem Kinderleben des Pestalozzi-Froebel Hauses, Hamburg, 1904.)



E           E        ? T   D         M        , –

L  W Legal equality was an important goal, but it meant little without economic independence. Mothers who depended on their male partners for their own subsistence and that of their children could hardly develop into autonomous individuals or responsible parents. Though women’s dependence and domestic servitude were age-old problems, the new century brought the hope of new solutions. In the mid-nineteenth century, when families were large, births were spaced throughout the woman’s reproductive period, and average female life expectancy was less than fifty years, motherhood might well be a lifetime task that excluded any other occupation. But at the turn of the twentieth century, changes in women’s lives called this traditional pattern into question. Must motherhood consume an entire life? Or was it a limited commitment that could coexist with other forms of work, including paid employment? For some, this latter possibility seemed to point the way to a more fully human existence, in which work might confer not only economic independence but also self-esteem. “What women who have fully thought out the position want, is not this forced alternative between activity in the human world, and control of their own economic position on the one hand, and marriage and children on the other, but both,” wrote the British socialist Mabel Atkinson in 1914. “Women do not want either love or work, but both, and the full meaning of the feminist movement will not develop until this demand becomes conscious and articulate among the rank and file of the movement.”1 This ideal of emancipation through a combination of family life and paid work would engage successive generations of feminists throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This innovative, indeed radical redefinition of the maternal role is overlooked by many recent historical accounts. For example, the prominent historian Ute Gerhard associates “first-wave” German feminist movements with a traditional ideal of motherhood that “left the prevailing gendered division of labor intact, adapted itself to the patriarchal order, and could on

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many occasions be used against women.”2 On the contrary, prominent figures of this era challenged both the conventional division of labor and the patriarchal order that lent its moral sanction to domestic slavery. They proposed two new ways of combining motherhood with economic independence. The first, which I shall call “employment,” was to enable women to combine paid work and child-rearing. Isolde, heroine of Helene Böhlau’s novel, Halbtier (A Lower Form of Life), dreamed of “a child and work,” and claimed that all women needed “work to broaden their minds, and a child to make their hearts rejoice” in order to realize their full potential.3 Proponents of maternal employment called upon the state to assume many tasks traditionally performed by mothers, including child-care and some forms of household work. The second solution—which I will call “endowment”—was to regard motherhood itself as a kind of profession, to be remunerated by the state for the substantial but limited period when children were young. The eponymous heroine of H.G. Wells’s widely read novel Ann Veronica, looked forward to a period when motherhood itself would be recognized as a valuable form of work. “Across that world was written in letters of light: ‘Endowment of motherhood’. Suppose in some complex yet conceivable way women were endowed, were no longer financially and socially dependent on men.”4 These debates on the economic status of mothers laid the foundation for the welfare state, which made the well-being of mothers and children a public concern. Much recent historical research has examined the issues raised by maternal employment in relation to public policy.5 This chapter, though it draws heavily on these works, will focus less on the state than on the maternal role itself. For whatever their utopian hopes, feminists acknowledged that progress toward public policies designed to solve the problems of the working mother was slow indeed. Meanwhile, the individual woman who strove to combine love and work faced practical difficulties, painful choices, and emotional conflicts—in fact, the maternal dilemma. The combination of paid work and motherhood was old—it had shaped the experience of women for centuries—but it had not usually been perceived as a dilemma. Traditionally, mothers had worked in agriculture and in family workshops, but such work was not generally distinguished from maternal duties. The removal of some industrial work from the family economy in the nineteenth century brought some mothers into workplaces outside the home. In the opinion of most nineteenth-century commentators, this was not a dilemma to be solved but an evil to be eliminated. These moralists were concerned less for the actual welfare of mothers or children than for the integrity of the family, which according to conventional moral notions depended for its stability on the father’s control of his household.6 The hardships suffered by the working woman, and especially by the working mother, were attributed not to material factors such as low wages and unhealthy surroundings but to the moral disorder caused by the removal of women from the “natural” authority of father or husband. With female independence were associated a host of other evils. In a famously extreme

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version of the argument, the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon reduced women’s career options to two: housewife or harlot.7 These moral claims served the material interests of employers and workers alike. By deploring married women’s work as an evil, employers resisted pressure to improve such workers’ pay and conditions or to provide benefits such as child-care. Similarly, labor unions, most of which were male-dominated, became zealous opponents of married women’s work and partisans of domesticity. Underlying this ideology was the fear that the availability of women workers, whose willingness to accept low wages was notorious, would undercut men’s claim to a “family wage” sufficient to support a wife and children.8 Even nineteenth-century women’s movements, which were disproportionately supported by unmarried professional women, regarded paid work as a survival necessity for single but not for married women. John Stuart Mill, a hero of nineteenth-century feminism, approved of the “common arrangement” which defined men as breadwinners and women as full-time domestic workers and mothers—a division of labor which he believed gave the mother “not only her fair share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint existence.”9 While ostensibly idealizing mothers, this discourse in fact made their work invisible. The contrast so often invoked by moralists between the employed mother torn from her children by the factory bell and the serene mistress of hearth and home was misleading on both sides. Few married women, and thus few mothers were engaged in full-time work. In 1907 in Germany only 26 percent of married women were classified as employed, and only 21 percent of female industrial workers were married.10 In 1901 only 10 percent of British married women were classified as full-time employees. The figure was much higher in France, where in 1911 48 percent of married women were described as “occupied,” but because of the much lower birthrate of French families many of these were not responsible for dependent children. But although most mothers did not work full time, they did not enjoy a purely domestic existence that was free of paid labor. For many mothers were forced to work for pay, and when excluded from factory work they turned to still more exploitative and underpaid forms of employment such as domestic industry, which because it was done in the home was invisible to policymakers. Also invisible was the arduous labor of child-rearing. Economists differentiated between reproduction and production and asserted that only the latter counted as economically valuable work. But mothers often regarded this distinction as artificial, and ascribed economic as well as emotional value to their occupation. British working-class mothers of the early twentieth century were proud of their accomplishments, writes Ellen Ross, and “saw themselves as workers for their husbands and children: productive rather than emotional functions were at the center of female identity.”11 At the turn of the twentieth century the discourse on motherhood, work, and the work of mothers was transformed by a new view of health, and child welfare as concerns of the state and not simply of the family. Maternity, though still regarded as a moral duty, was also re-conceptualized

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as a productive activity that manufactured the most important commodity of all, citizens. “Men make tools, but women bring new people into the world; men forge weapons, but soldiers grow up in the arms of their mothers,” declared the progressive German politician Friedrich Naumann.12 As Kathleen Canning observes, the focus of the discussion shifted from moral to medical issues— how did various forms of labor affect the female body and its all-important reproductive functions?13 This change in the climate of opinion presented both new possibilities and new problems to feminist speakers, who at the turn of the century assumed an ever more prominent role in the discussion. Although demands for the exclusion of mothers from industrial workplaces continued, maternal employment was now presented less as a moral evil to be forbidden than as a medical problem to be managed.14 Moreover, another development—the increased number of educated women who aspired to professional advancement— brought the issue of maternal work into the center of feminist agendas. In the nineteenth century, most professional women remained unmarried and this celibate way of life was regarded, both by the women themselves and by the surrounding culture, as an acceptable alternative to marriage and motherhood. But during our period, natalist propagandists attacked both the celibate professional woman herself and the sinister forces that had estranged her from her maternal duties. “The human race and our culture need the most numerous possible offspring, and from the most capable and intelligent women,” wrote the Dutch sociologist S.R. Steinmetz, “thus feminism, which opposes this goal, must be condemned.”15 As Karen Offen points out, feminists in all Western countries protested that the emancipation of women would not undermine but encourage their commitment to motherhood.16 Some—especially sexual reformers—agreed that the celibate life of the professional woman was indeed unsatisfactory. “Only in the relationship between man and woman can the complete person emerge,” argued the German teacher Maria Lichnewska, and motherhood was the “strongest instinct” of the healthy woman.17 But Lichnewska and others insisted that even this deprived existence was preferable to that of the dependent and powerless wife and mother. The “new woman” would consent to become a mother only if she could escape domestic servitude and preserve her economic independence. Some feminists created a new female role model: the tired but happy superwoman who combined career success and familial bliss. But others, including the prominent Ellen Key, objected that this overvaluation of work outside the home implicitly degraded the value of woman’s most important task, motherhood. Only a glimpse into their life stories can reveal the full complexity of the issues confronted by these women, whose conflicting commitments to maternity and professional or political engagement plunged them into insoluble dilemmas. Whereas their rhetoric emphasized patriotism and the needs of the state, their own decisions, whether painful or joyful, resulted from highly personal considerations. Some, who had accepted the traditional choice between motherhood and career, felt disappointed and deprived: “for

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years I could never look at children without being painfully reminded of my lost hopes,” wrote Alice Salomon, a founder of the profession of social work in Germany.18 Others had the opportunity for marriage and motherhood, and reluctantly refused it. Helene Stöcker turned down a proposal from her lover, Alexander Tille, who was a widower with two young sons. “I had grown up in a large family,” she wrote later, “and I had always thought it natural to include love, marriage, and children among my most important goals. But not yet, I pleaded inwardly. For my drive toward intellectual development, toward the development of my personality, was just as innate and natural.”19 Some well-known leaders who did marry, such as the Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs and the British author Olive Schreiner, were devastated by the early deaths of their children. “But, looking back, despite all the sorrow,” wrote Jacobs, “I still count myself lucky that I know how it feels to be a mother, that I have held my child in my arms, even though it was for but one day.”20 Some, such as the German socialist Lily Braun, were happy to be mothers and struggled to reconcile activism with child-rearing. “Since the birth of my child,” reflected the heroine of Braun’s autobiographical novel, “the problems of women’s emancipation were no longer just theories. They cut into my own flesh—and I was not a factory worker, I did not have to work from morning to evening in the factory, far from my darling. I shuddered to think that anything like that should be possible, let alone necessary.”21 French feminists often proudly portrayed themselves as devoted mothers. For example, the autobiography of the French socialist Nelly Roussel presented her as a “loving and loved spouse” and the “happy mother of two charming children.” But according to her biographer, Elinor Accampo, Roussel’s frequent speaking tours prevented her from playing much of a role in her children’s upbringing.22 These dilemmas were, of course, not limited to these elite circles; for example, Kathleen Canning describes how female factory workers invoked “the simultaneity of work and family in shaping women’s identity” to differentiate their own lives from those of the men of their class.23 Feminists asserted the liberty of all mothers to make the choices that were most appropriate for them.

“O S  H  S U H T”: T W M Advocates of women’s emancipation challenged virtually all conventional notions of female difference, whether of physical strength, intellectual acuity, or emotional stability, that were invoked to bar women from various kinds of work. During the prewar era, the British Olive Schreiner claimed for women “our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labour of the Children of Woman” as an indispensable condition of gender equality.24 But, argued the German socialist Lily Braun, feminists now faced a “great problem, how to reconcile this equality with the differentiation of the sexes.25 Without provision for that major form of gender

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difference, motherhood, the rights of women in the workplace could never be successfully won.26 In a climate of opinion that regarded the employment of married women as an evil to be avoided or a social problem to be solved, some feminists shocked public opinion by presenting such work in a positive light. Though they admitted that employment outside the home often brought more hardship than satisfaction, many also saw it as an essential condition for women’s emancipation. They expanded the critique of the laws of marriage discussed in the previous chapter by pointing out that an egalitarian marriage relationship was impossible for a woman who was economically dependent. During the nineteenth century, this was considered a problem chiefly for the unmarried women, who without a vocation often had no choice but to marry a man whom she did not love. But some influential authors, such as the socialists Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, declared that the dependency of the married woman was equally degrading. In the socialist state of the future, wrote Bebel, the married woman would “choose an occupation suited to her wishes, inclinations and abilities, and work under the same conditions as a man.” Released from the “sex slavery” of marriage, she would be economically and socially independent, “and the children that she will have will not impair her freedom, they will only increase her pleasure in life.”27 This analysis appealed across national boundaries to feminists, chiefly but not exclusively those of socialist or radical tendency. The British novelist Mona Caird, whose novel Daughters of Danaeus portrayed the soul-destroying effects of marital dependency on a talented woman, declared bitterly that “to be maintained, however luxuriously, without earning anything over which there is undisputed control, is to be, in so far, in the position of a slave. . . . It will be seen that the married woman is exactly in this position, inasmuch as her work in the home does not procure her independence. She is the working partner in a firm in whose profits she has no share.”28 Several theorists who gained international recognition offered appealing visions of a brighter future. Chief among these were the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the British Olive Schreiner, and the German Lily Braun. Gilman’s central work, Woman and Economics, was translated into at least six European languages—German, Dutch, French, Polish, Hungarian, and Russian—and her translators included prominent figures such as Aletta Jacobs in the Netherlands and Marie Stritt in Germany. Jacobs, who also translated Schreiner’s book, Woman and Labour, considered that both authors had laid a new scientific foundation for the women’s movement.29 Both Gilman and Braun were widely discussed in Hungary, and although no English translation of Lily Braun’s The Woman Question (Die Frauenfrage) seems to have existed, the British Fabian Women’s Group was sufficiently interested in her ideas to commission one of their members to report on them in 1910.30 British feminists also admired Gilman: the Englishwoman’s Review called Gilman’s Women and Economics “more calculated to stimulate thought than any book that has appeared of recent years.”31 In 1904, Gilman spoke at the International Women’s Congress in Berlin and looked forward

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to a utopian future when married women would be economically independent and “man and woman will stand together as free people.” By all accounts, the speech was received with great enthusiasm by delegates from many nations.32 Braun, Gilman, and Schreiner adopted a historical and anthropological perspective on the relationship of motherhood and work. From the prehistoric period to the early modern era, they claimed, industry had been based in the household, and married women had engaged in productive as well as reproductive work. Only very recently had the industrial revolution removed productive work from the home—two-thirds of the world’s work, Schreiner speculated, had thus been removed from the hands of women.33 This trend had not elevated married women to an idealized domestic role, but had rather reduced them to a harmful state of idleness and economic dependency which Schreiner called “sex parasitism.” The consequences, she warned, were likely to be disastrous to a new generation born to mothers who were physically, morally, and psychologically debilitated. Gilman likewise asserted that the degrading dependency of the married woman was physically as well as psychologically harmful to her children: “the more absolutely woman is segregated to sex-functions only . . . the more pathological does her motherhood become.”34 Some critics of Schreiner’s book pointed out that the notion of “sex parasitism” was highly specific to the leisured housewives of the middle class and hardly applied to the overburdened women of the working class, who might benefit from being relieved of their employment.35 But Lily Braun and others responded that, on the contrary, employment was of great importance to the working-class woman, for it transformed her from a “conservative element in society” to a “struggling and thinking human being.” Work alone, Braun insisted, was “the great emancipator, that leads her out of slavery to freedom.”36 Activists in many countries cited these popular works to support the expansion of women’s economic opportunities. Singled out as particularly unfair were the so-called marriage bars or celibacy clauses that forced women in civil service occupations to give up their positions when they married. Though they applied to all married women, these laws were justified by arguments that maternal employment damaged children and families, and thus targeted chiefly working mothers. As critics pointed out, such sentimental tributes to motherhood thinly disguised the self-interest of male professionals who hoped by this means to eliminate women from desirable jobs. In Germany, where such a clause applied to teachers, many delegates to a teachers’ conference held in 1904 asserted that the career woman who was fulfilled by her work was a better mother than the woman whose world was limited to her four walls. Hildegard Wegscheider-Ziegler, a teacher who had been ordered out of her classroom when she was pregnant, declared that “children need mothers who are role models. A teacher who has to work hard will be an example to her children and a valuable mother.”37 Several members of the British Fabian Women’s Group likewise deplored “the stultifying, paralyzing

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effect on children in the first years of their life of the mother whose activities are confined within the two or three-roomed homes of our great towns” and asserted that independent mothers raised healthier and happier children.38 And the Swiss Gertrud Woker, a university lecturer who was a disciple of Schreiner and Gilman, stated (along with many other theorists) that celibacy clauses actually discouraged motherhood, for many civil servants could not afford to marry and have children without the income from their employment.39 But if mothers were to be employed, the workplace must be adapted to their special needs. By contrast to the vanishing household system so nostalgically described by Schreiner, Gilman, and Braun, the modern workplace was structured for men and made no allowance for women’s reproductive role. In 1890, an international conference called in Berlin by the new German emperor, Wilhelm II, recommended several measures designed to protect women from the vulnerabilities imposed by pregnancy and childbearing, including a ban on night work and a shortened workday for women workers. During the succeeding two decades, these and other restrictions were legislated in many Western countries. Protective legislation gave rise to many protracted debates, the details of which were too complex to concern us here, within and among feminist organizations.40 Socialist women generally joined their male colleagues in supporting protection for women, while some middle-class leaders such as the Dutch Marie Rutgers-Hoitsema and Wilhelmine Drucker, opposed it as a limitation on female workers’ liberty and earning power.41 But even those who normally opposed protection conceded that some form of social support for pregnancy and childbearing was the indispensable condition for women’s participation in work, which otherwise they would be forced to leave when they became mothers. Those who took this position were faced with a theoretical problem of immense practical significance: how to redefine maternal obligations so that they could be combined with full-time work. Their solution to this problem was a minimal definition of motherhood that limited full-time maternal care to the period required for pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding, and thus called for only a short interruption in the mother’s employment. Throughout Europe, feminists demanded that this short period be covered by a maternity leave—which many believed should be made compulsory—and supported by government-sponsored maternity insurance or some other form of public subsidy. The need for maternity leave was documented by the research of French physicians such as the gynecologists Adolphe Pinard and Blanche EdwardsPilliet and the pediatrician Pierre Budin, who gained an international following.42 Their findings were confirmed by colleagues in other countries, for example, by the Germans Christian Klumker and Gustav Tugendreich, the Norwegian Katti Anker Møller, the British Caleb Saleeby, and many others. Childbirth had traditionally been defined as a danger to the woman herself, but these physicians redirected public concern to the health of her child. They pointed out that when economic pressures forced mothers to return to work soon after the birth, the infant was more likely to be artificially fed and

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was thus (given the difficulties of obtaining pure milk and clean water) much more likely to die of malnutrition or digestive diseases. Most medical opinion favored the extension of the maternity leave for at least six, and ideally eight, weeks after the birth. Pinard, whose practice included prenatal care, also declared on the basis of research conducted throughout the 1890s that mothers who rested from work for the final three months of pregnancy produced healthier babies than those who worked to term.43 In many Western European countries governments used these data to justify laws that made maternity leave compulsory for some categories of workers. In 1877 Switzerland became the first European country to mandate a leave for four weeks before and four weeks after the birth; in 1878 Germany mandated a leave of three weeks after the birth (which in 1908 was expanded to a period of six weeks, two weeks before and four weeks after the birth); in 1879 Italy required a leave of two weeks (later expanded to four). Austria (1885), Hungary (1884), Belgium (1889), Holland (1889), Norway (1892), and Denmark (1901) also mandated maternity leaves of varying length.44 Ironically France, the country most concerned about infant mortality, was among the last countries to decree a compulsory maternity leave, partly because of legislators’ reservations about state interference in the family. In 1913, the Strauss Law (Loi Strauss, named for Paul Strauss, a physician and legislator who was the most conspicuous advocate of protection for mothers) mandated a four-week leave following childbirth for all mothers who were employed outside the home.45 By 1900 the view that the survival and health of children were public concerns was so widely accepted that only a minority saw such measures as a restriction on the freedom of women to control their own working lives. Indeed, motherhood was often compared to military service, which also required a break from employment. Maguerite Durand, the editor of the main French feminist newspaper La Fronde, declared that the state had as much right to protect its children as to draft men into the army.46 But like military service, reformers added, motherhood deserved some form of compensation. “As motherhood is a social function,” explained Lily Braun, “the state must take it under its protection and ensure to all needy mothers the best possible care.”47 A model for such public assistance was provided by the work of private women’s organizations, which starting in the 1890s sponsored insurance funds to help working women through the economic hardships imposed by pregnancy and childbirth and to enable them to take additional time off in order to breast-feed their babies. In 1892, a garment makers’ union (Chambres syndicalistes des industries de l’aiguille) in Paris created the first such fund, known as a Maternal Aid Society (Mutualité Maternelle), which in return for premiums paid by mothers guaranteed a subsidy for six weeks before and six weeks after the birth.48 The concept rapidly spread to Italy, where in 1894 the socialist Paolina Schiff persuaded a Milan women’s organization, the League for the Defense of Women’s Interests (Lega per la tutela degli interessi feminili) to set up a maternity insurance fund for working

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women. The funds were financed both by premiums from the members and by contributions from wealthy benefactresses. Soon, many such local funds were established in Italian cities. The brochure that advertized the Turin fund expressed the hope that such efforts would unite “well-to-do mothers and needy mothers, whom nature has made equal in the joys and suffering of motherhood.”49 The founders of organizations such as the Dutch Mutual Society for the Protection of Women (Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming) and the German League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz) provided charitable services that often included support to needy mothers for childbirth and breast-feeding, with a particular emphasis on the unmarried mothers that more conventional charitable organizations often sanctimoniously rejected. But such private efforts could not suffice to solve the huge problem of maternal poverty. All these organizations called for public assistance, usually in the form of a state sponsored social insurance fund to support the compulsory maternity leaves which otherwise, they persuasively argued, merely deprived mothers of needed income. Such a demand raised complex questions about the maternal role. Insurance was based on the concept of “risk,” but whom did motherhood place “at risk”? All working mothers, all mothers, all potential mothers, families including fathers, the entire society? And to what other “risk” could maternity be compared? The closest analogy seemed to be illness. But many reformers argued that pregnancy and childbearing were not illnesses, but healthy and normal states that contributed to the general welfare. They should thus be supported by special insurance funds that were funded, not just by women or by mothers, but by all members of the society that depended for its survival on women’s willingness to bear and rear the next generation. The maternity funds that were founded in the prewar era hardly lived up to these ambitious claims. In 1912, a state-sponsored maternity insurance fund was founded in Italy, largely at the urging of the feminists who had been so active in founding private maternity funds. But because Italy had no compulsory public insurance system, no mechanism or precedent existed for extending the responsibility to the entire society. The fund was narrowly written for women industrial workers and supported only by the contributions of the women themselves and their employers. The covered workers immediately protested against this equation of “women” and “mother,” for most women who had been forced to pay into the fund while they were employed quit their jobs when they became pregnant and thus were not entitled to claim the benefits! In this predominantly rural economy, moreover, industrial workers constituted a small percentage of the female workforce. Neither the large group of women who worked in agriculture and domestic service, nor the still larger group who did not work for wages were covered. And the fact that the fund covered unmarried as well as married mothers gave rise to a popular protest that was instigated by the clergy, who charged that such godless innovations encouraged immoral conduct.50 A similar fund was proposed by legislators in Sweden, another country that was still largely rural and lacked a compulsory public insurance system.

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There, as in Italy, the insurance fund was designed to cover only female industrial workers, and to be supported only by their contributions and those of their employers. Feminists of both liberal and socialist persuasions objected vociferously to the essentialist assumption that all women workers ran the “risk” of motherhood, and must therefore carry the main financial burden. In Sweden as in Italy, many women resigned their jobs when they became mothers and thus never benefitted from their premiums. A still more important objection to this ill-conceived scheme focused on gender equality, a principle often forgotten amid the high-flown tributes to the glories of motherhood. “Fathers are not mentioned in the proposal,” protested a female trade-unionist in 1912. “Does the child have only a mother and no father?”51 Some opponents also believed such subsidies, especially to unmarried mothers, encouraged fathers to be irresponsible. Others pointed out that the limitation of coverage to the small group of industrial workers ignored the needs of the majority of mothers who did not belong to this category. Largely because of these objections, the proposal was withdrawn, and Swedish mothers had to wait for the passage of a comprehensive social insurance plan in the 1930s to gain coverage for maternity leaves. Slightly better remedies were available in the few countries that already had compulsory social insurance systems that covered sickness, accidents, and old age. Unlike Sweden and Italy, Germany was a heavily industrialized country where women, though a minority of all industrial workers, were numerous in a few industries. Germany was the first country to establish a state-mandated compulsory insurance program (funded chiefly by workers and employers), which classified maternity as an “illness” and financed maternity leave for workers in the occupations that were covered. In 1883 new mothers who worked in industry were given coverage for three weeks after childbirth; in 1892 this period was extended to four weeks, and in 1903 to six weeks.52 In Austria, where a state-sponsored insurance system was established in 1888, some working mothers were entitled to insurance coverage for four weeks.53 These systems insured maternity on the same terms as illness or injury, at a rate—one-half to two-thirds of the normal wage—that was designed to discourage malingering. Critics pointed out that this low rate of coverage often forced women to return to work (sometimes illegally) before the end of the mandatory rest period. In 1901 Lily Braun, who was influenced by Paolina Schiff and by the Belgian reformer Louis Frank, called for the creation of a separate insurance fund that would cover all mothers for four weeks before and eight weeks after birth at the level of the average wage and would provide free medical treatment, drugs, and home care for mother and child. Braun specified that the cost must be borne not by mothers alone but by all taxpayers, especially the single people and childless couples who she believed led “a much more carefree life than married people with large families.”54 By 1907 both the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine) and socialist women’s groups advocated governmentsubsidized maternity insurance. But they reluctantly decided that the

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improvement of the existing coverage through the reform of the health insurance system was a more practical goal than the creation of a separate maternity fund.55 In 1907 the League for the Protection of Mothers, which had placed maternity insurance at the center of its program, addressed a petition to the Reichstag that asserted that the employment of mothers was not a social evil to be abolished but “a necessary result of our economic development.”56 The petition demanded financial support for mothers, married and unmarried, in all occupations (not just the industrial occupations that were currently covered) and for the female dependents of male workers for six weeks before and six weeks after the birth. In addition, the petition demanded that the services of a midwife or physician be provided if necessary, and that cash payments known as “nursing premiums” (“Stillprämien”) be issued to mothers who undertook to breast-feed their infants after the period of coverage expired. These campaigns gained limited results—in 1911 the term was extended to eight weeks, the granting of medical benefits was made optional, and coverage was extended to groups such as agricultural and domestic workers not previously covered. In Austria, feminist groups launched a petition in 1907 for the extension of maternity coverage to twelve weeks. But such efforts brought few results until the war years.57 At the urging of the League of Swiss Women’s Associations (Bund schweizerischer Frauenvereine), Switzerland included six weeks of maternity coverage and four additional weeks’ allowance for mothers who breast-fed in a state-financed health insurance system that was founded in 1912, but because membership was voluntary a limited number of women received benefits.58 In 1911, partly due to the campaign waged by organizations such as the Women’s Cooperative Guild, Great Britain’s new social insurance system allotted a small maternity allowance to a limited group of wage-earning industrial workers. In 1913 the French law that made maternity leave compulsory also afforded a small government-financed allowance to mothers below a certain income.59 As many historians of social policy point out, these and other reforms, however limited, were highly significant as first steps toward the development of the welfare state. But they also illustrated the many problems involved in a model of motherhood that was confined to the biological functions of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. Despite feminists’ protest against this pejorative language, maternity insurance schemes classified motherhood negatively as an illness, which like other illnesses must necessitate only a short break in the woman’s employment. They did nothing for mothers who were not employed, and for the many employed women—such as those engaged in domestic or agricultural work—whose occupations did not fall into the covered categories. And the problem became even more serious when the social as well as the biological aspects of motherhood were considered. Obviously, child-rearing responsibilities did not end after one or two months of breast-feeding, when the infant was almost as much at risk as on the day of its birth. But to campaign for the lengthening of the compulsory maternity leave might play into the hands of those who proposed the exclusion of all

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married women from industrial or civil-service jobs. “A return to the old idea of ‘motherhood or work,’ ” warned the German Alice Salomon, would endanger the livelihood of the many mothers who “depend on their work to support themselves and their children.”60 If full-time motherhood was to be limited to such a short period, then the care of children must obviously be entrusted to someone other than the biological mother. In wealthy households, this assistance was provided by servants. But some utopian dreamers, most of whom were inspired by Braun and Gilman, looked forward to more fair and egalitarian solutions. Gilman, herself a divorced mother who had made the heart-breaking decision to relinquish custody of her child to her ex-husband, insisted that the prevalent tendency to idealize “mother-love” actually demonstrated a boundless contempt for the difficult and complex work of child-rearing. Mothers too often lacked both the natural talent and the specialized knowledge for this task, which Gilman recommended be left to experts. Both Gilman and Braun envisaged a reorganized form of the family in which the collective household with central kitchen, laundry facilities, and cleaning services would replace the scandalously inefficient labor of the housewife. Such households would provide child-care centers equipped with a playground and gymnasium and staffed by teachers trained in kindergarten methods. “It is no new and daring heresy to suggest that babies need better education than the individual mother now gives them,” Gilman explained. “It is simply a little further extension of the steadily expanding system of human education which is coming upon us, as civilization grows. And it no more infringes on the mother’s rights, the mother’s duties, the mother’s pleasures, than does the college or the school.”61 In the Netherlands the ideas of Braun and Gilman gained high prestige through the support of such leaders as Aletta Jacobs and Wilhelmina Drucker, head of the Free Women’s Association (Vrije Vrouwenvereeniging). This organization’s newspaper, Evolutie, championed the collective household and claimed that children would be much better off with qualified kindergarten teachers than with their unqualified mothers, to many of whom motherhood was a “game, and the baby a toy.”62 The cause was also taken up in Britain, where both the socialist Fabian Society and the Society for the Promotion of Cooperative Housekeeping, led by Alice Melvyn, were instrumental in the provision of facilities for “cooperative living” in several new communities (or “garden cities”). In Germany, a dwelling along the lines proposed by Lily Braun was built in the new suburb of Hellerau, outside Dresden.63 And in Berlin, reported a correspondent for the Austrian feminist journal Der Bund in 1909, several cooperatives were in the process of being founded by groups who “aimed to create a new culture of the home to replace the individual household . . . run by dilettantish housewives and untrained servants.”64 The supporters of these alternative communities joined in a polemic against traditional maternal practices, which they roundly condemned as ignorant, irresponsible, and often positively lethal. “It is impossible,”

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complained the British Mona Caird, “to go into the nursery of an average Christian household without being struck by the extraordinary ignorance there displayed of the simplest laws of hygiene, physical, mental, and moral. . . . The whole race is brought up in a manner that offends not only scientific acumen, but the simplest common sense.”65 Child-rearing, said the British socialist Ada Nield Chew, should be regarded as a vocation like any other: “women who are specially talented for taking care of babies should be employed by the state to mother the babies of the women who . . . though passionately loving and beloved mothers. . . . are quite unfit . . . to tend young children. Why should we always make such a virtue of putting square pegs in round holes?”66 To critics who charged her with plotting to destroy family life, Braun responded petulantly that conventional child-rearing methods too often produced “spoiled little tyrants,” who might well learn from the experience of communal living “that their little egos are not the center of the universe!” Their mothers, satisfied by their work, would exercise a far more positive influence than the full-time housewives whom Braun described with biting contempt as “prematurely aged, stupid women . . . who are able neither to be a parent and educator for their children nor a companion for their husbands.”67 Among the most influential of the era’s experiments with collective child-rearing was that of the Italian physician and social reformer Maria Montessori. Montessori, born in 1870, was one of the first Italian women to qualify as a physician. Her life-long concern for children probably arose partly from her own difficult experience of single motherhood. In 1898 she bore a son by a colleague, Giuseppe Montesano, who later acknowledged paternity. Montessori named her child for herself—Mario Montessori—and maintained a relationship with him, but did not acknowledge him publicly until he was an adult and her own reputation was sufficiently secure to withstand even the stigma of single motherhood.68 Montessori gained prominence both as a specialist in the field of child development and as a feminist who represented her country at the International Women’s Conference in Berlin in 1896. In 1907 Montessori was appointed the director of a day-care facility in a new apartment block in the poorest section of Rome. The owners of the building had set up the day-care center less to educate the children, for whose mental capacities they had little esteem, than to prevent damage to the premises during the time when parents were at work. Montessori had developed a pedagogy based on educational toys designed to develop the cognitive, motor, and social skills of retarded children. She found that this method produced even better results in children who were of normal intelligence. Her pupils showed an unexpected capacity for concentration, and even the most rambunctious were attentive. They were, she reported, “filled with life, and resembled those who have experienced some great joy.”69 Like other social reformers of her class, Montessori deplored the sanitary standards of the poor and added instruction in basic hygiene, which she encouraged the children to transmit to their parents. “Actually, these poor people became

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cleaner and tidier. . . . window panes began to sparkle, and geraniums began to blossom in the windows facing the courtyard.”70 Montessori’s work gained immediate attention in Italy, where similar centers, known as Children’s Houses (Case dei Bambini), were founded by philanthropic organizations in several cities. A speaker at the National Congress of Italian Women of 1914 saw in this pedagogical innovation “the basis of a new organization for the housing of the working classes.”71 Montessori, like feminist reformers in other countries, regarded communal child-care as a vital step in the “socialization of the home,” which would give even poor women a freedom to pursue work or other interests that was now available only to those who could afford nurses and governesses. Very possibly her own experience had made her painfully aware of how difficult it was to reconcile career and child-care obligations. “We are, then, communizing a ‘maternal function,’ a feminine duty within the home. We may see here in this practical act the solution of many of woman’s problems.”72 But though they appealed to a minority of feminists, these visions were unlikely to gain wide public support. The Berlin cooperatives soon fell into financial difficulties. In France, despite a high rate of employment among married women, communal living found few advocates. Madeleine Pelletier remarked with her usual acerbity that bourgeois Frenchwomen regarded child-care centers, known in France as “crêches,” as unsuitable for people of their class, and were “full of prejudices about the duties of mothers to their children.”73 In Germany, Lily Braun’s picture of the communal household was ridiculed by the conservative press as the “hamster-cage of the future, where family life is limited to the bedroom,” by the liberal press as “the barracks as domestic ideal,” and by her socialist colleague and rival Clara Zetkin as a frivolous utopian fantasy.74 In the socialist periodical Sozialistische Monatshefte, Edmund Fischer scornfully remarked that upwardly mobile working-class families were sick and tired of crowded “barracks-like” dwellings and longed for a private space where the housewife, relieved of wage-earning, could devote herself to “child-rearing and the cultivation of family life.”75 Jeanne Schmahl, who was herself one of few French disciples of Gilman, likewise observed that the workers for whom the collective household was primarily designed tended to regard it with a “marked antipathy” and to cling stubbornly to the “beloved intimacy of the home.”76 In fact, utopian visions of collective family life and child-rearing were not only impractical for the near future—the few institutions that were founded did little to solve the social problems affecting mothers and children—but unappealing to the majority of women who were not employed outside the home. These women, who often took pride in their household and childrearing skills and considered their contribution to their families as valuable as that of the breadwinner, had every reason to feel disrespected by reformers whose professions of concern for mothers were punctuated by complaints about their ignorance, irresponsibility, and backwardness. Therefore, a feminism that extolled the dignity of domesticity and full-time motherhood also found an audience, and to this movement we will now turn.

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“T H A  H L”: T E  M In 1895, the Swedish author and activist Ellen Key gave a lecture entitled “The Misuse of Women’s Energy” before several women’s groups in Sweden. Key struck a sensitive nerve when she charged women with misusing their newfound emancipation in a futile struggle to imitate men while denying the deepest needs of the female personality. “For the real woman,” she insisted, “the need to fulfill herself in personal relationships reaches its highest intensity in the activity which is also the highest aim of her life: motherhood and love.”77 The “truly free” woman of the future would recognize motherhood as the highest fulfillment of her individual potential, and would not “dream of a desire to be ‘liberated’ from the foremost essential quality of her womanhood—motherliness.”78 Key was only one of the many reformers of this era who urged the state to recognize motherhood through financial subsidies and social services that would ensure the health and well-being of both mother and child.79 The solution to the demeaning dependency imposed by “marriage as a trade,” these reformers argued, was not to combine motherhood with paid work, but to remunerate the work done by mothers. The idea that motherhood in itself could or should become a profession might appear to be traditional, but in fact it was distinctively modern.80 Traditionally, motherhood had been regarded more as a natural destiny or moral duty than as a form of self-realization, and notions of maternal duty centered more on children’s physical survival than on their psychological development. As we have seen, the new view of motherhood arose in part from concerns about declining rates of population growth. A still more important factor was the deeper investment in the individual child that was made possible by the smaller families of the early twentieth century. Psychologists of the era, including Key herself, insisted that children’s needs included not only physical care but also the opportunity to develop as unique individuals. The task of child-rearing was so intense, sensitive, and timeconsuming that only a full-time mother, who had (in Key’s words) “a daily opportunity to observe the child’s nature, in order by consistent action to influence it, encouraging certain tendencies and restraining others,” could perform it adequately.81 This view of child-rearing was widely debated in feminist circles—for example, in the British Fabian Women’s Group. “Let the child be as well cared for physically as may be, there is lacking the intangible but all-important element in child life, that emotional atmosphere created by the particular and specialized care of the mother,” remarked a member of the group in 1910. “The baby needs its mother not only when it wants to feed or sleep, but for stimulus and response in its amazing life. No woman I have ever met would, without the push of economic necessity, leave her young children and go to regular daily work, as it is arranged today.”82 Underlying this praise of mother-love was an anxious fear for the survival, not only of infants, but of Western culture itself. To be sure, a minority of

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feminists had rejoiced in the decline of the family, which according to Madeleine Pelletier brought to all its members only “servitude, rigidity and boredom.”83 But many others valued family life as a refuge from the mechanization and impersonality, which they feared had overtaken male-dominated society. Gertrud Bäumer, who as president of the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine) and co-editor of its journal Die Frau, set the ideological tone for the mainstream German woman’s movement, was a single, professional woman who was well acquainted with the economic necessities that compelled some women to work outside the home. She rejected Key’s definition of professional work as a “misuse of women’s energy” and defended the freedom of all women to control their working lives. But she nonetheless believed that “the sensitive dedication to personal life that the care of a child demands” was an important ethical commitment.84 For the sake of civilization as well as the individual family, she contended that maternity must be “an absolute obligation that sets limits to the absorption of woman in economic life.”85 In the Netherlands, Bäumer influenced a group of feminists who characterized themselves as “moderates” and opposed the tendency of some of their colleagues to identify emancipation will full-time work, insisting that the maternal vocation was fully compatible with gender equality.86 The role proposed by such reformers for the mother was summed up by the French term “mother-educator” (“mère éducatrice”).87 Key emphatically rejected institutional care for children below school age, for no day-care center could “show the concern for a child’s individuality, or furnish the peace and freedom for the development of a talent, that an average middle-class home can.”88 Even activists in the field of public child-care often shared this negative view. For instance Pauline Kergomard, the educator who had done more than anyone else to reform and extend the French system of public early childhood institutions (écoles maternelles), declared emphatically that “no school, however merry, will ever match the little room where the child receives its mother’s kisses, and the title of teacher will always be less intimate than that of ‘maman’.”89 Likewise Paul Strauss, a great advocate of public “crêches” designed to save the lives of infants, nonetheless referred to them as a “pis-aller,” or merely palliative measure.90 But this was not an “essentialist” view of motherhood as an innate instinct or life-long destiny. Though they prescribed a longer period of maternal involvement than the advocates of socialized child-rearing, these reformers too imagined “active motherhood” as a temporary phase in a woman’s life. Considering the reduction in family size, proposed the Austrian socialist Wally Zepler, “we can reasonably anticipate a time of ten to twelve years as the average length of that period of a mother’s life that is occupied primarily or exclusively with motherhood.”91 And however they might extol the “natural” mother–child bond, reformers of the prewar era were not prepared to leave child-rearing to instinct. On the contrary, the institutional education of mothers gained a new popularity and prestige. Education for motherhood was not a new idea—in fact, the petition composed by German feminist leader Helene Lange for the expansion of

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girls’ secondary education in 1888 had suggested that training in child-care, which could be useful to the future wife or to the future teacher, be provided in a kindergarten attached to each girls’ school. But though general pedagogical training might be acceptable, training in infant care had been anxiously avoided for fear it might lead girls to ask embarrassing questions about where babies came from.92 Among the pioneers in the area of maternal education was the French educator Augusta Moll-Weiss, who founded the first French School for Mothers (École des Mères) in Bordeaux in 1897 and moved it to Paris in 1903. Moll-Weiss scorned the “atavistic prejudice that considered instruction in baby care unsuitable for young girls.” Her school taught maternal skills, including infant care, to a student body that she claimed came from a wide class spectrum and aspired to professional careers in child-care as well as domestic work.93 The well-known French gynecologist Adolphe Pinard believed that “a little institute of child-care (puériculture)” should be attached to all girls’ primary schools. Pinard gave his first demonstration class in 1903, and by 1909 the textbook that he designed for such classes appeared on the approved reading lists of about 30 percent of French school districts.94 The influential text emphasized first the desirability of breast-feeding, and second the obligation of mothers to follow scientific principles rather than traditional practices. “If all mothers did their duty,” Pinard concluded, “the mortality of babies would be reduced greatly.”95 Meanwhile the PestalozziFroebel House in Berlin, which since its founding in 1882 had specialized in kindergarten training, added courses on infant care and hygiene. And in Britain, too, feminist activists founded new institutions dedicated to the education of future mothers and of mothers themselves. For instance, the Babies’ Welcome and School for Mothers was opened in London in 1907. Supported by a committee including the physician Mary Scharlieb, the reformer Alys Russell, and the temperance activist Lady Henry Somerset, the school offered educational, medical, and nutritional services to new mothers. British child-welfare activists petitioned the London school board to incorporate baby-care into school curricula.96 But motherhood could hardly be professionalized as long as it was unpaid. Nothing angered most feminist reformers more than the forced economic dependence of the mother on the father of her children, which exposed her in the best case to a humiliating subservience and in the worst to abandonment and destitution. In order to be a viable career, they insisted that motherhood must be remunerated. But how and by whom? Some believed by the husband: for example, the German Käthe Schirmacher and the Austrian Marianne Hainisch, both prominent figures in their countries’ mainstream women’s movements, argued that wives should be entitled to a share of their husbands’ income.97 To many other feminists the idea of direct payment for wifely “services” (as opposed to shared management of the household) was distasteful.98 But those who portrayed service to husbands as demeaning often exalted service to the state as a proud distinction. “The woman who shrinks from feeling

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that her wifehood is a means of livelihood,” said the British Fabian Maude Pember-Reeves, “will proudly acknowledge that her motherhood is a service to the state.”99 Motherhood as a “social function” was often compared to military service. “The mother who assures the perpetuation of the species,” wrote the French suffrage leader Hubertine Auclert, “should be treated like the soldier who assures the security of the territory: that is, she should be lodged and nourished during the period of her maternal service.”100 A direct state subsidy for childbearing avoided what many considered the problems of maternity insurance, for theoretically it would cover all mothers rather than only the minority that were employed outside the home. Among French feminists, support for state-funded maternal salary was all but unanimous and transcended political dividing lines. As Karen Offen has explained, the political environment of the Third Republic was highly favorable to the notion of “maternity as the patriotism of women”—a conviction that was shared by feminists with their progressive male allies.101 Male population activists such as Jacques Bertillon, founder of the influential National Alliance for Population Increase (Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française) had already defined the production of children as a service to the state that should be rewarded by tax deductions and other benefits. He and other male activists designated fathers as the recipients of these subsidies— a proposal that had already been put into practice by some patriotic French corporations, which began in the 1890s to pay family benefits to their employees (the majority of whom were men).102 The main challenge facing advocates of women’s rights was therefore to designate the state’s largesse as a “maternity budget” (Caisse de la maternité) that should subsidize mothers directly rather than through benefits to male breadwinners. This demand went back at least to the International Feminist Conference of 1896, and it was repeated at many national and international conferences and taken up into the programs of a diverse spectrum of organizations.103 As Marilyn Boxer has noted, the “maternity budget” found even more enthusiastic support among French socialists who claimed to speak for working-class constituencies than among the leaders of middle-class groups.104 Léonie Rouzade, who in 1880 had founded the first socialist women’s organization in France, affirmed that “the first law of the collectivity and of all intelligent governments is that children should be raised at the expense of society . . . There is the greatest public interest in sparing no resources on the development of future citizens.”105 Rouzade affirmed that citizens of both genders must engage in useful work, but motherhood should be included in that category.106 Nelly Roussel advocated financial allowances to mothers for two reasons: “first, to treat all mothers, married and unmarried, equally, and then because it seems just and logical that this reward for fertility should go to the producer of children.”107 Liberal reformers concerned with children’s welfare often agreed that the state must support motherhood. In 1913, a subsidy to poor families with numerous children (usually paid to the father) was a first step toward the recognition of the state’s obligation to support its offspring.108

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In other European countries, the state-funded “maternal salary”—which the British called the “endowment of motherhood”—was supported chiefly by socialist groups, who insisted that working-class women had no desire to add employment to their already crushing household responsibilities. Such a mother, argued the British socialist Mabel Atkinson, often demanded “not independence and the right to work, but rather protection against the unending burden of toil which has been laid upon her.”109 A state subsidy to mothers with children under five was advocated by the Fabian Society, a British group that favored the gradual introduction of socialism by the state. “It follows that motherhood,” wrote H.G. Wells, a flamboyant Fabian spokesman, “is regarded by Socialists as a benefit to society, a public duty done.”110 Women of the British Labour Party debated the issue in 1909, but reached no definite conclusion.111 In Scandinavia some female activists supported Ellen Key’s demand for state support for all mothers for the first four years of their children’s lives. The Norwegian Katti Anker Møller, who like Pinard also wrote textbooks for school courses on child care, believed that motherhood should be made a profession and should be subsidized on the condition that the mother refrained from work outside the home.112 In Germany, the remuneration of women for their services to what Käthe Schirmacher, who had spent time in France, called “the great national population industry” had a few advocates. For example, the suffragist Anita Augspurg called for a maternity pension for every mother which would last eighteen months, well beyond the period covered by maternity insurance.113 However the leadership of the mainstream German women’s movement, which consisted almost entirely of unmarried professional women, showed no such overwhelming enthusiasm for the concept of “motherhood as a social function” as did their French counterparts.114 German socialists, too, tended to favor the socially supported employment rather than direct remuneration of mothers. And indeed, the model of motherhood as a profession or paid service posed many problems. For like most social reformers, the proponents of the “endowment of motherhood” had little respect for the objects of their benevolence, in this case mothers themselves. They always made it clear that the award of benefits must be contingent on the rigorous observance of regulations concerning work, breast-feeding, child-care, and medical supervision. Ellen Key insisted that the recipients of her proposed subsidy to mothers meet high standards: she required them to be of appropriate age, to present a health certificate to local authorities, to have completed a year of training in child-care (designated as “female military service”), and to care for their children at home.115 The French physicians Paul Strauss and Just Sicard de Plauzoles insisted that breast-feeding must be made compulsory— Sicard even asserted that a mother who refused to breast-feed should be prosecuted as a criminal.116 And governmental assistance also involved surveillance. As the historian Yvonne Knibiehler has observed, a new era of state-regulated motherhood was at hand.117 The French Loi Strauss that provided a subsidy for maternity

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leaves also required “lady visitors” (“dames visiteuses”) to supervise the child-rearing practices of the recipients. Such services, which were provided by private and public agencies in many countries, were supported by the middleclass women to whom they provided employment but often resented by their low-income clients.118 And some proponents of endowed motherhood more or less explicitly discouraged women’s newfound educational and economic ambitions. The reorganization of maternity as a “national service,” predicted Sicard de Plauzoles, would not only give France a future but provide “a solution to a great portion of the Woman question.”119 Some male French socialists reveled in utopian fantasies of a state that removed women from the labor force and returned them to their “natural” profession of motherhood.120 H.G. Wells hoped that the “monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function . . . while they ‘earn their living’ by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product, will disappear.”121 Therefore the notion of state-subsidized motherhood was highly controversial among feminists of this era, and many rejected it. At the Paris conference of 1908, the French activist Camille Béllilon suggested that the “maternity budget” should be re-named the “children’s budget” because otherwise men, assuming that women were provided for by the state, would feel justified in denying them professional opportunities.122 In Britain, a group of contributors to the radical periodical, The Freewoman, engaged in a spirited polemic against H.G. Wells’ proposal for the “endowment of motherhood.” Did the idea that motherhood was a service to the state imply that the government could determine how many children each woman must bear? And if so, on what criteria would this allotment be based? Who would be considered qualified to perform this important public service? And if mothers were to be selected, then why not fathers too? Should marriage be a condition for child-bearing, or would eugenic fitness be sufficient? What, exactly, was the difference between such a “service” and the sexual relations traded for money by prostitutes? To whom would the resulting child belong—the parents or the state?123 Many commentators objected that the “endowment” scheme left out fathers and might discourage responsible paternal behavior. Perturbed by the socialist overtones of “endowment,” German liberal feminists presciently warned of the dangers of opening the private sphere of the family to control by the state. “Motherhood and fatherhood are not only social functions,” wrote Alice Salomon, “but they are familial functions in the most exact sense of that word.” And what if the state took the notion of motherhood as national service to its logical extreme and “laid on women only the duty, or the right, to bear children for the society and the state, without giving them any power over the child’s upbringing. Then mothers might well go on strike.” The rights of mothers, she concluded, must depend on “the drawing of a careful boundary between parental and state responsibilities.”124 In Italy, the veteran feminist Anna Maria Mozzoni warned her socialist sisters that the utopian visions of state-endowed motherhood invoked by male socialist

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leaders could reverse educational and professional gains and turn marriage into the “greatest and best employment opportunity for women.”125

A N D Both proposed routes to economic independence—employment and endowment—rested on some of the same highly untraditional assumptions. Mothers were to be independent of male breadwinners and the state was assigned some functions that were traditionally performed by the family. And advocates of employment and endowment alike insisted that motherhood was now a phase in the life of the modern woman, who after a limited period of full-time mother-work could also aspire to other activities, including paid employment. According to the British socialist Mabel Atkinson, the family of the future “would probably not consist of more than three or four children, and even if one made the assumption that the woman should devote herself entirely to the care of her children until the youngest reached school age, there would still remain many years of her life during which she would be strong and fit for work.”126 In the prewar period we see the first step toward the redefinition of maternity from a lifetime identity to a role. This new definition of the maternal role had many implications, both liberating and confining. Feminist movements contributed to an important trend in twentieth-century culture—the popularization of motherhood, which was now held out as an option for all women, even those who aspired to economic independence and professional success. In fact, emancipation was increasingly defined as a combination of career success and familial, specifically maternal and heterosexual, fulfillment. Like every other political ideology, this one created invidious distinctions. It often justified a negative view of the woman who, for whatever reason, chose a single or childless life— an option that was once respected, but now carried the stigma of abnormality. The spinster, wrote a contributor to The Freewoman, was a “barren sister, a withered tree, the acidulous vestal under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten.”127 Some single career women responded that they felt no regrets. “All this talk about how the single and celibate life is harmful to women is total nonsense,” wrote the German teacher Elisabeth Schneider, “and I am the proof of that—I’m healthy.”128 Although they defined a new ideal, feminists of this era could chart no clear path to its fulfillment. To be sure, they produced many inspiring visions of new forms of family and household, new ways of organizing professional work and child-care, and a new respect for motherhood. But ultimately the mother was placed before several unpalatable alternatives: home as domestic prison or impersonal commune, child-care as maternal smother-love or institutional regimentation, parenthood as service to the patriarchal family or to the bureaucratic state, work as domestic slave or exhausted superwoman. In their search for fulfillment, remarked Ellen Key, modern women were haunted by a “dualism that is based in nature and difficult to resolve.”129 “In most professions,” wrote the German socialists Adele

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Gerhard and Helene Simon, “the conflict between intellectual and artistic work and the fulfilled life of a woman is unavoidable.”130 In their search for a new female life-plan, feminists succeeded chiefly in defining a new dilemma. And its resolution was left to the individual woman: the “free woman” of the future, prophesied the German Hedwig Dohm, would realize that “each woman has to decide the question—job or no job—for herself.”131

A warning from a British women’s organization, the Women’s Total Abstinence Union, against the perils of drinking. (Leeds: Petty and Sons, 1914–18 (?). Poster Archive: Hoover Institution.)

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“ T   R          C      C        P      ” : M            R R   Pw E

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egal equality, economic independence—these were indispensable bases for the reconstruction of motherhood on the basis of gender equality. But even the achievement of these ends could not relieve a still more basic form of servitude. “For what is poverty, what is all the misery of industrial exploitation,” asked the leader of the League of German Women’s Associations, Marie Stritt, in 1910, “compared to the cruel sexual exploitation in which the great mass of women live today?”1 “Dependence, in short, is the curse of our marriages,” wrote the British Mona Caird, “of our homes and of our children, who are born of women who are not free—not free even to refuse to bear them.”2 The claim to a right to refuse might at first glance seem to contradict the prevalent definition of motherhood as a contribution to the public welfare. But in fact it reinforced that definition, for mothers had power as well as responsibility—they could make or break the state, and thus wielded a formidable political weapon. “What they forget, in all this talk about population, is that in order to produce children, you have to have mothers,” wrote the French journalist Maria Martin, editor of the Journal des Femmes. “Children will become the pride of every household when mothers are respected by the law. Until that day, we fear that women will not be sufficiently patriotic to make children for the fatherland, which rewards them so meagerly.”3 Here again was the familiar rhetorical strategy, which claimed women’s rights as an appropriate “reward” for the performance of patriotic duties, and especially for the production of new citizens. Karen Offen and others have praised the efficacy of this strategy, and it worked well as an approach to the issues discussed in chapters 2 and 3.4 Clearly, mothers who were legally empowered and economically secure would be better able to care for their children: in these cases individual and social interests could be presented as identical. But when applied to issues concerning reproductive rights, the

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ideology of the patriotic mother-citizen was fraught with problems and inconsistencies. For here, individual and social interests seemed to conflict. The state needed more citizens, but falling birthrates indicated that individual parents—including mothers—were unwilling to produce them in the numbers required. “Meanwhile all facts point to the conclusion that VOLITIONAL LIMITATION OF THE FAMILY is the chief and vastly predominant cause of the decline in birth-rates which is taking place in so many countries,” wrote the British physician Arthur Newsholme in 1911, and his opinion was shared by commentators across the political spectrum.5 In this context, the claim made by so many feminist activists that motherhood was, or should be, a “social function” raised intractable difficulties. For if motherhood was indeed a service to the state, did the state have the right to regulate it by dictating who must become a mother and how many children she must have? And if so, then how could this claim to public recognition be reconciled with the mother’s right to individual liberty? This, of course, was no abstract question—government leaders all over Europe responded to falling birthrates with new measures designed not only to save the lives of children already born but to raise birthrates by limiting access to birth control and abortion. In this as in other areas, feminist ideologies of this era stressed the need to reconcile the freedom of the individual with the needs of the community. But was this possible? Or were the conceptions of motherhood as public duty and private right inherently contradictory? After sketching in the historical context, this chapter will trace this discussion as it focused on four issues: sexual education, the reproductive rights of women, eugenic policies, and the so-called birth strike through which some activists proposed to demonstrate the political power of mothers. Feminists formulated their positions on reproductive issues in a political environment that sent them very mixed messages. In all the Western European nations, population and birthrates became dominant political issues. To be sure, the emphasis differed from country to country: in France the chief concern was for population numbers regardless of social class; in Britain, more for the class composition than for the numbers of the new generation; in Germany and Scandinavia, for both.6 But all these nations initiated new policies focused on the welfare of mothers and children. And all saw what Karen Offen has called a “surge of anti-feminism,” which pilloried women—and especially middle-class women, who were considered particularly susceptible to the dangerous doctrines of feminism—for their neglect of their maternal responsibilities.7 The challenge facing feminists was not to advocate the restriction of births, but to create a more positive “spin” on a trend that was now well established. Women’s opposition, they argued, was not to motherhood itself, but to motherhood as a coerced service to a patriarchal family and state, and when free to control their own reproductive decisions (a freedom that was defined in many different ways), women would willingly become mothers. But reproductive self-determination was a revolutionary concept that had little basis in any existing ethical, legal, or political system. It could not be

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defended by any existing doctrine of individual rights, for in the realm of sexuality and reproduction no such rights were accorded to women. Rights in this area belonged only to men, who according to the laws of marriage controlled their wives’ bodies and their fertility. Neither could it be buttressed by appeals to individual privacy and liberty, for there too the law unambiguously favored men by protecting the household against state interference. Privacy laws did not protect women and children, but made them vulnerable to abuse. Moreover, the prudish secrecy surrounding sexual life deprived women of the information that they needed to control their own fertility and to protect themselves against disease. The Italian physician Maria Montessori, who made her mark not only as an educator but as an advocate of maternal and child health, referred to the “terror” which “goes by the name of shame and modesty.”8 The partial lifting of this taboo in the late nineteenth century was a crucial factor in the spread of knowledge about birth control that enabled couples to limit their families.9 Far from invoking the right of privacy, therefore, many feminists of this era were willing (as we see in retrospect, too willing) to open the private realm of the household to public scrutiny. In the words of the British Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, “only those who are called in to help and advise suffering wives,” could know “what unspeakable infamies are sometimes hidden by the veil of legal marriage.”10 Lacking in credibility as a moral norm, reproductive self-determination had to be defended through instrumental arguments as a means to some other end—most frequently, the survival and well-being of children. Though more novel, the doctrine of the rights of the child was more popular and much less controversial than that of the rights of women—and the child’s most important rights were to life and health. Rates of infant mortality were still high: around 1900, fourteen of every hundred infants in Britain, thirteen in France, and eighteen in Germany died before the age of one year.11 These frightening statistics could be used to show the dangers of excessive and unplanned childbearing under conditions of poverty and disadvantage. In Britain, an editorial in Common Cause, organ of the moderate National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies, charged that a recently compiled Report on Infant Mortality was “a dry record of the most tragic things in life— outraged, desecrated, unwilling motherhood, maimed, diseased, unwanted babies . . . Could there be a more inconceivable desecration of all that is divine in us than reluctant motherhood?”12 The Dutch feminist periodical Evolutie likewise presented infant mortality as a consequence of bearing children “too young, too often, and in too rapid succession.”13 It was easy enough to argue that mothers who were empowered to plan their pregnancies would be more likely to bear and raise healthy children, and would thus cut back rates of infant mortality and morbidity. But opponents always objected that this gain in population numbers would be more than offset by the tendency of such women to bear fewer children—a choice that would further exacerbate the population crisis. Feminists responded by distinguishing between the sheer numbers and the “quality” of

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offspring—a concept that was often invoked but never defined. A contributor to the suffrage paper The Vote declared that “the awakened woman is learning that quality is at least as important as quantity.”14 Influential theorists in many other countries insisted that parents who limited their families could provide (in the words of Ellen Key) both “better living conditions and better care. These children do more to raise the quality of the population than a mass of badly developed children.”15 These rhetorical strategies facilitated alliances between feminists and powerful political and medical elites. In 1899, British military authorities noted with alarm that one-third of all volunteers for military service in the Boer War had been rejected for health reasons. Their disabilities were attributed not just to the social conditions of a wealthy country where one-fourth of the population were living in poverty, but also to the consequences of widespread moral depravity.16 Public health authorities identified alcoholism and venereal disease, both associated with congenital defects, as the two “racial poisons” that produced widespread illness and death among children. In this context, feminists formulated another argument for reproductive self-determination, this time as a principle of social morality. They never tired of pointing out that the “social scourges” of drunkenness and disease resulted chiefly from male behavior and victimized women as well as children. And they cultivated links to the very broad spectrum of organizations—male and female, socialist and conservative, religious and secular—that headed campaigns against the evils of drink and regulated prostitution. Declining birthrates were often attributed not only to female but to male behavior. “People say that the women of the wealthy classes avoid the duties of motherhood,” admitted Marianne Hainisch, leader of the League of Austrian Women’s Organizations, “and far be it from me to defend them; these indeed are signs of degeneration, but I am concerned not only about the degeneracy of women but that of men.”17 The search for ways of reconciling women’s interest in reproductive selfdetermination with society’s interest in a healthy and flourishing population led some feminists to one of this era’s most popular intellectual fashions, eugenics. This movement, which was loosely based on Darwinian biology and given its name by the British scientist Francis Galton, had as its aim the improvement of the quality of the human race by the application of science to reproduction. The most basic principle of the eugenics movement was that the transformation of parenthood from an accident to a conscious commitment would benefit society by improving the quality of the new generation—a prospect that could seem attractive to those who wished to improve the status and the material conditions of mothers. The attraction of feminists of this era to eugenics is often mentioned but seldom explored by historians. Admirers of the women who will figure in this chapter usually do their best to dissociate them from eugenics. Detractors include them in a general condemnation of eugenics and all its alleged results: the horrors of imperialism, National Socialism, the Holocaust, and the two world wars.18 Only a few historians, chiefly of the English-speaking

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world, present a more complex and differentiated view. Among these is Daniel Kevles, who distinguishes between two large groups of eugenicists: the “mainline” group, which emphasized the differences among the human races, and the “social-radicals,” many of whom belonged to progressive and left-wing parties, who disavowed racism and focused on improvement of the human race as a whole. Most of the women and men to be discussed here belonged to this latter group, and though some shared the racial attitudes that were typical of their time and place, racial difference was not among their chief concerns.19 Feminists often played an assertive and independent role in the movement by disputing the misogynist ideas of male leaders and appropriating the fashionable new vocabulary in the service of feminist goals.20 Though the eugenics movement was international, its organizational structure and the participation of women differed across national boundaries. The new science was promoted by two organizations founded in Germany in the year 1905: the Racial Hygiene Society (Gesellschaft für Rassehygiene) under the leadership of the biologist Alfred Ploetz, and the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz, or BfM), led by a collection of sexual reformers of both genders. Politically these organizations were far apart. Whereas Ploetz, despite his socialist background, had by 1905 moved so far to the right of his movement that he refused to admit most feminists to his organization, the BfM developed a highly original synthesis of feminism and eugenics, which it exported to several Germanic-language countries. The International League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform (Internationale Vereinigung für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform), founded under the leadership of the German group in 1911, included branches in Sweden and Austria as well as in Germany.21 Unlike its German counterpart, the British eugenics movement integrated women from the outset. When the Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907, women constituted one-half of the first board of directors and about one-third of the membership.22 Although the male leadership was generally unsympathetic to feminism, the group often sent speakers to lecture to female audiences of varying political persuasions on topics such as “Women and Economics in Relation to Eugenics,” and “Eugenics and Women’s Social Work.”23 The French Eugenics Society (Société Eugénique), which was founded in 1913, included very few women, in part because one of its leaders, the prominent physician Adolphe Pinard, considered that reproduction up to and including conception was a male, and only after conception a female, concern.24 However despite such discouraging advice French women had taken an interest in issues concerning hereditary disease and reproduction since the 1890s, and the lectures sponsored by the Eugenics Society attracted a considerable female audience. Women who had brought children into the world with so much pain, claimed an article in the Society’s periodical, “would never consent to the degeneration of this precious product . . . Eugenics will always have women on its side, and it will appreciate the honor.”25

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Because of its later role in National Socialist ideology, eugenics is often associated with the political right and with hostility to the working class. And feminist eugenicists did indeed often condemn the poor for sexual and reproductive behavior that they found irresponsible. However (as Daniel Kevles has pointed out) eugenic theory was also popular on the political left, and often attacked the mores of the upper classes. After all, upper-class men were more likely than workers to be the patrons of prostitutes and to spread disease to their trusting and ignorant wives and innocent children. The health of the next generation was often pictured as a female concern that transcended class. “A coerced maternity,” declared the reformer Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, “is a crime against the child, whose first right it is to be well-born . . . The offspring of uncontrolled and selfish lust on the one side and abject subservience on the other is ill-born, no matter upon what external prosperity it may be ushered.”26 Socialist women, too, openly condemned husbands who exercised their “marital rights” without considering the consequences. “No amount of State help can help the suffering of mothers,” wrote an anonymous working-class woman to the British Women’s Cooperative Guild, “until men are taught many things in regard to the right use of the organs of reproduction, and until he realises that the wife’s body belongs to herself, and until the marriage relation takes a higher sense of morality and bare justice.”27 Anna Bergmann has documented the same attitude among German, and Ida Blom among Norwegian working-class women. And the historian Wally Secombe points out that despite their limited education these women often used both a feminist and a medical vocabulary, which enabled them to think of uncontrolled childbearing as “a preventable malady.”28 Did this scientific discourse achieve its purpose—to legitimize women’s claims to reproductive self-determination? The following chapter will show that its effects were problematic. Feminists assumed that scientific knowledge would reinforce a moral claim—the right of mothers to respect, dignity, and empowerment in heterosexual relationships. This claim rested on a maternalist stereotype that pictured women as models of sexual prudence and selfrestraint—in short, as the morally superior sex. In fact, the new scientific approaches undermined this stereotype by removing sexuality and reproduction from the domain of morality and placing it firmly in that of nature, where both male and female participated in the same natural processes and were motivated by instinctual drives that they shared with other animals. We shall see how this transition affected feminist views of sex education, birth control and abortion, and eugenic legislation.

T O  B   S: T C  S E During this period, the lifting of the taboos that had long inhibited the discussion of sexuality and reproduction was widely recognized as the first step toward the empowerment of women in the family and the marital

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relationship. The responsibility for initiating that discussion was placed on mothers themselves, who often proved unequal to the task. “May I say, first of all,” wrote another anonymous correspondent of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, “that lack of knowledge causes, in nearly every case, much unnecessary suffering . . . I might say that I was very ignorant when I was married; my mother did not consider it at all proper to talk about such things.”29 Literature and drama often attributed all the sexual and marital misfortunes of young women to their mothers’ culpable silence. “Tell me, dear mother,” begged Wendla, the heroine of Frank Wedekind’s drama, Spring’s Awakening. “I’m ashamed of myself. Please, please speak. . . . how does it happen? . . . You cannot expect that I, who am fourteen years old, still believe in the stork.”30 Wendla later died of a botched abortion. But was the mother, herself raised in ignorance, qualified to impart the saving knowledge to her children? On this issue, contemporary commentators divided into two groups, designated by the historian Claudia Nelson as maternalists and professionalists. The first group held to the traditional view of woman as the moral center of her family, who by both precept and example taught self-restraint and chastity to her male and female children. But the second group wished to shift the responsibility of sexual education to the state, which through its qualified teachers could present the subject with scientific accuracy and objectivity. This was a very radical proposal; few sex education courses existed in schools in any country during this era.31 Among the maternalists was the British Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, who attracted international attention both as a crusader for the reform of marriage laws and as the author (with her partner, Ben Elmy) of books for children on the facts of life. Elizabeth Elmy believed that the right kind of sex education would strengthen women’s position in the family by teaching children to respect their mothers. She assigned no educational role to fathers, contributing to what Nelson calls the “growing sense that adult men could contribute little to child-rearing in the home.”32 The Elmy couple’s most famous book, Baby Buds, was written for small children and published in 1895. The narrator traced her authority directly to her personal experience: “and in telling you how baby was born, I shall also be telling you how you yourself came to me as a baby, over four years ago.”33 Starting with the plant and animal kingdoms, the story placed human parenthood in the context of the natural world. Mothers throughout nature were shown choosing their partners and controlling the rearing of their young. By contrast, animal and human fathers were shown in roles that were decorative or domestic, but always subordinate, and their procreative role was never explained: “how this truly comes about,” the young reader was warned, “you can scarcely understand until you are older.”34 Sex education was also a prominent theme of discussion among Dutch feminists. Some dismissed it as a new and deplorable fad. “Isn’t it bad enough that men speak and write so coarsely?” wrote Elise van Calcar. “Must women too step forward without blushing and tell the public about things that our mothers and grandmothers whispered to their daughters in their boudoirs?”35 However, a more positive attitude was shown by the organizers

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of the National Exhibition of Women’s Work, held in Amsterdam in 1899, where a session was devoted to the theme of “moral education.”36 The best-known Dutch promoter of sex education for children was the teacher Nellie van Kol, whose illustrated book entitled Mother and Child (Moeder en Kind) was published in 1898 and by 1900 had been reprinted in six editions. Like Elmy, van Kol framed her story as a private discussion between mother and child, which started with the animal kingdom and concluded with the human mother. In an article in the feminist periodical Evolutie, van Kol argued on the basis of her own experience that children respected mothers who told the truth. Even more important, however, was the child’s loving response. “And my little angel realized how much pain she had caused me and embraced me tenderly. So a flower of love and gratitude grew out of the fertile soil of truth.”37 Some educators warned that such images of maternal martyrdom might have the undesirable effect of deterring young girls from motherhood.38 In the Netherlands, where most public schools were church-affiliated, school based sex education found few supporters. In France, where public schools were secular, the professionalist view of sex education—which called for its inclusion in school curricula—had stronger support. Lydie Martial, founder of an organization entitled “Women’s Philosophy” (“La Pensée féminine”) insisted with considerable bravado that courses on the responsibilities of fatherhood should be held not only in schools but in other public settings, including military barracks.39 However, others feared that this might undermine the authority of mothers by transferring the responsibility for sex education from the home to the male-dominated school environment. This question featured prominently on the agenda of the conference of the International Council of Women, held in Paris in 1913. Some delegates, for example, Marguerite De Witt Schlumberger, insisted that sex education should be left to mothers, who could be expected to care the most about protecting daughters from “masculine immorality” and teaching sons to respect women. However, the prestigious gynecologist Dr. Pinard, who as a male ally participated in the discussion, placed the authority of the state above that of the mother, charging that few mothers had the scientific expertise to convey the information correctly.40 The prominent educator Pauline Kergomard, who took a leading role in this discussion, was torn between maternalist and professionalist approaches. She argued that the enlightenment of children was “the right of the mother,” but that many mothers (particularly those of the working class) lacked the requisite time and knowledge. Kergomard proposed that each school should offer a course to both boys and girls that emphasized both factual knowledge and “self-respect and respect for the other sex.” However, she had strong reservations about leaving this instruction to regular classroom teachers, who were too often men and thus (in her view) unqualified to teach such sensitive material to mixed classes. She was also convinced that the introduction of sex education into the schools would provide the Catholic Church with an

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additional rationale for its already virulent opposition to secular public education. The conference as a whole thus rejected a resolution calling for sex education in school, and instead offered a compromise: “parents should consider the sexual education of their children as a duty,” but “if the mother cannot educate her children, this function should be performed by other people.”41 The inconsistency between the references to parents and mothers expressed a real ambivalence—never openly discussed—about the possible role of fathers in the task of sex education. Though she agreed that mothers often lacked scientific knowledge, the Swiss educator Emma Piecynska did not believe that sex education must be left to professional teachers, but rather that mothers must be educated. Born in 1854, Emma Reichenbach was the daughter of a wealthy Swiss family who was raised in Paris and married the Polish Count Piecynski, from whom she later separated. Her original ambition—to become a physician—was thwarted by an illness that left her permanently deaf. Having been introduced to feminism by her life partner Helene de Mulinen (who later headed her country’s largest feminist organization, the League of Swiss Women’s Associations, Bund schweizerischer Frauenvereine or Alliance Nationale des Sociétés Féminines), Piecynska became a supporter of the International Abolitionist Federation, which campaigned to abolish state-regulated prostitution and to encourage responsible sexual behavior. In 1895, she taught courses to adults on “the laws of reproduction and the education of humanity on this subject” in Geneva and Bern, and later published her lectures under the title The School of Purity (L’École de la Pureté). She defied the conventional prejudice that confined the scientific study of reproduction to (mostly male) experts but denied it to mothers themselves. “It is not the scientists and philosophers who have the most important right to this information,” she wrote. “We [women] cannot leave it . . . to specialists. We are the specialists.”42 Piecynska became a popular lecturer who spoke to female secondary-school students as well as to adults, and received many letters from her admirers asking for advice on sexual and marital problems.43 In Germany, the land of scientific progress, the professionalist standpoint was strongly represented. To be sure, many works on child-rearing that were widely read in Germany, including Ellen Key’s The Century of the Child, had called on mothers, to teach “the facts of life.”44 However the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bf M) took a position that was strongly influenced by the new scientific field of sexology. The leader of this field, Havelock Ellis, had considerably more influence in Germany than in his native Britain. Ellis and his German admirers proposed a compromise solution: mothers were the natural educators of small children in sexual as in other matters, but they lacked the scientific qualifications to instruct older children—a task that would be better accomplished by qualified teachers of both genders.45 The professional teachers who made up a substantial portion of the League’s membership strongly favored a state-mandated program of sex education.

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In 1906, the BfM petitioned the cultural ministries of all the German states to include the subject in school curricula. Maria Lichnewska, a leader of the organization who was also a teacher, justified the petition by arguing that the trend of the times was to make “education into a public concern and to remove it from the sphere of the home.” She cited a scandal in Hamburg, where in 1906 a teacher had been disciplined for giving factual information to a schoolgirl, to underscore the need for instruction in schools.46 By contrast, the leader of the League of Austrian Women’s Organizations, Marianne Hainisch, rejected school-based sex education: though teachers might be qualified to dispense scientific information, parents must retain their authority on moral questions.47 In Scandinavia, individuals and groups who were affiliated with International League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform, particularly the Swedish Frida Steenhoff and the Norwegian Katti Anker Møller, likewise campaigned for sex education. And the newly enfranchised women of Norway included it in their political program. The Norwegian National Council of Women compromised on the vexed issue of parental versus school based sexual education. In 1913, the organization opened a competition for “medical women and men for the best book on this subject, which can be used by the teachers or by the parents in their homes. Women are the most awake to the question of how to keep the young boys and girls pure and healthy—how to protect the fountain of life.”48 It was in Britain that the controversy between maternalist and professionalist approaches to sex education caused the most open conflict. In 1913 an elementary school teacher, Miss Outram, who was an advocate of both eugenics and woman suffrage, gave her religion class some texts that she claimed to have received from America. The first adapted the Biblical creation story to include a rather imprecise account of human reproduction. The second consisted of a conversation between father and son on “the mysterious feeling that men have for women and women have for men.”49 The parents of the school district responded with outrage that the teacher had usurped their prerogatives and undermined their authority. “It is too disgusting for the children to know—they have not the same respect for their parents when they know that,” complained a mother.50 However the local school authority, the Derbyshire Education Committee, refused to dismiss Outram, and the controversy was broken off without any decisive resolution by the outbreak of war in 1914. Feminist views of sex education thus reflected a broader transition from maternalist to professionalist views of sexuality. And the results did not fulfill feminists’ hopes that scientific learning would enhance the prestige and status of mothers. Maternalist educators had exalted the primacy of the mother–child relationship. “All human love has sprung in the first place from the love between mother and child,” Elmy wrote.51 Van Kol accorded mothers the dominant role in mate-selection and reproductive decision-making. “What happens to plants unconsciously, becomes a conscious process in human beings. . . . The woman gives herself only to the man whom she judges

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worthy to become the father of her child.”52 By contrast, professionalists downgraded the mother for her lack of scientific expertise, and recommended that the responsibility for sexual enlightenment be transferred to the state through public school systems. And in place of the moral principles taught by mothers—chastity and self-respect—scientific educators looked to eugenics for their guiding principles. Sex education, wrote Henriette Fürth, must transmit the message that “each human being must strive to become so strong, beautiful and perfect that they are worthy to be the bearers of a new and better generation.”53 An educational literature that was framed in the austere language of science could hardly be expected to gain the popularity to which the educators aspired. But a far more appealing approach would soon be initiated by Marie Carmichael Stopes. Stopes, who was born in Edinburgh in 1880, had attained a doctorate in a scientific field, paleo-botany, and was thirty-one years of age when she married a fellow scientist in 1911. Her wide reading of scientific literature had included even works of sexology, but had apparently left her without some basic knowledge. According to her own account, after several years of marriage she was unable to understand why she had not yet become pregnant until she found out from a physician that she was still a virgin. Whatever the truth of this story—which her husband contested—it enabled Stopes to divorce him for non-consummation. And she felt deeply deprived—of maternity but even more of sexual fulfillment. In her best-selling book, Married Love, published in 1918, she deplored the plight of “our educated girls, composed of virgin sweetness shut up in ignorance.”54 Stopes would later popularize both birth control and sex education by extolling not only eugenic principles, but also the joys of heterosexual love.

“D D  J A”: T P  P Despite the taboos on women’s knowledge and discussion of sexuality, the right of women to decide on the number and timing of pregnancies was advocated in most feminist groups by 1900. As Carol Dyhouse points out, the topic was usually placed in the general context of “feminine autonomy within marriage and of mutual desire and respect as preconditions of the sexual union.”55 These discussions were marked by the same tension between maternalist and scientific approaches to sexuality as we have seen in the area of sex education. Maternalist feminists upheld values such as chastity and selfrestraint, which though formulated in secular language were closely linked to Christian moral principles. Perceiving women as the custodians of such values, they unabashedly advocated female supremacy in the marital relationship. Birth-control activists, influenced by scientific fields such as sexology and eugenics, asserted both the ability and the right of both women and men to enjoy sexual relations, the joint responsibility of the couple for reproductive decisions, and the use of contraceptive technology to separate sex from reproduction.

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Most British feminists of this era, aroused to anger by campaigns such as that of Elizabeth Elmy against marital rape, tended toward the maternalist position and called for the liberation of women from, not into, heterosexuality. Theorists such as Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Swiney and Elmy herself, all very influential in Britain, asserted that existing forms of heterosexuality were not designed to serve the biological purpose of reproduction—in fact they were harmful to the health of mothers and children—but rather the political purpose of perpetuating male supremacy. Elmy speculated that even such biological functions as menstruation were environmental in origin, produced by women’s enslavement to her sexual function at times when it served no reproductive purpose. On woman falls that heritage of woe, And e’en the virgin feels its dastard blow. For long ere fit to wield maternal cares, Abnormal fruits of birth her guiltless body bears.56

The novelist and playwright Cicely Hamilton likewise saw heterosexuality as a form of slavery: “in sexual matters, the whole trend and tendency of woman’s relation to men has been to make refusal impossible and to cut off every avenue of escape from the gratification of his desire.”57 If given their choice, these theorists assumed, women would surely confine sexual intercourse to the minimum necessary for rational and planned reproduction.58 The modern birth-control movement can be said to have originated in Britain in 1877, when William Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were tried for selling a “dirty, filthy book” on the history and techniques of contraception.59 The result of the famous trial was the founding of the Neo-Malthusian League, which justified birth control chiefly through an economic doctrine that attributed poverty to uncontrolled reproduction and large families. Some feminists and other social reformers objected to the class bias that was built into a doctrine that blamed poverty on the poor themselves rather than on social conditions. As the Fabian socialist Maude Pember Reeves remarked, if the poor had only the number of children that they could afford, the result could only be “the dying out of all poor people.”60 Others feared that the use of mechanical contraception might provide a “morally degrading” encouragement to male lust and self-indulgence.61 Therefore, only a few feminists supported the efforts of activists to popularize birth control among British working-class people in the prewar years.62 These women and men modified Neo-Malthusian ideology to emphasize the well-being of families rather than the dismal science of economics. Drawing on the results of recent research in sexology, they suggested that chastity was as unnatural for women as for men. “Let us admit our joy and gratitude for the beauty and pleasure of sex,” wrote Stella Browne in the Freewoman in 1912, and Jane Hume Clapperton declared that “the average woman has sexual needs of commanding importance to be met and satisfied.”63 Even more important was the happiness of children: “it is the birthright of the

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child,” wrote Charles Drysdale, “to have been longed for by his mother beforehand.”64 And that of the couple: “sexual and parental love,” said Clapperton, “is bursting into fuller life. It is radiating forth new influences . . . and preparing for the reign of universal brotherhood.”65 However, the efforts of these and other activists, such as Drysdale’s partner Alice Vickery Drysdale, to organize women in support of birth control proved unsuccessful in the prewar years. In the Netherlands the birth-control movement gained a degree of legitimacy in the 1890s that was unmatched in any other country. The historian Hugo Röling attributes this success to the weakness of populationist movements in a country where birthrates were still robust. In 1880 the newly qualified physician Aletta Jacobs traveled to London, where she met Bradlaugh, Besant, and the other Neo-Malthusians who (as she later recollected) “had caused an uproar in the sanctimonious England of the day.”66 In 1882, having learned that a German physician, Dr. Mensinga, had developed a barrier contraceptive for women, Jacobs opened a clinic to prescribe the device—the first birth-control clinic in the world. The clinic chiefly served poor women. Having joined the Dutch Neo-Malthusian League (NieuwMalthusiaansche Bond, founded in 1881), Jacobs promoted contraception as a means to the happiness and well-being of mothers, couples, and their carefully nurtured children. “No child should come into the world,” she wrote, “whose coming is not deeply desired and joyously awaited.”67 She opposed the common practice of abortion, which she hoped that the spread of contraceptive technology would make obsolete. Jacobs became a leader of the fledgling Dutch feminist movement, which for a while actively supported Neo-Malthusianism. Wilhelmina Drucker, the editor of the journal Evolutie, cited scientific research to prove that both women and men had sexual needs. Rejecting abstinence as a means of contraception, she considered it unfair to expect “two beings who have sworn to live their lives together and to share everything, except the most intimate companionship, that unites them with the sweetest bond . . . What a mockery of marriage!”68 In the Netherlands, the Neo-Malthusian League became an officially recognized organization in 1895. Emilie Claeys, a textile worker from Ghent who became a leader of the socialist woman’s movement and the editor of its journal De Vrouw, began in 1893 to inform Belgian readers of the work of the Dutch birth controllers. By 1909, clinics sponsored by the Neo-Malthusian League in three Belgian cities—Malines, Antwerp, and Louvain—prescribed contraceptives, gave advice, and distributed literature.69 But after the turn of the century, fears of declining birthrates, especially among social elites, increased opposition to Neo-Malthusianism in both Holland and Belgium. Jacobs herself, who had become a prominent suffrage leader, withdrew from her public role as a birth-control advocate for fear of discrediting the suffrage movement. The Dutch women’s movement grew to include a more diverse constituency that included religious women who feared that technological contraception would degrade women by making

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them “the playthings of men.” The leaders of the Malthusian League, Johannes Rutgers and his wife Marie Rutgers-Hoitsema, responded with the medical argument that sexual abstinence caused mental and physical illness in both sexes.70 However, new laws that were passed in 1911 that regulated the sale of contraception and broadened laws against abortion met with little feminist protest.71 In Belgium, the passage of a similar bill proposed in 1912 was prevented by the outbreak of war in 1914.72 In France, the majority of feminists strongly supported maternalist views of sexual morality. Those who campaigned for the recognition of maternity as “a social function” promoted voluntary motherhood, but not family limitation. As we have already seen, many French feminists held men responsible for low birthrates, and insisted that women, when given the rights of citizenship, would become willing mothers.73 Like their British counterparts, they believed that reproductive decisions should be made by women. “Women dream of an ideal union—to be united in ideas, in supreme thought—to be the mistress of the mind of man, to direct him,” wrote the influential intellectual Céline Renooz, and Lydie Martial likewise declared that “the enlightened woman” (“la femme consciente”) was the “natural sexual regulator . . . who knows how to endow sexual life with order and temperance for the happiness of both sexes.”74 Swiss activists, who were closely allied with their French colleagues, took similar positions. Emma Piecynska served with the legal scholar Louis Bridel on the editorial board of a journal entitled Social Morality (Morale Sociale), which in 1901 published an article by Johannes Rutgers, the head of the Dutch Neo-Malthusian Society. A response to Rutgers by Piecynska expressed the journal’s editorial position on the vexed question of birth control. Though she conceded that contraception might help mothers who were sick, exhausted, or victims of abuse, she asserted that most women had serious reservations about practices that seemed to affirm male supremacy in its most odious form. Piecynska protested that women were “indignant about the prerogatives exercised by male sensuality over the freedom, the health, and the entire destiny of women.” She proposed an educational program for both men and women that emphasized the advantages of sexual self-restraint—a program for which her own course had provided a model—as a solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy.75 In the French-speaking world, birth control found its chief supporters among anarchists such as Paul Robin, who founded the League for Human Regeneration in 1896.76 Female activists who aspired to respectability remained aloof from this group because of its radical leadership. NeoMalthusianism attracted only a small group of French feminists, but these were among the movement’s most original thinkers. They shifted their emphasis from the economic theories that fascinated their male colleagues to the liberation of mothers, the health of children, and the harmony of families. Nelly Roussel denied that declining birthrates were a sign of national weakness and declared that they showed progress toward a higher level of civilization in which mothers were free and children were wanted and cared for. Among

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the bravest and most isolated apostles of birth control was the physician Madeleine Pelletier, who asserted that women also had sexual needs: “the sexual instinct also speaks in her.”77 Pelletier, who was of working-class origin, defended the right to abortion—a practice that was widespread among working-class women but considered by middle-class reformers to be crude and repulsive.78 Pelletier demanded the legalization of abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.79 She looked forward to a new form of the family in which “the raising of children will be the responsibility of both parents.”80 Roussel, herself the mother of three children, harshly criticized male sexual behavior: that of the worker who “after a drunken binge impregnates his wife without any thought for the future” and that of the wealthy man about town.81 But she declared that “love is a noble and complex emotion . . . and feminism must rehabilitate it.”82 And Gabrielle Petit, editor of the Neo-Malthusian journal La Femme Affranchie, predicted that if the father was “a beloved, well-chosen companion,” he would “cooperate with the mother, with all his heart, in the upbringing and education of their cherished children.”83 But it was in Germany that the new ideology of birth control and sexual reform found its strongest support among feminists, for reasons that were both organizational and intellectual. The BfM, which by comparison to the French and British Neo-Malthusian groups was a very large organization (at its height in 1908 it boasted about 3800 members), included many prominent intellectuals. As we have seen, Germany was a center of research in sexology, and many leaders of this field belonged to the BfM and wrote for its journal. In addition, birth control was debated in the German socialist party, where the ideas of the French anarchists had won wide acceptance among the rank and file, though not among most of the leaders.84 The German socialist Adele Schreiber, for example, was an admirer of Nelly Roussel, whom she sought out in Paris in 1910.85 Helene Stöcker melded these diverse intellectual currents into a new ideology that combined the emancipation of women, the pursuit of eugenic quality, and an egalitarian ideal of parenthood. Motherhood, she insisted, must be the free choice of a free woman and it must enhance rather than arrest the development of her personality. Sexual gratification and love, moreover, were as important as reproduction. “We will not allow ourselves to be deprived of the love of men,” she insisted, “or of the love of children.” Stöcker hoped that shared sexual pleasure would bring an end to gender conflict, and exhorted men and women to “work together toward the development of both, so that man and woman do not face each other as enemies, but begin to understand that one sex cannot exist without the other.”86 Although Stöcker’s radical ideology was never endorsed by the majority of German feminists, it briefly gained considerable visibility within their umbrella organization, the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF). From 1899 until 1910 Marie Stritt, who was a member of the BfM and a birth-control activist, served as president of the BDF. In 1908 the BDF’s Committee on Legal Reform, also

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headed by Stritt, drew up a general proposal for the reform of the criminal law code of the German Empire, where access to contraception was limited by obscenity laws and abortion was forbidden. The proposal included the complete elimination of penalties for abortion (Paragraph 218 of the criminal code). The debate on this proposal at the annual meeting of the BDF in 1908 pitted maternalists against birth controllers. Opponents of the proposal asserted that the legalization of abortion would deliver women over to the rapacious male sex drive. Throughout nature, objected the antiprostitution crusader Katharina Scheven, the sexual act was intended for reproduction, and only the human species had diverted it from its proper purpose and made it “a source of physical pleasure, completely devoid of consequences and responsibility.”87 In defense of the proposal, the legal expert Camilla Jellinek claimed right to “the freedom of the personality, to which above all belongs the disposal over one’s own body.”88 But Jellinek did not rely on this controversial claim, but hastened to add that the nation, too, would be strengthened by the birth of children who were wanted, healthy, and carefully nurtured. The BDF, which had recently admitted a large and conservative religious organization, the League of Protestant Women (Deutsch-Evangelische Frauenbund), to membership, voted down the resolution of the Legal Committee—an action that has sometimes been interpreted as a triumph of conservatism that was consolidated by the succession of the moderate Gertrud Bäumer as president in 1910.89 But in its willingness even to discuss this issue, the BDF was unique among all contemporary national feminist organizations. Moreover, the majority did not uphold the existing prohibition, but voted to legalize abortion in cases of rape or fetal defect or to protect the life of the mother—indications that they proposed should be established by a committee upon which women were represented.90 The compromise resolution, reported by Marie Stritt in person, was received with approval by the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine).91 Of course, German lawmakers did not act on this proposal. The leaders of the BfM continued to support birth control, in 1911 by attending the International Neo-Malthusian Congress, and in 1912 by changing the subtitle of its periodical, The New Generation (Die neue Generation), to read “The Publication of the International Association for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform and the International Neo-Malthusian Committee.”92 The influence of the BfM spread to Scandinavia, where Frida Steenhoff headed a Swedish branch and Katti Anker Møller tried unsuccessfully to found one in Norway. Møller declared in 1910 that the use of contraception for family planning would ensure the happiness of families and the right of all children “to expect that they are welcome.”93 But she found little support for this position from the mainstream feminists of her country, the Norwegian National Women’s Council, who agreed to publish her textbook for women on sex education in 1915 but deleted the chapter on contraception.94

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In the area of birth control, as of sex education, maternalist ideals of chastity and self-restraint were gradually superseded by more scientific theories that affirmed sex as a natural need and glorified heterosexual love as the right of both sexes. But this raised urgent ethical and philosophical questions. Maternalists had assumed that gender alone conferred upon women the moral authority to guide sexual relationships. Because the woman could “never forget the final end of sexual union, the child,” wrote Emma Piecynska, she was “more likely to take a sane and moral view of the conjugal union.” And many combined feminism with strong religious convictions. “What woman wills, God wills,” concluded Piecynska.95 But a more scientific and secular view of sexuality discredited claims both to innate female virtue and to religious authority. By what ethical principles, then, would sexuality and reproduction be guided? Helene Stöcker remarked that the “old tables of the law are broken, but the new tables are only half written.”96 Could new ethical guidelines be derived from science itself? Some feminists sought the answer to this question in the field of eugenics—a problematic quest that we will now consider.

“A C A  S”: F  E In her international best seller, The Century of the Child, Ellen Key proclaimed the “right of the child to choose its parents.”97 Key and others claimed that traditional religious morality had sacrificed the health and wellbeing of children as well as women to the Moloch of patriarchal marriage. The “new morality,” she said, “must deem no common living of men and women immoral, except that which gives occasion to a weak offspring and produces bad conditions for the development of that offspring.”98 This argument, which was widely used by feminists of the prewar era, shifted the basis of sexual morality from religious conceptions of sin to scientific norms of prudent reproduction and sound nurture. The new vocabulary of science reframed an older issue—the moral and legal basis of marriage—and was used to justify a wide variety of positions. Some highly visible figures criticized prevailing customs that encouraged young people and their parents to value the financial and social status over the health and fitness of the prospective spouse—a custom that often promoted dysgenic unions. And they added that the fit, among them many independent professional women, were often deterred from matrimony. Some drew the conclusion that maternity should be separated from marriage. The declining birthrates of the Western countries, speculated the Austrian theorist Grete Meisel-Hess, signaled a “sexual crisis” which would initiate a new moral order that condoned temporary sexual relationships and childbearing by unmarried women.99 George Bernard Shaw’s play Getting Married featured the suggestively named Lesbia, an independent spinster who (for unspecified reasons) disdained heterosexual love. “I ought to have children,” she declared. “I should be a good mother to children. . . . But the

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country tells me that I cant have a child without a man in the house, so I tell the country that it will have to do without my children.”100 But most feminists, though willing to countenance the single-parent family under some circumstances, were unwilling to accept it as an ideal. To use a man as a mere means to the end of reproduction, said Ellen Key, was an exploitative and vindictive action that would unfairly deprive the child of a father.101 The mother and her well-born child, said Helene Stöcker, could develop optimally only amid the “full, warm, rich life” of the well-matched couple.102 While accepting and even glorifying marriage, however, large groups of activist women argued for significant changes in its ethical and legal basis— changes that would protect the health of mothers and children against the consequences of male vices. This agenda was dramatized in one of the era’s most popular plays, Les Avariés (The Syphilitics) by the French playwright Eugène Brieux.103 Censored in Paris while still in rehearsal in 1901, the play was later a hit not only in France but in several other countries, including Britain, where it was given the English title Damaged Goods. The protagonist, George, was informed by his physician on the eve of his marriage that he had contracted syphilis and was therefore morally obliged to call off his wedding at least temporarily. “I will tell you this,” said the physician, “if you marry before three or four years have elapsed, you will be a criminal.”104 When George, unwilling to violate social convention, went ahead with the marriage and infected his wife, his child, and the child’s hired wet-nurse, his father-in-law expostulated that “the law provides no arms against the man who takes an innocent, confiding young girl in sound health, knowingly befouls her with the heritage of his debauchery, and makes her the mother of a wretched mite whose future is such that those who love it most do not know whether they had better pray for its life or for its immediate deliverance!”105 This play was received enthusiastically by some feminists, including the British suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst. She acclaimed Brieux for supporting the central assertion of her pamphlet, The Great Scourge and How to End It, that marriage often put women in danger, but added that “a woman’s play would be stronger still.”106 Many women activists presented men as villains and women as their innocent victims. Maria Montessori lamented the plight of the woman who had “neither the knowledge nor the power to avoid being made the instrument for the birth of weakly diseased or degenerate children,” and charged that the subordination of women in marriage was an “enormous crime against the species and against humanity.”107 Birth controllers justified women’s use of contraception as a means of resisting abusive or diseased husbands. Women, said Roussel, had the right to decide “if and when they will become mothers, and any time that they are not able, without undue suffering, to bring into the world children who are physically and morally sound . . . they have the right, I would almost say the duty, not to bear children.”108

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But the emphasis shifted from the victimization of the mother to the joint responsibility of the couple. If the production of sick or defective offspring was no longer simply a misfortune but the predictable outcome of imprudent sexual behavior, then the mother too must be held accountable. The Portuguese League of Republican Women (Liga Republicana das Mulheres Portuguesas) mixed condemnation with pity: women who “had children by alcoholics do not deserve the name of mothers; they are ignorant or criminal, unless deceived.”109 And some legal reformers advocated laws penalizing sexual irresponsibility in men and women alike. For example, in countries with police-regulated prostitution, they often recommended that police action against prostitutes should be replaced with gender-neutral laws against the spread of venereal disease by anyone, male or female. The Scandinavian countries—Norway in 1906 and Denmark in 1912—were the first to pass laws that criminalized the knowing transmission of venereal diseases.110 In their debates on these controversial measures, feminists struggled to find the proper balance between the welfare of society and the liberty of the individual. In Gemany, the BDF included a law that criminalized the knowing transmission of venereal disease in its proposals for the reform of the German criminal code in 1909. But this proposal met with criticism from the organization’s leading legal expert, Camilla Jellinek, who objected that it would actually work to the disadvantage of women. She pointed out that women would be more hesitant than men to bring lawsuits for fear of damaging publicity, and that prostitutes were less likely to sue their customers than to be sued by them. “Naturally, women have a keen interest in measures to promote public welfare and public health,” she concluded, “but when these come into conflict with . . . the preservation of women’s dignity, then we are not called upon to sacrifice the latter for the former.”111 Katharina Scheven, a conservative social-purity activist, acknowledged that the laws would be difficult to enforce but defended them nonetheless because of their deterrent effect on unscrupulous men. The proposed law was turned down by the governmental committee charged with the reform of the legal code in 1909 because, the members objected, it would encourage blackmail and false accusations.112 Among feminists in several countries, the most popular eugenic measure was the requirement of a health certificate for marriage. On this issue some French feminists were far in advance of their country’s Eugenics Society, which did not lobby for a premarital health certificate until 1926.113 In 1896, the International Feminist Conference held in Paris passed a resolution, introduced by the French participant Marya Chéliga, that “in order to protect the family against the horrible scourge of hereditary and contagious diseases, future spouses should be required to present a health certificate at the city hall.”114 In 1908, the Stavanger branch of the Norwegian Women’s National Council sent a petition to the Storthing (Parliament) requesting a debate on the issue.115 As in other areas of marriage and family law, the Scandinavian countries led the way. The draft of a new uniform marriage law, to which

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women’s organizations made an important contribution, required health certificates for male and female candidates for marriage and prohibited marriage to those afflicted with a few diseases.116 Contrary to the picture of eugenics given by many historians, who emphasize its coercive aspects, most feminist legislative proposals avoided compulsion and emphasized voluntarism and individual responsibility. In 1906, Ellen Key urged prospective spouses to obtain a certificate because “in the interest of the individual and of the human race we can demand that no one be forced to make an uninformed choice.”117 But she recommended that the certificate be shared by the physician only with the couple themselves, and that the decision to marry be left to them. The International Women’s Congress in 1913, held in Paris, recommended against making the certificate public because the revelation of private health data might lead to many forms of discrimination.118 Others, including the members of the League for the Protection of Mothers, strongly encouraged the certificate on a voluntary basis but opposed any prohibition against marriage, which might only encourage the more promiscuous reproduction of the “unfit.”119 But some feminists also supported coercive measures. The British “Mental Deficiency Act” was passed by Parliament in 1913. The Act, which was formulated and supported by the Eugenics Education Society and several civic organizations, provided that any person defined by two physicians as “feeble-minded” or as “mentally deficient” might, with the consent of parents or guardians, be confined in an institution for as long as its directors considered necessary. As Matthew Thomson points out, this measure had many female supporters, who combined philanthropic concern for a vulnerable population with eugenically based opposition to the transmission of traits that were assumed to be hereditary.120 Its chief impact was on the poor— whose behavior was more likely to come to the attention of the police and social agencies—and specifically on the female poor. Single mothers who had borne children while on public assistance were classified as “feeble-minded.” Some feminists opposed the law because it was damaging to women. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, editor of the suffrage periodical Votes for Women, objected that the powers conferred by the Bill “will be used with greater ruthlessness and responsibility toward women . . . than toward men.” Some also pointed out the law’s class bias: Dora Marsden, editor of The Freewoman, called the Eugenics Education Society “a danger to the community” and the Bill “a rascally conspiracy against the poor.”121 But because the objects of the Bill were more often stereotyped as dangerous males—criminals, alcoholics, and sex offenders—other organs of feminist opinion supported it. The suffrage periodical The Vote called for the segregation of “all confirmed drunkards and lunatics.”122 Such a measure was also proposed to the League of German Women’s Organizations in 1908 by the socialist Adele Schreiber, but was not incorporated into the organization’s legislative program until the postwar years.123 Let us return to the question raised in the introduction to this chapter: could the liberty of the individual mother be reconciled with the interest of

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society in a healthy and flourishing population? The use of eugenic theory to solve this problem was ultimately unsuccessful. Rather than a right, eugenics constituted reproductive liberty as a privilege from which an under-class of “unqualified” individuals—women as well as men—was excluded. And these judgments, though backed by the authority of science, were in fact based on criteria—such as dubious theories of heredity or measures of intelligence— that we know now to be arbitrary. But in the prewar era, when eugenic legislation existed more at the level of rhetoric than of reality, its dangers were difficult to foresee. They would become apparent in the interwar years.

B S The ideology of the citizen-mother was based on a kind of social contract, in which women’s provision of citizens to the state was rewarded by the granting of political rights and various kinds of support. In the immediate prewar years, feminists objected that the state had not fulfilled its side of the bargain. Some called for a “birth-strike,” or a strategic refusal of service to states that were still so resistant to gender equality. The “birth-strike” (or grève des ventres) was first advocated by the French Neo-Malthusians, who since the 1890s had urged workers to refuse to produce more human material to be consumed by industry and war.124 Nelly Roussel gave their message a feminist twist. Women, she swore in 1903, would no longer produce children for a society that offered them nothing but scorn and degradation. “We will put them on notice, the strike has been declared . . . in the circle, still narrow, of those who think and understand, but it will spread further.”125 In 1904 Roussel, a professional actress, attracted wide public attention as the star of her own dramatic portrayal of the birth strike, a play entitled Revolt (Par la révolte). Roussel’s character, symbolically named Eve, declared to a figure representing “Society” that she would perform “no work without a salary! I am weary of bearing ingrates,” she continued. “The tree of life refuses its fruit to the executioners.”126 From Norway, Katti Anker Møller predicted that “the expanding birthstrike, that has already started in the upper classes, is the vice that will force state authorities to give in to our claims.”127 And from Austria, Henriette Herzfelder stated that “if men had to bear children under these conditions, they would long ago have resorted to the means that they use to fight for better living conditions—the mass strike. And would it be a matter for surprise or condemnation if women, too, planned a strike?”128 British suffragists claimed that the “strike” had already begun. The declining birthrates of Western countries were identified by the editors of The Vote as an “outward sign of revolt against the degradation of the highest and holiest of functions.”129 At the height of the militant suffrage movement, Christabel Pankhurst called on women not only to refuse childbearing but to avoid all sexual contact with men, 70 to 80 percent of whom she claimed were infected with venereal disease.130 In 1914, the Women’s Freedom

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League, a suffrage organization that favored non-violence, discussed new tactics to be used in the struggle. Some members seriously suggested distributing contraceptives among working-class women. “We have got at least twenty members who are ready to do it. . . . The real force here rests with the women, if you refuse to have children, the country is powerless,” urged a member, Mrs. Huntsman. Others agreed on the goal, but rejected the means. “The only right way to limit the birth-rate is by having no relationships with men,” argued one. “Otherwise you are giving people opportunities for unlimited license . . . We object to prostitution, are we going to make prostitutes of women, of married women?”131 In Germany, the initiative came from two socialist physicians, who in 1913 urged the women of the proletariat to refuse childbearing until the state improved social and medical services to families. The leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), including prominent women such as Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, had rejected Neo-Malthusianism from the beginning because it placed the needs of the individual above the need of the working class for increased numbers.132 They immediately condemned the birthstrike, arguing that the proletariat needed “soldiers for the revolution.” The strike was more popular among the rank and file, who turned out in great numbers to discuss and support it. “Comrade Zetkin does not really understand the living conditions of the poor,” said a speaker at a mass meeting. “I advise them to go ahead and strike.”133 But the opposition of the SPD leadership consigned the movement to oblivion. The freedom to control fertility was at the heart of feminist aspirations to be both a mother and a human being. The most conspicuous rhetorical strategy of prewar feminists presented gender equality in such areas as politics, economic life, and marriage less as an intrinsic right than as a reward for a service. This service was motherhood, the production of citizens. As many historians have pointed out, this was in some ways a productive strategy, which by linking the cause of women to the welfare of the nation initiated the first stage in the development of the modern welfare state. Changes in laws regarding marriage and unmarried parenthood, new forms of state provision for mothers and children, and the first discussions of reproductive rights were among this era’s most important developments. But as the birth-strikers asserted, these gains were limited. And the definition of motherhood as a public contribution had raised some new threats to the liberty of individuals—threats that Helene Stöcker was one of the few feminists to recognize. Criticizing her colleagues who regarded “children, even in the womb, as the property of the state,” Stöcker asserted the primacy of the individual: “the state exists for the sake of the individual, not the individual for the state.”134 And Cicely Hamilton, a British suffragette and unregenerate spinster, noted that her contemporaries had put the cart before the horse. Women would not be given equality out of respect for motherhood—a function that they had little choice but to exercise. Only when women gained equality would motherhood, as the free choice of a free women, deserve respect. Until then, Hamilton saw nothing particularly distinguished about

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mere breeding. “After all, it is not upon the performance of a purely animal function that a human being should found his or her title to respect; if woman is reverenced only because she reproduces her kind, a still higher meed of reverence is due to the rabbit.”135 But amid the patriotic hysteria that would soon greet the outbreak of war, such thoughts were out of season.

Britannia protecting her children; an advertisement for National Baby Week, first held in Britain in 1917. (Hill Siffken: 1914–18 (?). Poster archive: Hoover Institution.)

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“ T V  B  ”: M, C,   S  W,  – 

“T G B  W” In 1900, Ellen Key embodied the new century as “a naked child, who comes down to earth, but turns back in terror at the sight of the globe bristling with weapons, which leaves him not even a small patch of ground where he can set foot.” Key hoped that “the new generation, its care, and its rearing,” would become “the central task of society,” and that the infant century might thus be preserved from the looming danger of war.1 But was peace really in the interest of mothers and children? Key’s worst fears were greatly surpassed by the war that broke out in 1914. And it was in wartime, so many observers remarked, that the value of children was truly appreciated. “The war with its terrible toll of young life has taught us the value of babies,” wrote Maude Royden, a British reformer, suffragist, and theologian, in 1918. “They used to be called ‘encumbrances’; now we are beginning to reckon them up as jewels.”2 Feminists in all countries hoped that the war would indeed result in an enhanced respect for mothers as well as children. For several decades they had insisted that motherhood was as vital a contribution to the life of the nation as men’s military service—a claim that wartime conditions seemed to validate. Now more than ever the state depended on mothers for its survival. And considering the progress made in maternal and child welfare, some historians have concluded that (in the words of Deborah Dwork) war was “good for babies and other young children.”3 But we have seen that feminists aimed not only to provide practical assistance to mothers and children, but even more to enable mothers to become free individuals. And though sometimes beneficial in a material sense, wartime measures eroded the individual liberties of mothers by instrumentalizing reproduction in the service of military objectives. After sketching in the historical context, this chapter will look at three feminist debates—on the wartime role of mothers, on the role of the state in encouraging, compelling, or forbidding motherhood, and on the revival of maternalism in women’s peace movements. The focus will be on the belligerent nations, particularly on France, Britain, and Germany.

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In the prewar era, a certain ambivalence about the militarization of motherhood was already apparent in feminists’ rhetoric. To be sure, the comparison of reproduction to military service had become a familiar, indeed a hackneyed trope. Since the late nineteenth century, feminists across the political spectrum had responded to the argument that only those who fought to defend their country truly deserved to govern it by pointing out that the production and rearing of citizens was an equally valuable contribution. Patriots such as the suffragist Hubertine Auclert claimed in 1908 that “the law that repeatedly demands nine months (of service) of women is more demanding than the law that requires two years of men, and many more women die on a bed of pain to create life than men on the battlefield to destroy it.”4 Even pacifists, among them the Swedish Ellen Key, called motherhood a “female military obligation.”5 But when they came up with more practical proposals for a female service obligation, few feminists suggested the recruitment of young women into motherhood. To be sure, most believed that the female military obligation must be gender-appropriate, and the suggestion of the French physician Madeleine Pelletier that women should fight alongside men found little support.6 Female military service, affirmed the League of Austrian Women’s Organizations in 1915, must never require the “training of Amazons.”7 But proponents of a female draft nonetheless hoped to give women a share in the opportunities that military service was said to provide for men—to broaden social awareness through contact with age-mates of all classes and regions, and to learn skills that would be useful in later life. And such a purpose could not be served by tying young women to maternity. In a debate held by the German League of Women’s Organizations in 1912 (the proceedings were published in 1916) the reformer Anna Pappritz asserted that motherhood in itself could never be a constructive form of service, for the woman who was confined to the household could not rise above “family egotism” to become an effective citizen.8 French women who aspired to military service likewise declined to associate it primarily with motherhood. The legendary Spartan mother—who admonished her soldier son to return from battle as a victor carrying his shield or as a corpse carried on it—was not their chosen role model. They settled on nursing, an occupation that combined maternal nurture with patriotic courage, as women’s most appropriate wartime activity.9 In Britain, the definition of motherhood as a form of military service seems also to have been confined to rhetoric. With the formation of the Volunteer Aid Detachments under the auspices of the Red Cross, young British women committed themselves to wartime service as nurses. This service, they stipulated, was to be voluntary.10 When war broke out in 1914, the majority of feminists sought to turn the crisis to the advantage of their cause by showing that women were ready and willing to take on the responsibilities of citizenship. Everywhere they abandoned struggles for suffrage and for other rights. In an outburst of patriotic enthusiasm, women’s organizations resolved to forget their differences and

M, C,   S  W

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to join in their own version of the Burgfrieden or Union Sacrée declared by political leaders, who called on citizens of all political parties to rally around the national flag. In Germany the National Women’s Service (Nationaler Frauendienst), in France the French Women’s Alliance (Éffort féminin français) in Britain a diverse group of old and new organizations recruited women into the war effort.11 In 1914, Italian women formed a National Women’s Committee (Comitato nazionale femminile), which promised to “prepare all women who are fit for work to assume public and private offices, so that in case of war the social and economic life of the country will not come to a standstill.”12 When their expectations of a quick and victorious conclusion to the conflict were disappointed, government leaders who had at first contemptuously rejected women’s offers of service now mobilized them to do the work of production. And feminist leaders were given a conspicuous role in recruiting these workers. In Britain, the representatives of several suffrage organizations attended National Conference on War Service for Women called in 1915 by Arthur Henderson, a Labour Party head of the War Cabinet.13 Meanwhile, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst turned their organizational talents to patriotic demonstrations. “The British Lion is awake, so is the Lioness,” read a newsreel headline.14 Gertrud Bäumer, the head of the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) coordinated the National Women’s Service, which engaged women across the political spectrum in the provision of child-care, employment agencies, and other social services to the female dependents and children of service men.15 Two other high-profile feminist leaders were appointed to lead the Women’s Bureau (Frauenreferat) in the Ministry of War: Marie-Elisabeth Lüders as head, and Agnes von Harnack as her deputy. Later Lüders headed a National Committee for Women’s War Work (Nationaler Ausschuss für Frauenarbeit im Krieg).16 In France, feminist leaders likewise participated in a Committee on Women’s Work, attached to the Ministry of Munitions.17 “French women in wartime. What they are doing, and what is being done for them,” read a banner headline in the feminist movement’s chief newspaper, La Française, in May 1915.18 An editorial in the periodical Der Bund, the organ of the League of Austrian Women’s Organization, declared that “what millions of women have done behind the front since the beginning of the war, day in and day out, is as important and indispensable for the course of the war as the sacrifice of millions of nameless heroes at the front.”19 In Britain, women’s total workforce participation increased from about 25 percent to 47 percent, and their share in traditionally male industries increased still more: in building 320 percent, in metal work 249 percent.20 In France, where about 30 percent of the workforce in 1914 was female; the figure increased to about 40 percent in 1918.21 Italian women employed in war-related industries increased in number from 23,000 in 1915 to about 200,000 in 1917, and they also appeared in new roles as streetcar conductors, bank tellers, and post office employees.22 In Germany, where most of

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the wartime workers had previously held other jobs, the historian Ute Daniel estimates that the increase in the total number of employed women was only about 17 percent.23 Whatever the facts, contemporary observers perceived that the female workforce had increased enormously. And of course, many of these workers were mothers. The feminist press in all countries spoke optimistically of the new respect for women who cheerfully accepted the double burden of work and family: Jane Misme, editor of La Française, reported that a boss had praised his new employees. “With some exceptions, they are wonderful,” he said, “After ten hours of work per day, they find ways to keep a perfect house.”24 However, the reality of many mothers’ lives hardly bore out such idealized reports. Despite official expressions of support for working mothers, their well-being was often sacrificed to the needs of war production. Most legislation designed to protect maternal health was suspended for the duration. As the war went on, shortages of many goods caused hardships that often interfered with the work of mothers. British women complained of the hours that they were forced to wait in line to buy scarce foodstuffs.25 Male and female workers in both France and Britain protested such shortages through a wave of strikes in 1917.26 But the hardships suffered by the populations of these countries, where child and female mortality rates hardly changed during the war years, were slight compared to those that beset families in Germany and Austria. A blockade of the German coastline by the British navy interdicted shipment of food, medicine, and other vital goods to these central European nations, and resulted in widespread hunger and increased maternal and child mortality. When money lost much of its value, barter, foraging, and theft rather than wage work became the most effective means of survival of many workingclass urban families. The breakdown of law and order in many cities began the process of de-stabilization that led to the fall of the German and Austrian monarchies.27 Governments recognized women’s patriotism by awarding them medals and other public honors. But among their fellow workers, women’s movement into male jobs often attracted more resentment than praise. Trade unions made clear that the workforce advances made by women were only temporary, to be reversed when the return of the men allowed wives and mothers to return to more appropriate domestic duties. Although changes in women’s employment patterns were in fact quite limited, they were perceived as a catastrophic reversal of gender roles. Would motherhood and motherliness, those essential female qualities, be destroyed by the war? Hands “coarsened in munitions factories,” lamented the British poet Mary Gabrielle Collins, were better suited to “guide the rosy teat swelling with milk, to the eager mouth of the suckling babe.”28 Along with the pressure to work came the pressure to reproduce. Existing natalist organizations expanded and new ones were founded. 29 French postcards that were very risqué by the standards of this era equated reproduction with war: one card pictured three babies hanging by their swaddling bands from a soldier’s bayonet over the caption, “A good thrust”; and another,

M, C,   S  W

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which portrayed an obviously pregnant woman, exhorted women to “work for France.”30 Among the measures that were designed to support childbearing were dependency allowances and social services for the families of soldiers—reforms that will be examined more thoroughly later in this chapter. However, such measures could do little to reverse the devastating impact of total war on reproduction and family life. As Ute Daniel has pointed out, the absence of fathers, the postponement of marriages, the separation of married couples, and the economic hardships endured by many households disrupted the traditional reproductive and socializing functions of the family. Birthrates were the lowest ever recorded.31 The forced separation of couples brought a rise in all forms of non-marital sexuality, including prostitution, and rates of illegitimacy, venereal disease, divorce, and abortion increased. In Germany, an increase in juvenile delinquency was attributed both to poverty and to affluence—to the shortages that gave rise to petty thievery, and to the enhanced earning power of male adolescents, who in the absence of adult men found both new job opportunities and freedom from paternal discipline.32 All of these developments were interpreted as signs of a social pathology that called for the enhanced supervision and surveillance of private life, especially that of women. Police forces controlled the sexual conduct of soldiers’ wives; infant care agencies sent “home visitors” to check up on new mothers and their babies; new rules on the sale and consumption of alcohol regulated the leisure-time activities of women.33 At the beginning of the war feminist movements split. While the majority supported the war in the hopes that women’s patriotism would finally earn them the rights that they had sought for decades, a minority in every country joined the peace movement which was inaugurated by the International Congress of Women in the Hague in 1915—a meeting of women from both belligerent and neutral nations—and continued by an International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (later re-named the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom).34 Most accounts of wartime feminism differentiate sharply between patriots and pacifists. But, as Susan Grayzel points out, these groups’ view of motherhood had much in common. Both defined “motherliness,” whether expressed through warlike enthusiasm or nonviolent compassion, as a defining female attribute.35 Both praised women’s sacrificial service to the war effort, hoped that this service would be respected and rewarded, and were frustrated—even enraged—by the way it was belittled by political and military leaders. And all shared in the grief that wartime separation, anxiety, and bereavement brought to civilians everywhere. Thus wartime discourses on motherhood often mixed exaltation with indignation, triumph with mourning, patriotism with dissent.

“T M W  F N” In the first years of the war, most feminists in all the belligerent countries affirmed that motherhood was a form of national service. “We will be the

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mothers that the fatherland needs!” wrote the German socialist Henriette Fürth in 1915. Women’s groups of all shades of opinion greatly expanded their charitable work for maternal and child welfare, now often with support from private donors and local governments. To name only a few examples: French women volunteered their services to the League to Combat Infant Mortality (Ligue contre la mortalité infantile), which sponsored urban puremilk stations, child-care centers, and kindergartens; German groups from the radical League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz, or BfM) to the conservative Patriotic Women’s Associations expanded their services to families; British volunteers worked with the Red Cross Society, the Belgian Refugees’ Fund, and the Soldiers and Sailors Dependents’ Fund to help women and children in need.36 When Italy entered the war in 1915, women’s committees in many cities cooperated under the leadership of a National Women’s Committee (Comitato nazionale femminile) to create childcare centers for working mothers and services for the children of soldiers.37 However, such charitable ventures were not sufficient to fill the immense need for social services. “The progress of the race,” wrote Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head of the British socialist group known as the Women’s Cooperative Guild, in 1916, “can best be served by raising motherhood to a position of power and equality, so that the rights of parenthood may be shared by both men and women. For this we shall find that comprehensive reforms are needed, which will entail national provision for the practical needs of motherhood and infancy, the wiping out of old laws, and the passing of others consistent with modern ideas.”38 In the wartime crisis, feminists developed a host of new arguments in favor of the reforms that they had advocated in peacetime. For many decades before the outbreak of war in 1914, reformers had pointed out that the patriarchal laws of marriage, which condemned married mothers to subordination and unmarried mothers to destitution and disgrace, harmed children as well as mothers. And in wartime governments and opinion leaders hardly needed to be persuaded of the importance of preserving the lives of children. But the tradition of male supremacy in marriage was still strongly defended, and changes in the status of married mothers in belligerent countries were very limited. Among the most important was the French law giving mothers, who had been unable to make important decisions about their children during the prolonged absence of their husbands, the rights of guardianship over their children in 1915.39 The status of “illegitimate” children, who died at twice the rate of their legitimate age-mates, caused greater concern. Even Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, who before the war had left philanthropic concern for infant welfare to the Empress, wrote from his military headquarters to the Ministry of the Interior in 1916 that the health of mothers and children, and particularly of the illegitimate, must be given higher priority.40 However, even patriotic fervor could not overcome the traditional moral notion that any improvement in the status of unmarried mothers and their children undermined Christian marriage. Changes in these laws, too, were very limited.

M, C,   S  W

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At the outbreak of war, the German League for the Protection of Mothers submitted a petition to the Imperial government requesting that illegitimate children and their mothers be included in dependency allowances and survivor benefits, and that fathers in military service be allowed to marry and legitimate their children in absentia.41 These measures, which were also supported by other influential organizations, were passed. German policymakers also expressed a new concern about the high mortality rate among illegitimate children, and some supported legal reforms that the BfM had advocated for years, including the abolition of the provision known as the exceptio plurium (which exempted a putative father who could prove that others might have fathered the child) that made it easy for fathers to avoid support obligations. Helene Stöcker remarked ironically that politicians were now enthusiastic about an agenda that they had ignored or reviled in peacetime: “the need for a comprehensive protection of mothers (Mutterschutz).”42 However, the continuing strength of conservative Christian groups prevented the reform of German laws on illegitimacy.43 The French government, too, passed measures allotting support payments to the unmarried partners of soldiers and their children, and permitting soldiers to recognize their children from the Front. In 1916, the French Chamber of Deputies approved legislation allowing such children to be legitimated after the deaths of their fathers so long as their mothers could present evidence of paternity. But this, legislators stressed, was a provisional measure for the duration of the war.44 In Rome, the National Committee for Legal Assistance to the Families of Service Personnel (Comitato nazionale per l’assistenza legale alle famiglie dei richiamati) campaigned successfully for the allotment of support payments to the children of unmarried parents and set up legal services to help soldiers and their partners regularize their unions and legitimate their children.45 The legal status of the “illegitimate” child also became a prominent issue in Britain, where before the war it had received less attention than on the continent. In 1915, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association, a private agency entrusted with the distribution of governmental separation allowances to the dependents of service men, held a public meeting to discuss a controversial proposal to include unmarried partners and their children in these benefits. The agency’s decision to pay allowances to unmarried parents who were in a stable relationship unleashed a national debate. Some argued that such a policy would encourage irresponsible female behavior and warned against the “excited and giddy girls” who “haunted the camps and caused mischief and scandal.”46 Others argued that these children were too important a resource to waste: “the mothers of our soldiers’ children,” said a Conservative member of Parliament in a letter to the editors of the Morning Post, “are to be treated with no scorn or dishonor, and . . . the infants themselves should receive a loyal and unashamed welcome.” They were, the speaker insisted, “the children of the state.”47 Children of the state? This indeed was one logical outcome of the argument that motherhood was a distinctively female form of military service. Some

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feminists affirmed this duty with enthusiasm. Among them was Marie Stopes, who during the war tried her hand at play-writing. The heroine of her play, The Race, published in 1918 (it was apparently never performed), defended her decision to bear a child by her soldier fiancé. “My body serves my country, just as much as Ernest’s, only in a different way,” she told her horrified mother. “A soldier gives his body to death; a woman gives hers to bring life.”48 Emmeline Pankhurst offered to raise fifty of “the nation’s babies,” and actually adopted four. Her daughter Sylvia, a socialist, insisted that such vulnerable children should not be left “to the fluctuations and caprice of private charity,” and recommended that Britain should follow the example of Norway and raise paternal support obligations.49 But others found this affirmation of unmarried motherhood harder to accept. Some cited traditional moral standards. The Oxford undergraduate Vera Brittain, later to become a well-known author and reformer, confided to her diary that some offers of support were “so extremely favorable to the offenders as to encourage others to repeat the same sin, and thus undermine our whole social and moral structure.” As a more mature woman, Brittain regretted her youthful self-righteousness.50 Other opponents turned to more modern ideas, including the right of the child to a stable and loving home environment. In an editorial in the suffrage paper, Common Cause, Maude Royden approved the decision to support innocent and valuable children but deplored what she called “the temptations of militarism,” particularly “the most dangerous to women—the tendency to regard them merely as potential mothers of men.” Each child, she said, had the right to be born of “a faithful love. Its coming should be earnestly desired, looked forward to with joy, received with reverence. . . . And therefore a woman or a man who becomes responsible for the birth of a child from a passing emotion and evanescent passion . . . is an illegitimate mother, and an illegitimate father.”51 A campaign to revise Britain’s uniquely harsh law, which unlike those of the Continent forbade the legitimation of children even by the subsequent marriage of their parents, produced no immediate results. But in 1917, a new organization entitled the National Association for the Unmarried Mother and her Child was founded to advocate the improvement of the legal and social status of single-mother households.52 Before the war, feminists had been almost the only public speakers to take a positive view of the wage labor of mothers, which had been seen by others as an evil to be tolerated or prohibited. Under wartime conditions such work was widely acknowledged to be an urgent, though temporary, necessity. But how would women’s obligation to work affect their equally pressing obligation to reproduce? Governments now promised forms of support for working mothers that feminists had advocated, often without success, during the prewar period. Feminists hoped that this new assistance would ease the dilemma of motherhood and paid work. The Austrian Margarete Minor predicted that women’s wartime achievements would show, once and for all, that “the argument whether motherhood can be combined with professional work is

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outdated,” for “women have shown themselves capable and reliable in all manner of occupations.”53 In France, the gynecologist Adolphe Pinard, who joined the physician and reformer Paul Strauss in heading a governmental agency devoted to maternal and child welfare (Office central d’assistance maternelle et infantile), denounced “the factory, killer of babies” (“l’usine tueuse d’enfants”) and recommended that pregnant women and mothers of infants be barred from industrial work. But a panel of physicians drawn from the Academy of Medicine argued that work was not damaging to mothers and children as long as sufficient leave time and social services were provided to them. At its 1917 convention, the French League for Woman Suffrage recommended the extension of maternity leaves and the provision of child-care centers and nursing rooms in factories. In 1917, a law required factories that employed more than 100 women to provide an hour’s break each day and facilities for breast-feeding.54 The League of German Women’s Organizations (BDF) devoted its “Wartime Convention” (Kriegstagung) of 1916 to the theme of work and motherhood. Continuing this group’s long-standing support for women’s professional ambitions, speakers denied that career commitments in themselves weakened women’s “will to motherhood.” They insisted that, on the contrary, the patriotic woman worker wished to fulfill her “moral responsibility for reproduction,” but could hardly do so without social services including maternity insurance and public child care.55 Starting in 1914, private organizations, sometimes with aid from local or national governments, established new child-care centers, called “War Kindergartens.”56 In 1917 Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, the prominent feminist who had been appointed the head of the National Committee on Women’s War Work (Nationaler Ausschuss für Frauenarbeit im Krieg) drafted a set of guidelines which, had they been implemented, would have almost completely socialized child-care. Lüders recommended that every locality should establish publicly funded centers which would be accessible to factories and open twenty-four hours a day. Younger infants, she specified, should be cared for in the mother’s workplace, and older children must be provided with free school meals and after-school care, also on a round-the-clock schedule. Always concerned to provide employment opportunities to educated, middleclass women, Lüders was careful to specify that such institutions must be staffed by trained personnel.57 But by 1917 the desperate financial situation of national and local governments made such proposals thoroughly impractical. Only a small percentage of the children of industrial workers were cared for in public day-care centers, which were not popular among mothers.58 Lüders complained constantly that the men who made social policy, including the staff of the War Ministry, lacked all “experience and training” on issues concerning child-care.59 The many frustrations that she encountered in her dealings with the military authorities led to her resignation in 1917.60 Lüders was not the only reformer whose utopian hopes for the expansion of public child-care were disappointed. In Britain, Margaret McMillan,

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a child-welfare activist who was a member of the Independent Labour Party, had worked to improve preschool education since the 1890s, when she had campaigned for the provision of free lunches, health care, and baths for the children. She had opened her first nursery school for the children of workers in 1911. In 1916, she opened a new nursery school in Deptford, one of several that were funded for the children of munitions workers by the Ministry of Munitions. McMillan did not regard this and other nursery schools as a temporary expedient, but as a permanent part of the progressive society that she hoped would emerge from the war. “Why, we are asked, do we want nursery schools?” she asked. “Should not every mother take entire charge of her little ones until they are of school age?” This question, she pointed out, was asked only of working-class mothers. “The well-todo mother never attempts to do it alone. She engages a nurse, perhaps also a governess . . . I don’t wish to continue the parallel. It is too cruel. The working-class mother in her home has no help at all.”61 McMillan, whose nursery schools provided baths and clean clothing, imagined that her well-scrubbed children would bring moral as well as physical regeneration to a world that was polluted by war, poverty, vice, and disease. Each afternoon, she recounted, “the gate of the Nursery opens and a troop of lovely children file out and pass, a river of beauty and grace, up the dim alley and across the public square flanked by public houses.” Despite their working-class background, McMillan claimed that these children were as healthy as “the well-groomed nurslings of Hyde Park or Mayfair.”62 However, most of the nursery schools founded in wartime hardly lived up to this prototype. They were understaffed, regimented, and institutional, and mothers were reluctant to use them.63 In 1918, an Education Act required support by local governments for these schools. But McMillan’s hopes for universally available early childhood education were disappointed, for by 1919 only fourteen nursery schools had been founded.64 Other feminist demands were also recast as patriotic responses to the wartime emergency. In Germany, the maternity coverage that had been added to the national insurance system in 1883 and expanded in the early twentieth century was further enlarged at the outbreak of war to provide coverage for an eight weeks’ leave to the dependents of service men and to guarantee several benefits that had been optional, including reimbursement for medical services and supplemental grants to mothers who breast-fed.65 Many women’s groups, especially those affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, called for an additional increase in the rate of coverage to replace the worker’s daily wage.66 In Britain, where the maternity benefits that had been passed in 1911 were minimal, the socialist Women’s Cooperative Guild and other groups called for a more comprehensive protection of maternal and infant health. And this campaign, which was now supported by opinion leaders in medicine, public health, and government, produced impressive results. The Maternity and Child Welfare Act, passed in 1918, required local governments to support an extensive network of centers that served maternal and infant health.67

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Their successes in the public sphere emboldened British feminists to address the more sensitive issues raised by the position of women in the family, still defined as a private realm that was insulated against public scrutiny. Feminists in every country had asserted that the liberation of mothers from economic dependence was an essential step toward equality. In wartime, the comparison of the mother to the soldier, whose patriotic services were compensated, was often adduced to justify some form of “maternal salary.” Though debated in all the belligerent countries, this idea gained the greatest prominence in Britain. Other European countries granted dependency allowances to the wives and children of soldiers, but these benefits were meager and inadequate. But in Britain, where military service was not compulsory when war broke out in 1914, the government was forced to provide incentives for men to volunteer. Among these was an allowance payable to wives and mothers without a means test and at a level on which families could actually subsist. Of course, this entitlement was actually intended to reward the services of male heads of household by supporting their dependents. But Eleanor Rathbone, who at this time worked as a social worker with the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Family Association, chose to “misread” the provision as a form of state support for women, and specifically for mothers—a benefit that she believed must be extended beyond the wartime emergency.68 She was convinced that the government allowance, which “distributed the means of subsistence according to the number of persons in the family concerned,” provided a far more adequate level of support than could be given by a male breadwinner who himself was at the mercy of an unpredictable and inequitable labor market.69 The socialist Woman’s Cooperative Guild and several women’s trade-union organizations insisted that motherhood deserved a wage. In 1915, the Cooperative Guild justified this demand by publishing a volume entitled Maternity: Letters from Working Women in which members described “the conditions under which they had brought children into the world.”70 This volume contained 160 autobiographical accounts—compiled shortly before the war—of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing.71 Written by the working-class women who headed the Cooperative Guild’s local groups, these stories left no doubt that maternity was indeed a “blood tax” equivalent to that levied on men by military service. In her preface, Davies made clear that these mothers belonged to the elite of the working class and considered themselves “more fortunately placed than most women.” And yet the stories were shocking, creating “on the whole an impression of perpetual overwork, illness and suffering.”72 Davies denied that the banishment of mothers from industrial work would solve the problem: “people forget,” she pointed out in her introduction, “that the unpaid work of the workingwoman at the stove, at scrubbing and cleaning, at the washtub, in lifting and carrying heavy weights is just as severe manual labour as many industrial operations in factories.”73 One mother wrote that she had “six children, all living, and what a terrible time it is, to be sure, especially during the last two months—only just enough

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to live on and another coming. . . . The mental strain in addition to bodily labour must surely affect the child.”74 Another had lost six children before she reared one. “I was very unfortunate in my married life,” she recalled, “and at one time thought that I was not going to rear any children.”75 Most of the contributors agreed that “the state . . . if it wants citizens, and healthy citizens . . . must make it possible for men and women to have families while living a full life themselves and giving a full life to their children . . . The first requirement is, then, the improvement of the economic position of the family.”76 But Davies added that the mother needed not only material benefits, but also individual freedom and dignity—“the means and the leisure to live a life of her own without which she is unfit to give life to her children and to direct it during their most impressionable years.”77 In the dark days of wartime, many feminists thus hoped that the state’s new appreciation of the value of each of its citizens would bring a new dignity to motherhood. “My sincere desire is that a better time is dawning for working-class mothers and their babies,” wrote a British mother.78 Certainly, the wartime emergency had motivated legislators to improve some of the material and medical conditions surrounding pregnancy, birth, and childrearing. But the very limited success of efforts to improve mothers’ legal and economic status suggested that these mothers were valued more as the producers of a vital and scarce commodity than as individuals or as citizens. In July 1917, the Queen of England recognized a national “Baby Week” by opening an exhibition on infant health in Westminster, where she was greeted by a guard of honor of mothers and children. A speech by the Bishop of London explained frankly why these mothers were honored. “The loss of life in this war had made every baby’s life doubly precious.”79 The German socialist Henriette Fürth clearly saw the intent behind such patronizing rhetoric, which was also common in Germany. “Without any respect for our individual rights and our personal aspirations,” she charged, in 1915, such men “demand children, children, and more children! . . . And how will they force us to bear them?”80

“T D S  W”: M  M In the prewar era, feminists had compared motherhood figuratively to military service. In wartime, metaphor became reality. As military casualties mounted, patriotic physicians abandoned any pretense of concern for individual mothers or children, and insisted on production at any cost. In 1916, the German physician Hugo Sellheim declared in a lecture given to the female volunteers of the Red Cross that “women can give children to the fatherland . . . it is up to her to make up for all our losses, and . . . to ensure the survival of the nation.” Like war itself, childbirth was a life-threatening ordeal in which eligible citizens had no choice but to engage: “The entry of a new citizen into the world is a bloody battle,” continued Dr. Sellheim, “in which women are often wounded, sometimes fatally.”81 An influential

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pamphlet by two French physicians stated in 1918 that women who shirked their duty “to have babies, to have babies, always to have babies” did not deserve the name of citizen.82 Underlying such shrill and desperate exhortations were fears of a crisis in civilian morale. The fall in birthrates, which in Britain declined by 26 percent, in Germany by 52 percent, in France by 38 percent, was due not only to the absence of fathers, but perhaps also to the conscious refusal of parents to bring children into a world of poverty, uncertainty, and violence.83 According to the historian Belinda Davis, working-class Berlin women who struggled to survive amid shortages so “resented the notion, spread by some private organizations, that the mother of many young children contributed more to her country’s needs and that she should therefore be rewarded for her efforts” that they contested the need of such families for increased rations. Women who became pregnant under these circumstances were deemed “selfish and suspect.”84 In 1915, Margaret Llewelyn Davies remarked on a “current of general opinion which is among the working classes, resulting in the refusal to have children,” which she called “a kind of strike against large families.”85 Evelyn Greville Warwick, a British feminist and social reformer, noted ominously in 1916 that the war had “left in the hearts of the survivors so vivid a sense of the horrors of life that many a man will hesitate to become a father lest his sons have to take their place in time to come on the fields of war and his daughters chance to be among the dwellers in a conquered city.”86 Fearing a renewal of the “birth strike,” governments in all three countries resorted to coercion as well as to positive incentives. Both the natalist legislation itself and the ways in which feminists responded to it differed in Britain, France, and Germany. Even in wartime, natalist pressure was not nearly so strong in Britain as on the Continent. An act passed in 1915 mandating the reporting of all births and stillbirths to local medical officers was designed to control abortion.87 Most feminists argued, as they had in the prewar period, that childbearing might indeed be encouraged, but could not be compelled. The physician Mary Scharlieb testified before the National Birth Rate Commission in 1916 that measures to prohibit the sale of contraceptives, though perhaps desirable, would be ineffective. “I think that we must try to educate the conscience of the nation—try to make them understand that they are committing racial suicide—try to make them willing to have children.”88 According to the British historian Jeffrey Weeks, both the knowledge and the use of contraceptive technology increased during the war—a trend influenced by the publication of the Women’s Cooperative Guild’s volume Maternity.89 The working-class mothers who contributed to this volume were strongly committed to the care of their children but angrily resisted involuntary childbearing. Many complained of forced motherhood under conditions of domestic slavery. “I cannot tell you all my sufferings during the time of motherhood. I thought, like hundreds of women do today, that it was only natural and you had to bear it. I was left an orphan and, having no mother to tell me anything, I was quite unprepared for marriage and what

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was expected of me,” wrote one, “I often think women are really worse off than beasts.” Another reflected that “when you have got an unkind husband it is a terrible life.”90 And they resisted coercion by the state as well as by husbands. “Preventives are largely used,” reported one. “Race suicide, if you will, is the policy of the mothers of the future. Who will blame us?”91 The modern woman, wrote the pacifist Helena Swanwick in 1915, felt the need “to be a complete person,” and would resist pressure, whether religious, legal, or social, to spend “all her best years in incessant child-bearing.”92 In France, a committee composed of physicians nominated by the Commissioner of Public Assistance proposed new laws that sharpened the penalties for performing, seeking, or advocating abortion and for the spread of information on contraception—a proposal that became the model for a law that was finally passed in 1920.93 Caught up in the wartime emergency, some prominent feminists supported these coercive measures. In 1916, a new addition to the already large number of natalist organizations, the League for Life (Ligue pour la Vie), included the feminist leaders Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger and Cécile Brunschvicg along with some prominent male politicians in its executive committee. Schlumberger, herself the mother of six children, was the head of a large organization, the French Union for Woman Suffrage (Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, or UFSF).94 In the mainstream feminist newspaper, La Française, she declared in an article of 1916, entitled “The Distinctive Duty of Women,” that “mothers owe service to the country just as do soldiers on the front,” and that “any young married people in good health who refuse to give a child to France in the first year of peace should be considered deserters.”95 The historians Karen Offen, Anne Cova, and Paul Smith place this statement in the context of a resurgent campaign for woman suffrage, which in the form of a municipal franchise or a “familial vote” seemed a political possibility. The “familial vote” would have given the parents of large families additional votes, and feminists hoped that mothers as well as fathers would be thus enfranchised.96 Was Schlumberger’s patriotic stance part of a “deliberate political trade-off,” asks Offen, and was “reproductive servitude the ultimate price of women’s admission to French citizenship?”97 Although not all feminists agreed with Schlumberger, wartime censorship—which penalized any support of birth control or family limitation—prevented the open discussion of her position. German feminists, and especially those of the mainstream League of German Women’s Associations (BDF) have often been stereotyped as fervent nationalists.98 But although many agreed with their French counterparts that childbearing was a service to the nation, as a group they proved more resistant to natalist pressures. German feminists of all political persuasions objected to the exploitation of motherhood in the service of militarism. Gertrud Bäumer, who in addition to her position as the leader of the National Women’s Service was the editor of the best-known German feminist periodical, Die Frau, argued in 1916 that reproduction was indeed a form of public service, but a voluntary one that the state could not compel. “People,

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who belong to us, are our greatest wealth—in the end, the only wealth that we possess, and there is nothing greater than to give life to another person.” Pointing to women’s protests against wartime hardships, she characterized sinking birthrates as an expression of “pessimism about the future,” and concluded that only “the belief in social justice” could restore “the courage required for parenthood.”99 The failure of Germany’s natalist associations— unlike those of France—to put women in prominent roles left them vulnerable to criticism. In 1916, Helene Lange commented on the inaugural meeting of one such organization, the Society for Population Policy (Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik) that it was “very strange” that “in a matter in which nature has given women a not inconsiderable role . . . they are allotted only token representation.”100 In Germany, three laws—one that strengthened penalties for abortion, a second that forbade all advertisement or sale of contraceptives, and a third that tightened control over prostitution and the reporting and treatment of venereal disease—were introduced in the Reichstag in 1918.101 In a resolution passed in the same year, the BDF endorsed some clauses in the new laws, including the criminalization of abortion and the prohibition of the door-todoor peddling of contraceptives. But the resolution objected to any total ban on the sale of contraceptives: “in the interests of many families who are under economic pressure, and to protect women, we should not prohibit the restriction of births. Therefore, in our opinion the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of contraceptives goes too far. The means of preventing both venereal disease and conception must be available in apothecary shops, drugstores, and shops that sell medical supplies.”102 In October of 1918, the collapse of the German army on the Western Front and the prospect of an armistice initiated a period of political change, marked by the appointment of a new Chancellor, Max von Baden, and the first steps toward the liberalization of the monarchy. In this freer atmosphere, feminists of all political persuasions spoke out against “compulsory childbearing” (Gebärzwang). The socialist women’s groups organized protest meetings against a state which (as the socialist women’s newspaper, Die Gleichheit, put it in October of 1918) “forces you . . . to bring as many children as possible into the world, by depriving you of the only harmless means of deciding for yourselves how many children you want to have.”103 In an article entitled “Coercive Population Policy,” Bäumer declared “with a feeling of painful humiliation” that there was “no area of legislation . . . in which it is more woefully apparent to women that laws are made for them without consulting them or even taking their viewpoint into account.”104 The proposed laws were, in fact, never passed, for by the winter of 1918 the Imperial government disintegrated under the impact of defeat, and the successor regime, the Weimar Republic, inaugurated a less coercive population policy.105 The cult of militarized motherhood also demanded of mothers, as of draft boards, the selection of the healthy. In Britain, where military service did not become compulsory until 1916, grief for a “Lost Generation” expressed

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a popular belief that the war had claimed a disproportionate number of upper-class young men—seen through the lens of nostalgia and class prejudice as the best, healthiest, and brightest.106 Some medical authorities feared that the removal of these men from the gene pool was a threat to the nation’s future. “Some of us are trying to encourage the men to marry before they go,” testified a prominent physician and eugenicist, Caleb Saleeby. “I am doing so for the definite eugenic end, as they are the pick of our men.”107 Marie Stopes agreed: the heroine of her play, The Race, warned that if “all the fine, clean, strong young men . . . who go out to be killed should leave no sons to carry on the race” then the next generation would be bred from “the cowardly and unhealthy ones.”108 During the war years, public health authorities urged mothers to avoid the production of unhealthy children who, like these unfit fathers, would burden society. An exhibition held in Dresden in 1916 included both advice on children’s health and warnings against “irresponsibly produced children.”109 Alarmed at the prospect that returning soldiers would spread venereal disease, public health authorities in the belligerent countries proposed new measures directed against women, including stiffer controls on prostitutes. By contrast, feminists emphasized men’s share of the responsibility for spreading disease. School-based sex education gained more public support; for example, in Britain the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease recommended the teaching of “the laws of moral hygiene” in all “types and grades of education.”110 The push for voluntary or compulsory health certificates for married couples, reinforced by the passage of such a measure in Sweden in 1915, also continued. In France, the premarital health certificate was advocated by the prominent anti-prostitution activist Marcelle LeGrand Falco. But the physician Blanche Edwards-Pilliet considered that such a requirement would be ineffective, and argued instead for an intensive program to educate young people of both sexes on the danger of venereal disease.111 In Germany, representatives of the League for the Protection of Mothers and of the socialist women’s groups attended a meeting held in 1917 under the auspices of natalist organizations such as the Society for Population Policy (Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik) and the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft für Rassehygiene). Along with many other participants, they advocated premarital health examinations chiefly in order to protect the health of women and their children from infection by diseased men. Some female delegates also appealed to women’s own sense of responsibility by insisting that the health examination should be required of brides as well as bridegrooms. But the Ministry of Health looked unfavorably upon any measure that would cut back on the number of marriages and births, and endorsed only a recommendation that a leaflet on the dangers of hereditary disease and the importance of wise mate-selection be distributed by local marriage offices. This became law during the Weimar Republic.112 Maternalists often claimed that motherly concern for children was a universal emotion that knew no distinction of class or nationality. But in

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wartime, tenderness was out of fashion. Whereas the child—or at least the healthy child—of the nation was regarded as a priceless resource, the child of the enemy could be seen as a hated invader. In January 1915, French newspapers reported that many pregnancies had resulted from rape by German soldiers during the invasion of Belgium and northern France in the previous autumn. According to these same reports, a Belgian priest had dramatically abjured Catholic doctrine and exhorted the victims to emulate Herod’s massacre of the innocents: “Let no impure blood corrupt the purity of your veins. . . . I give you absolution before God and men.”113 Incitement to abortion and infanticide was repudiated by the Catholic press but taken up by nationalist propagandists. If their mothers killed these children of rape, wrote the eminent journalist and novelist Maurice Barrès, “what jury would condemn them?”114 The response of French feminists to these reports was so deeply divided that the editors of both the mainstream paper, La Française and the left-wing La Bataille Syndicaliste opened their columns to debate. What to do with the “children of the enemy”? On the one hand, the victims of rape excited sympathy and outrage. On the other hand, many correspondents remarked that those who advocated the termination of these pregnancies were hardly concerned about the women—in fact, they were among the most fanatical opponents of abortion or contraception under other circumstances. Rather, they were motivated by sheer, murderous hatred for the enemy. And could a child be the enemy? Some readers clearly thought so. “France should get rid of everything German,” stated a letter to La Française in 1915. Some feminists took advantage of the crisis to break taboos that forbade the advocacy of abortion. “Don’t you think that, in such cases, abortion is not a crime but a duty?” wrote a correspondent who pitied the mother who held “the child of the foreigner at the breast in the place of a French child.”115 No mother, wrote the lawyer Maria Vérone, should be condemned to such a “horrible maternity”; nor, according to the feminist Camille Bélillon, should she be regarded simply as a “baby mill.”116 But the editor of La Française, Jane Misme, held to her maternalist position that mothers and children deserved respect and help, whatever their circumstances. “It is with all the strength of my maternal instinct that I speak,” she wrote, “to defend, here and everywhere, the mothers and children who are treated as outcasts.”117 Misme asserted that the conservative men who exploited the victims’ plight for propagandistic purposes were hypocrites, for they had never objected to marriage laws that produced countless “legitimate” children of rape.118 When spokesmen for the government affirmed that these children, if abandoned by their parents, had the same right to foster care as all needy children, Misme asked how they would be treated by foster families who might well know or suspect their origin.119 Likewise Marcelle Capy, a socialist reporter for La Bataille Syndicaliste, condemned the “utter hatred” expressed in letters to the editor, and affirmed her faith that “women, whatever their nationality, have stayed close to their nature, and could thus never reject an innocent, newborn life . . . Have

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women become just like men, for whom the law of guns and executioners is supreme?”120 The visceral hostility to the “children of the enemy” was reinforced by racist theories that the genetic quality of the French population was threatened by this infusion of inferior German blood. But some feminist authors, especially those who advocated a matrilineal family structure, insisted that the child of a French mother was French, whatever the father’s nationality might be. In one of the many fictional accounts of this dilemma, the husband of a raped woman decided against killing or abandoning the child and resolved that: “we will make him into a good Frenchman, and that will be our revenge.”121 How could a mother love such an unwanted child? In order to explain this, the mother–child relationship had to be divested of its moral and spiritual content and recast as a purely visceral and instinctive bond. The child-welfare activist and pacifist Madeleine Vernet portrayed a fictional rape victim, Marthe, who was determined to abort, kill, or abandon her child. But when she saw the baby’s face, she felt “the call of the flesh, which affirms life and existence . . . Sublime, unchanging, is maternity not its own reason for existence, and is it not sufficient in itself?”122 However, such maternal instincts were clearly not universal. In 1917, the servant Joséphine Barthélemy was tried for the murder of her newborn infant. Although she declared herself innocent of murder, she claimed to have been the victim of rape by German soldiers. In a decision supported by public opinion, she was acquitted.123 Among the psychological effects of the war was to continue the destruction, well under way in the prewar years, of the Victorian ideal of the mother as pure and altruistic “angel in the house.” For the wartime mother lived independently, did the work of a man, protested raucously in the streets, and often refused her traditional burden—in the words of the British pacifist Maude Royden, the bearing of children into “a world so unready for them.”124 And all mothers were not the loving, compassionate, and responsible beings that some prewar feminists had made them out to be. Indeed, many shared in wartime hatreds that could include even newborn babies among the enemy.

“W-W” T P M But a minority of pacifists in all countries still held up the mother as a symbol of love, compassion, and nonviolence. Aletta Jacobs (since her marriage Aletta Jacobs Gerritsen), who was president of Holland’s Association for Woman Suffrage, summoned women who wished to “protest together against the horrors of war” and perhaps even to “find a way to end the hostilities” to a meeting in The Hague in 1915.125 The national feminist associations in the belligerent countries refused to send delegations, but small groups from Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Great Britain, as well as from such neutral nations as Sweden, the Netherlands, the United States, and Canada

M, C,   S  W

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attended. These women formed the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (in 1919 its name was changed to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) and passed a set of resolutions that called for a negotiated peace. This document, which was sent to the governments of thirteen neutral and belligerent nations, influenced the “Fourteen Points” that were proposed later by the American President Woodrow Wilson.126 The meeting was chaired by a woman of great international prestige, the American Jane Addams. Though herself neither married nor a mother, Addams claimed that pacifism came naturally to women because of their experience of motherhood—an experience that transcended national boundaries. The same argument was made by Helena Swanwick, a British participant. “Two pieces of work for the human family are peculiarly the work of women: they are the life-givers and the homemakers,” she wrote in 1915. War kills or maims the children born of woman and tended by her; war destroys “woman’s place”—the home. Every man killed or mangled in war has been carried for months in his mother’s body and has been tended and nourished for years of his life by women. He is the work of women: they have rights in him and in what he does with the life they have given and sustained.127

Swanwick and other delegates who returned from the Hague such as the German Anita Augspurg and the Austrian Rosa Mayreder set up branches of the International Committee in their own countries. Some, such as the German Helene Stöcker, supported pacifism through journalism and organizational work.128 Following a socialist peace conference held in Switzerland in 1915, some French socialist women, including Hélène Brion and Louise Saumoneau, took up the pacifist cause. Brion, an activist with a left-wing teachers’ union, was arrested for her antiwar activities in 1917. At her trial, where she stated fearlessly that “I am first and foremost a feminist. All those who know me can attest to it. And it is because of my feminism that I am an enemy of war,” she was defended by her friends Nelly Roussel and Madeleine Vernet.129 In 1917, Vernet founded a periodical, The Mother as Educator (La Mère Éducatrice), in which she proclaimed that only mothers could save the world from “a slow death, a moral death, the worst of deaths. . . . We will help you with the moral education of your children!” she promised mothers. “We will show you the grandeur of your maternal role, we will give you confidence in yourself so that you finally dare, O mother, to occupy the place in society that belongs to you.”130 Meanwhile a new group that called itself Women’s Action (Action des femmes) was founded in France in 1915 and took up the struggle for woman suffrage that the larger organizations had renounced at the outset of hostilities. At first, this group’s program was highly patriotic. But by 1917, disillusioned with the war, the group turned to a pacifist ideology based on the matriarchal

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theories of Céline Renooz, who at the age of seventy-eight was elected its honorary president. The group’s manifesto of 1917 invoked “the difference of the sexes in nature and mission” as a basis for female solidarity transcending class. “The male is violent and destructive; the female is gentle, altruistic, and constructive.” Whereas the age of matriarchal rule had been a “period of peace and happiness, called the ‘golden age,’ ” the rule of men had brought nothing but “an uninterrupted sequence of wars and horrible catastrophes.”131 The present war, stated the group’s secretary, Anne Léal, was merely the latest consequence of the “triumph of panmasculinism.”132 Women’s Action called for the legal recognition of a mother-headed family structure, maternity as a social function, and women’s entitlement to equality of opportunity in education, the professions, and political life. It also claimed “the right and duty to assume the moral leadership of humanity.”133 This initiative had considerable success—meetings often attracted over two hundred women— and helped to reinvigorate the suffrage struggle carried on by the Committee for Suffragist Action (Comité d’action suffragiste) in 1918.134 But motherhood proved to be a shaky basis for international solidarity. The vast majority of feminists in all countries refused to cooperate with the peace movement. Of course, one motive for this refusal was the ambition to deserve the rights of citizenship, including suffrage, through valiant patriotic service. But some were also skeptical about the pacifists’ conception of women’s nature. Like most men, most women defined themselves more by nationality than by gender. French women, stated the National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes françaises), had always been sympathetic to pacifism and in the prewar years had aspired to “peace and international understanding, if not in the entire world, at least in Europe.” But “until the German women protested to their own government against its violations of international law and the crimes of its army against civilians, any cooperation with them would be a betrayal of the nation; the fact that they belong to the female sex was quite irrelevant.”135 Marianne Hainisch, the leader of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine) declared that support for the peace movement was a betrayal of the Fatherland.136 The Germans too rallied to their men. “Nobody can look for an end of these sacrifices with more longing than we,” wrote Gertrud Bäumer. “But with the knowledge of the greatness of the sacrifices we feel one with our people and our government. The men who take the responsibility for the decisions Germany makes are as dear to us as are the men who shed their blood for us on the field of battle. . . . Should we spiritually betray the men who defend our safety by belittling and insulting the inner forces which keep them up?”137 In an article written for Die Frau, Hanna Hellmann doubted that the notion that woman’s nature was inherently peaceable could stand against the historical fact that the majority of women had supported the war enthusiastically. “So we must not ask ‘how must women fulfill their nature,’ but rather admit that this is the way women have behaved. What can we conclude about their

M, C,   S  W

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nature?” The pacifist doctrine made women into rather simple and stereotyped creatures. “If women are purely determined by their biology, then, if they are truly feminine, can they never feel any conflict between natural urges and intellectual convictions?”138 At the conference in the Hague, the statement of a lone dissenting delegate that she did not believe that “the average woman” was more peaceful by nature than the average man was met with derision.139 But the same skepticism was expressed by other women. The British journalist and suffrage activist Rebecca West criticized feminist pacifism as it was articulated by the Swedish child-welfare advocate Ellen Key. Like other peace activists, Key believed that the admission of mothers to the rights of citizenship would put an end to war. “When women have gained a voice in these decisions, the living human material that is now ruthlessly sacrificed . . . will be accounted the greatest riches of the State.”140 West, who had never belonged to Key’s international fan club, derided the notion that “now mere femaleness is going to end the war” as an expression, not of feminism, but of sentimental “woman-worship . . . Mere platitudinous assertions as to the niceness of peace and the nastiness of war are useless in such crises, and the ‘motherly’ advice of Miss Key that the belligerent nations should refrain from denouncing the sins of others . . . is actively mischievous.”141 Pacifists claimed that mothers’ love for their sons would always be a force for peace. But wartime images of mothers and their soldier sons did not inevitably carry a pacifist moral—indeed, they were much more often used to serve the cause of patriotism. In 1914, Britain had adopted the “Mother’s Day” holiday from the United States. A British pamphlet showed a gray-haired mother who imagined that her son was sitting at her feet while she knit him a pair of socks. “When you do come marching home,” read a letter from this fictional mother, “bring me back the same boy I gave my country—true and clean and gentle and brave.”142 The holiday spread to France by 1918, where a Catholic women’s organization, the League of French Women (Ligue des femmes françaises) organized celebrations in Paris and Lyon. The celebrations included patriotic films and music for children, and medals were awarded to mothers who were judged particularly meritorious.143 Italian propagandists urged mothers to reinforce the morale of the troops by encouraging their sons to fight, and compared the mothers of the fallen to the Virgin Mary as “mamma dolorosa, mamma gloriosa.”144 All these sentimental images, whether pacifist or patriotic, were covered with contempt by the authors who claimed to speak for the soldiers themselves. Like other women, mothers were civilians, who were often resented for the safety in which they lived. “We’re divided into two foreign countries,” said a soldier on leave in Henri Barbusse’s novel, Under Fire, “the Front, over there, here there are too many unhappy, and the Rear, here, where there are too many happy.”145 In the all-male society of the Front, the only human ties that counted were to comrades. Mothers could not support their sons emotionally—in fact, the parent–child relationship was reversed as sons were forced to shield

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their mothers from the shocking truth. Sometimes mothers’ ignorance was portrayed as simply pitiable. A soldier in Barbusse’s fictional company who wrote a cheerful and reassuring letter to his mother was killed before he could send it. His comrade, who retrieved the letter, reflected that it “would have been read by the old peasant woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet nothing in the cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows like a dark spring on the walls of the trench.”146 While home on leave, the central character of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (which was based on its German author’s own experience as a front soldier) was asked by his mother if it was “bad out there.” He lied: “No, Mother, not so very. There are always a lot of us together, so it isn’t bad.”147 With mixed pity and aggression, the British soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon addressed the mother of the enemy. Oh German mother, dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son, His face is trodden deeper in the mud.148

But not all mothers were pitied—some were included in the poets’ indictment of an older generation whose stupidity and arrogance had sent so many young men to their deaths. The Countess of Warwick described a British mother’s response to her son’s death. “Harry’s colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor son’s bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition—ours has always been a fighting family.”149 In another of his poems, Sassoon pictured just such a Spartan mother, who responded to the news of her son’s death with pride that “Jack fell as he’d have wished.” The officer bringing the news, who had seen Jack “blown to small bits,” admitted that he had: Told the poor old dear some gallant lies, That she would nourish all her days, no doubt, For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy, Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.150

The British war poets, observes the historian Paul Fussell, had very little sympathy for the suffering of bereaved women.151 Neither did the German fighting men portrayed by Klaus Theweleit. Their literary works pictured mothers in the double guise of creator and destroyer, and denounced the “mother of iron who does not even bat an eyelid at the news of the death of the sons that she has sacrificed so much to raise.”152 These misogynist fantasies said more about the sons’ feelings of vulnerability than about the mothers’ actual behavior. Parents grieved in many different ways. Some tried to recover their sons’ bodies, others decided to leave them where they had fallen.153 Often, there was no body. Vera Brittain recalled the “helpless distress” of her fiancé’s mother when she received his

M, C,   S  W

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only remains—a few items of clothing, which gave off “a charnel-house smell.” “Take these clothes away into the kitchen and don’t ever let me see them again,” said Roland’s mother. “I must either burn them or bury them. They are not Roland.”154 Some bereaved mothers and fathers attended spiritualist séances, which gained in popularity during and after the war, in a desperate attempt to make contact with the dead.155 The German painter and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz struggled to express her grief for her son Peter. “Make a drawing: the mother letting her dead son slide into her arms. I might make a hundred such drawings, and yet I do not get any closer to him. . . . I am too shattered, weakened, drained by tears.”156 A replica of Kollwitz’s bronze sculpture of a mother cradling her dead son in her lap now stands in Berlin as a monument to all victims of war and political oppression. In the German working-class neighborhoods described by Ute Daniel, mental breakdown and suicide, but also laughter and curses, were among the reactions to bereavement.157 Contrary to the hopes of pacifists, the moral authority of mothers was not exalted by the war. On the contrary, maternalist stereotypes of innately peaceful and altruistic mothers were questioned by the many feminists who rejected the peace movement. And familiar clichés about mother-love, which had been degraded in the service of wartime propaganda, were consigned by spokesmen for an angry younger generation to the trash-heap of outmoded Victorian sentimentalities. In the interwar era, the mother would be displaced from her pedestal.

C: “B   H?” What was the effect of the wartime experience on the culture and politics of motherhood? Prewar feminists had aspired to two ideals of the post-patriarchal family: one centered on the independent mother and the other on the egalitarian two-parent household. The wartime experience, though it seemed to reinforce the first model, actually tilted the balance toward the second. For the mother-headed family was associated with the hardship and bereavement of wartime; by contrast, the restoration of the two-parent household promised a return to stability, harmony, and fertility. More than ever, prestigious spokesmen prescribed marriage and motherhood as every woman’s destiny. Dr. Gaston Variot, the head of the Institute of Child-Care in Paris, declared that “young girls and women must now think of the repopulation of France, and fill up the house with children quickly after the war.”158 To be sure, the supply of healthy young men had been decimated. But Dr. Variot insisted that women must be persuaded to marry the wounded, whose injuries had not diminished their genetic value.159 The British Eugenics Education Society even recommended that the wounded be given a special badge to attest to their fitness for paternity.160 But the literature of the postwar period offered few happy endings. In Rebecca West’s novel, The Return of the Soldier, the shell-shocked veteran did not even recognize his wife, and returned to the love of his youth, who was

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married to someone else.161 The returning soldier portrayed by Ernst Toller’s play, Hinkemann was castrated.162 In his short novel The Fox, D.H. Lawrence depicted a female couple who offered hospitality to a demobilized soldier. Having fallen in love with one of the women, the soldier jealously killed the other.163 These literary figures had their real-life counterparts in the men who returned disabled, emotionally disturbed, or unable to adapt to civilian life.164 Natalist zealots proposed polygamous marriage as a solution to the shortage of suitable husbands. Jane Misme rejected this degrading suggestion, but admitted that many women would be deprived of motherhood. They were, she said in 1916, “victims of war. Just as men have sacrificed their lives or their health, women will suffer in their souls.”165 Feminists had hoped that wartime measures that assisted working mothers would be preserved and expanded after the war. But returning veterans demanded the removal of their female competitors. Even before the war was over, feminists expressed concern about the widespread summary dismissal of women from their wartime jobs. The return of women to the home, wrote Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, depended on the presence of the family breadwinner and his ability to earn an adequate wage, and under existing conditions neither could be relied on.166 Helena Swanwick feared that the cry of “back to the home” would be raised “whether the women have a home or not.”167 The editors of La Française continued to support women’s right to work, but added that such work must be reconciled with maternal obligations: “the France of the future,” stated an editorial of 1918, “cannot sacrifice maternity to work, or work to maternity.”168 Feminists predicted confidently that postwar governments would recognize the contributions of women by making it possible for them to fulfill their true potential, both as mothers and as human beings. The Italian Donna Paola (Baronchelli) praised the work of Italian women in the fields of maternal and child welfare and hoped that the mother of tomorrow would be a “conscious citizen” who would become the educator of “a new Italian people—new in spirit, in thought, in customs.”169 As we have seen, medical coverage and social benefits for mothers and children were improved during the war, a trend that would continue in the interwar years. In some countries, such as Britain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria, the granting of suffrage rights signaled lawmakers’ appreciation of women as mothers as well as workers. But fears that the female would outnumber the male electorate came to the fore in the British law that set a minimum voting age of thirty for women, but of twenty-one years for men. In France, an initiative to give women the vote passed one legislative chamber, the Chamber of Deputies, but was defeated in the upper house, the Senate, where members insisted that it might endanger population growth. And in Italy, woman suffrage failed because of the disorganization of the liberal parties and the rise of the militantly anti-feminist fascist movement.170 While feminists dreamed of a postwar world where the mother could finally be a free individual, the generation of male authors who served at the front cherished a very different fantasy. The modernist literature and visual

M, C,   S  W

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art that they created was full of anger at women for refusing their maternal and feminine roles. A playful variation on this theme was the revue The Breasts of Tiresias (Les Mamelles de Tirésias) by the soldier-poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which though written in 1903 was first performed (in a revised version that contained some topical references to the war) in Paris in 1916. In far-off Zanzibar, a housewife named Thérèse declared that she would have no children, removed her breasts (represented by balloons) and went off to become a general, a deputy, and a city councillor. Whereupon her husband assumed the breasts and his patriotic responsibility: Women who crave emancipation Have called a halt to procreation! “We’ll bear no more” they boldly state. “You’ll simply have to populate Our land with apes and elephants, With snakes and ostriches and ants.” Just like the queen, who oversees Her busy, buzzing hive of bees (Though less industrious than these) Our women have become quite sterile. They’ve placed the Fatherland in peril! So shout aloud, to near and far, “We need more kids for Zanzibar.” Despite the accident of gender, We love our land, and we’ll defend her. If women will not breed the race, We men will do it in their place.171

Unlike this versatile hero, who immediately produced more than 40,000 children for the Fatherland, real men could not learn to have babies. But they could devise new ways to stem the tide of emancipation, keep women out of male careers, and control their reproductive capacities. And these would be major policy directions during the next two decades.

“Think of our future: vote for the Center Party.” In the interwar era, all German political parties emphasized the importance of mothers and children to the survival of the nation. (Deutsche Zentrumspartei, Berlin: A.M. Cay, 1918–25 (?) Poster archive: Hoover Institution.)



T D B: M       , M        ,    E              I      Y    

“N  P  C” At the close of the war, feminists hoped for peace not only in international but also in gender relations, to which wartime had brought so much tension, disorder, and conflict. Sometimes, a return to nurturing motherhood was proposed as a remedy. Amid the revelry that marked the signing of the Armistice, the British suffragist Catherine Gasquoine Hartley deplored the behavior of the “screaming girls” who greeted the soldiers. “In one group a woman was carrying a baby, and a tiny child dragged at the hand of another girl, crying drearily, and no one noticed. . . . Surely this squandering of Woman’s gift, this failure of herself, must cease now that peace has come.”1 But as the initial euphoria was followed by a more realistic view of women’s status in interwar societies, many voices were raised against this one-sided view of women’s destiny. Among them was that of the flamboyant British activist Dora Russell. “In actual fact, a woman is as capable as a man of combining love of a mate, parenthood, and physical and intellectual work,” she wrote in 1925. “If we cannot have children and remain intelligent human beings . . . then indeed our emancipation is a mockery.”2 Russell included both maternity and fulfillment through work in her definition of emancipation. Feminists of the interwar era have often been stereotyped as conservative. For instance, Susan Kingsley Kent accuses British leaders of endorsing “conservative and reactionary images of masculinity and femininity”; and Claudia Koonz depicts German feminists as devotees of “motherly love in its separate sphere.”3 Certainly, these years saw the decline of militancy and a new emphasis on the reconciliation of the sexes, and large and vocal religious women’s organizations gave high visibility to some conservative positions. But by the 1930s, progressive feminists in every country—and even some members of conservative religious groups—had coalesced around a view of motherhood that was distinctly modern and included equality of parental rights, the right to combine marriage and motherhood with paid work,

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F           M           W       E    

controlled reproduction, and rationalized child-rearing. After sketching in the historical context, this chapter will focus on the first two issues—the legal rights of mothers in marriage, and the combination of motherhood and job or career. The others will be discussed in the two chapters that follow. Feminists’ positions on these issues evolved in the context of more general changes in attitudes toward reproduction, child-rearing, and the role of the state. As we have seen from an earlier chapter, most prewar feminists did not simply affirm woman’s maternal vocation, but problematized it by depicting it as one side of a dilemma, the other side of which was the desire for individual autonomy or self-realization, sometimes in the form of paid work. In the interwar era, issues surrounding motherhood and paid work moved to the forefront of public concern. And the maternal dilemma continued as a prominent theme in feminist debates, but with a change of emphasis from the individual mother to the family group. The context for this shift of focus was the widespread perception that the family was in crisis—a crisis that was attributed not just to the stress of postwar readjustment, but to changes in the status of women. In the closing days of the war, feminists renewed the campaigns that had been suspended in 1914. And in the first years of peacetime, they reached the height of their influence. Shortly after the war, women had gained the right to vote in many countries—such as Britain, Germany, Austria, Britain, Ireland (where the British law was extended to women, and ratified in 1922 by the newly created Irish Free State), the Netherlands, and Sweden. In France, where women did not gain suffrage rights, organizations such as the National Council of French women and other liberal organizations nonetheless gained in prestige and influence.4 In many countries, legislation—for example, the British Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 and German educational reforms that admitted women to university teaching positions and to the legal profession—gave women new access to educational opportunities and to professions. In wartime, women had not only taken on new vocational roles, but had claimed new personal freedoms in dress, social behavior, and recreational activities. Public opinion responded anxiously to these changes in women’s status. For example, the influential British journalist Victor Gollancz associated his country’s resurgent women’s movement with “revolutionary methods, sex strikes, and sex wars” which might abolish all distinctions of gender.5 Groups representing male workers, including professional organizations, veterans’ associations, and labor unions, retaliated against this imagined threat by denying job opportunities to female workers. And mothers—actual or potential—were singled out for discriminatory treatment by policies and laws that mandated the dismissal of married female workers in many occupations, particularly in privileged civil service and teaching positions.6 As unemployment was defined as a male problem, married women who were dismissed were often denied insurance and other forms of financial assistance. The family, too, was sometimes portrayed as a war zone. The popular French novelist Henry Bordeaux described the marital conflicts of reunited

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couples. “We talk of marriage between men and women,” he observed, “as one talks of peace between the Germans and the French. The husband wants to impose conditions. . . . Women do not want to obey and don’t know how to command.”7 Such apprehensions were shared by many feminists. The Austrian Grete Meisel-Hess warned that “the tensions that the war created seem still to hover in the air. People have not had enough of the pain, the hostility, the destructive fury . . . Marriage and war have infected each other.”8 The popular culture of the era exuberantly fed these obsessions by portraying the emancipated woman as a seductive man-hater—red-lipped, sharp-toothed, and sadistic. “I am a vamp, I am a vamp, I’m a fierce wild beast,” sang the cabaret stars of Berlin: Upon the blood of men I feed, I like them fried and fricasseed.9

Most famous of the vamps was Monique, the heroine of La Garçonne (The Bachelor Girl), by the French novelist and sex reformer Victor Margueritte. An instant publishing sensation in 1922, the novel sold a million copies by the end of its first decade in print, and was translated into many languages.10 Monique rejected an arranged marriage and set out on a “bachelor” life, complete with career, lots of wild partying, and affairs with glamorous partners of both genders. But lest the novel subvert its own moral by making its wayward heroine seem enviable, the author cursed her with sterility. After an abortion, Monique found herself unable to conceive, and reflected sadly that “she had won nothing beside her freedom. Her work? What good was it, if it only fed her loneliness? . . . If no child was to be given to her, what was there left?”11 As Mary Louise Roberts remarks, Monique was the female counterpart of the impotent or emasculated male veterans who wandered helplessly through postwar fiction.12 And the solution to this anguish was marriage, for when she found a sympathetic husband and gave up her misguided independence, Monique’s fertility was miraculously restored. The reconstruction of the family was also a central concern of the national community. Governments faced with the task of reintegrating returning veterans into society and reversing wartime declines in birthrates promoted marriage and family stability. The constitution of the German Weimar Republic devoted a clause to the family: “Marriage is the foundation of family life and of the preservation and increase of the nation, and stands under the protection of the constitution.”13 The French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, declared in 1919 that although the Versailles treaty did not specifically “stipulate that France undertakes to produce a great number of children,” nonetheless “that should have been its very first article, since . . . France will be ruined because there will not be any Frenchmen left.”14 The Swedish Minister of Social Affairs wrote to a newly appointed Population Commission that “measures will have to be instituted to encourage marriage . . . and the bearing of children.”15 The concepts of “marriage” and “family” were widely debated and took on a broad range of meanings.

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One influential familial ideal was promoted by religious and right-wing women’s organizations. In Germany, conservative religious women organized in the German Evangelical Women’s League (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund) and the Catholic Women’s League (Catholischer Frauenbund).16 In France, Catholic women united in the National Union for Woman Suffrage (Union Nationale pour la Vote des Femmes), the Women’s Civic and Social Union (Union Féminine Civique et Sociale), and French Women’s Catholic Action (Ligue Féminine d’Action Catholique Française). By 1937 these groups together claimed a membership of two million women, far surpassing the liberal National Council of French Women (Conseil National des Femmes Françaises), whose membership declined from about 300,000 members in 1926 to about 200,000 in the 1930s.17 Large Catholic organizations, including the British St. Joan’s Society and the Dutch Christian Women’s League (Christen-Vrouwen-Bond), were formed in all countries with substantial Catholic populations.18 The Catholic groups took as their guide the papal encyclical Casti Connubii, which when promulgated by Pope Pius XI in 1930 became the era’s most influential religious statement on family life and sexual morality. The Pope denounced the false doctrine that “the wife, being freed from the care of children and family, should, to the neglect of these, be able to follow her own bent and devote herself to business and even to public affairs,” and lamented “the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian.”19 But despite its wide appeal, this religious ideal of the family was by no means uncontested or even dominant among Western Europeans during the interwar years. Another major development of this period was the increased influence of socialist women’s groups, such as those that developed within the British Labour Party, the German and Scandinavian Social Democratic Parties, and trade-union movements everywhere. These working-class women, who sometimes cooperated with liberal feminists, rejected religious doctrines of male supremacy and based their definition of the family on a comradely relationship between husband and wife. Partly in order to distance themselves from the Russian Bolsheviks, who were reputed to have socialized women as well as other means of production, democratic socialists disavowed radical doctrines of “free love” and lauded the joys of monogamy. For example, the German socialist periodical Die Gleichheit (Equality), aimed at a working-class female readership, extolled marriage as “the intimate spiritual comradeship of two equal partners.”20 This ideal proved to be extremely popular. During the interwar era, the spread of moral values previously professed chiefly by the middle class to the working-class majority increased the popularity and prestige of marriage.21 Dismal predictions that the wartime holocaust of men would produce a generation of lonely widows and wild bachelor-girls were not fulfilled. In fact, the rate of marriage increased in most European countries. For example, whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century about 80 percent of British

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women had married by age fifty, by 1940 the proportion was about 94 percent.22 In Germany about 55 percent of all men and 53 percent of all women were married in 1910; by 1939 these figures had risen to 63 percent and 58 percent.23 At the same time, attitudes toward marriage became more individualistic. Divorce rates (still very low by contemporary standards) doubled in Germany and Sweden and increased fourfold in Britain.24 Divorce changed the lives of some prominent feminists. The French Marcelle Kraemer-Bach married at the end of the war, and divorced a year later. “The ecstatic adolescent was dead,” she wrote. “There I was, ruined by my husband, with a baby in my arms, facing reality and forced to reinvent myself.”25 Both Kraemer-Bach and another divorced Frenchwoman, Yvonne Netter, became prominent lawyers.26 The German social worker and politician Else Ulich-Beil was the mother of two sons when her husband demanded a divorce in 1929. “I put the divorce decree in my drawer. And there, unread, it burned in 1944.”27 Gender roles in marriage were understood as complementary, and many wives aspired to a domestic existence occupied by housework and childrearing. Working-class women were even more likely than their middle-class contemporaries to rejoice in domesticity and to consider employment outside the home as, at best, a necessary evil.28 Housewives’ organizations such as the National League of German Housewives’ Associations (Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine) and the Danish Housewives’ Federation demanded respect and financial support for the full-time homemaker.29 However, many married women continued to work outside the home, at rates that varied among nations. In Britain, married women were only about 14 to 16 percent of the female workforce; in France, however, half of all female workers were married in 1920.30 Around 1930, 29 percent of all married women were employed in Germany, but in Sweden only 9 percent, in Denmark 10 percent to 12 percent, in the Netherlands 10 percent, and in Ireland only about 5 percent held paying jobs.31 Two models of motherhood— one based on full-time homemaker status and the other on a combination of domestic work and employment—competed for legitimacy. This era’s feminist organizations created their own approaches to marriage, the family, and parenthood. The leaders of the British National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), which succeeded the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies, criticized the prewar suffragettes as mindless imitators of men, and called for a new respect for female difference. Though they continued to link motherhood to citizenship, the “new feminists” shied away from the exalted moral claims that had been advanced by prewar maternalists such as Ellen Key, and soberly defined motherhood as a job almost like any other. Not all British feminists supported the new ideology: an active and vocal minority founded an organization known as the Six Point Group to oppose what they considered a dangerous emphasis on gender difference at the expense of equality. Feminists in other countries likewise affirmed motherhood as an essential task of the female citizen.32 They, too, shifted away from maternalist rhetoric to emphasize the couple or the family over the mother as an individual.

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“Marriages have never been more numerous,” declared an editorial in La Française, “Wherever there is a man and women who love each other, there is a family.” Warm and comforting images of family life expressed hopes for peace in a land ravaged by war.33 The pacifist Madeleine Vernet, who continued to publish her journal La Mère Éducatrice (The Mother-Educator) extolled the family as the basis of social harmony. “The ideal for which we must strive,” she wrote, “is that of a man and woman who depend on each other, collaborating in two areas, family and society.”34 In Germany, the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine or BDF) stated in its program of 1920 that “as the highest and most intimate form of human community, the family must be the seed-bed of all spiritual development. The purity of family life is thus the basis of the health and strength of society.”35 And in Austria, an editorial in the socialist periodical The Worker (Arbeiterzeitung), proclaimed that the experience of motherhood and family life must provide the basis for a “human, comprehensible, real-life politics. Politics that lays hold of them (women) and that they experience first hand.”36 These moderate and family-centered programs are often interpreted as a sign of the decline of feminism and the blunting of its formerly militant message.37 But in fact, they sometimes provided powerful arguments for gender equality. The modern woman, feminists asserted, would never become a mother under conditions of subordination and economic dependency. The diversity of interwar women’s movements—which as we have seen contained a spectrum of political positions ranging from religious conservatism to socialist radicalism—made a unified approach to issues concerning marriage, work, and parenthood very difficult. As Anne Cova has remarked, leaders who tried to pull together these warring factions often walked “the razor’s edge.”38 Nonetheless when faced with a backlash against all the gains that women had made over the past decades, many interwar feminist movements moved from the conciliatory programs of the 1920s to a more militant defense of equality in the 1930s. And their struggle was not simply defensive, but also innovative, creating an image of the mother as both nurturer and worker which anticipated the “new feminism” of the second half of the century.

“H  H P”: T M   F The struggle to improve the legal status of the mother in and outside of marriage faced new obstacles in the interwar years. The process of reform that had begun in the prewar era produced some results, but its momentum was reduced in some countries and halted in others. We will first look at changes in the status of the mother in marriage and then at the very much more complex and acrimonious debate on the rights of the unmarried mother. In the Scandinavian countries, a process of reform that had been initiated during the prewar era produced results in the 1920s.39 As the historian Silke

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Neunsinger points out, these neutral nations were spared the gender conflict that arose elsewhere from the traumas of wartime and postwar readjustment.40 A Scandinavian Committee for Family Law produced its final report in 1918, and by 1929 its recommendations were incorporated into the marriage laws of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The new codes decreed the equality of husband and wife in almost all aspects of married life, including most aspects of child-rearing. In all countries except Finland, however, fathers maintained guardianship rights in respect to financial decisions. Equality of rights did not imply equality of function: these laws assumed that the household would normally be headed by a male breadwinner. Housewives were given the right to sufficient resources to meet household expenses, and were allowed to appeal to the courts against a husband who refused to provide for his family.41 As Birgitte Søland points out, Scandinavian conservatives displayed an openness to the reform of the family that was seldom shared by their counterparts in other European states. Their motive, she suspects, was to counteract what they viewed as the dangerous appeal of feminism by making family life more attractive.42 The goal of this legislation, as defined by a member of the Norwegian parliament in 1918, was to encourage “the founding of numerous homes for healthy people, where healthy children can be born.”43 In Britain, too, a campaign for the rights of married mothers that had begun in the nineteenth century produced results during this period. In 1920, NUSEC drafted a law that gave mothers and fathers equal rights of guardianship over children and an equal obligation to maintain them “according to their means.” The draft law made this obligation enforceable whether the partners were living together or apart. Another draft law strengthened the enforcement of maintenance obligations to divorced women and their children.44 The laws that were passed by Parliament—the Married Women (Maintenance) Act of 1922 and the Guardianship of Infants Act (1925)—conferred on mothers, married, separated, or divorced, an equal right to guardianship of children. But the law forced fathers to support their families financially only in case of separation or divorce. Unlike their Scandinavian counterparts, who thought of the family almost as an agency of the state, the British lawgivers were reluctant to allow the state to intervene in what they still regarded as the private sphere.45 In family law as in other areas, the hopes for progress held out in Germany by the constitution of the new Weimar Republic were frustrated by a rightward political trend. The National Assembly that debated and ratified the Weimar Constitution in 1919 was elected by both men and women, and about 10 percent of its delegates, representing the entire spectrum of political parties, were female.46 A clause in the Constitution stated that marriage “rested on the equal rights of both sexes,” and that “the nurture of offspring to physical, spiritual and social maturity is the highest duty and natural right of the parents, over whose work the state presides.”47 The League of German Women’s Organizations reaffirmed its prewar program that called for equal parental power and the intervention of a guardians’ court in cases of

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disagreement. In cases of divorce, the group further stipulated, the custodial parent should also have full parental rights. But these demands were never implemented through legislation. The law that gave precedence to the father’s wishes in case of parental disagreement remained in force, except for an amendment of 1921 that prevented him from changing the children’s religious affiliation without the mother’s consent. In cases of divorce, the care of the children was allotted to the innocent party, but the father remained the guardian in financial matters.48 Though the struggle for suffrage absorbed most of the energies of French feminist organizations, they also upheld the parental rights of mothers. Despite the emergency wartime decree that had given mothers power to make some decisions regarding their children, French law still upheld most forms of paternal authority.49 In 1919, a position paper of the National Council of French Women called for an end to all the legal disadvantages suffered by married women (many of whose decisions were still subject to their husbands’ approval) and demanded equal rights for both parents and the intervention of a court in case of disagreement.50 Parental equality also received the enthusiastic support of socialist feminists; “if the family is to become the harmonious environment that we hope for,” wrote the influential Madeleine Vernet, “it should not be based on an injustice.”51 But the large and vocal Catholic women’s groups that lauded the mother as “giver of life, educator, heart of the household, agent of human progress” upheld paternal authority.52 On this issue, the Catholic women followed the lead of male-dominated natalist organizations such as the National Alliance to Increase the French Population (Alliance nationale pour l’acroissement de la population française), which attributed declining birthrates to the Napoleonic Code’s system of partible inheritance (which forced fathers to divide their property among their children) and warned that further restrictions upon paternal rights might wholly destroy men’s incentive to found families.53 In 1929 a general meeting of all French feminist groups, the Estates General of Feminism, called for the abolition of paternal power.54 But Andrée Butillard, head of the Women’s Civic and Social Union, supported her rightwing allies by insisting that the law should buttress the husband’s paternal and economic power by giving him the title “head of the family” (Chef de Famille).55 When a new Marriage Code—denounced by feminists as “truncated and mutilated”—was passed in 1938, it enacted some improvements in the status of wives but preserved paternal power, which was not fully abolished until the 1970s.56 Although historians have tended to regard natalism as the predominant goal of interwar family policies, these policies in fact placed a still higher priority on the stability of marriage. The victim of this emphasis on marriage was the unmarried mother.57 In the prewar era, natalist rhetoric had often justified efforts to reform the legal status of single mothers and their children, who were defined as valuable citizens who deserved protection. Among the most significant results were the French law of 1912, which for the first time

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permitted paternity suits, and the Norwegian law of 1916, which gave the children of unmarried parents, in cases where paternity could be established, most of the rights of “legitimate” children with respect to inheritance and family name, and allotted public assistance if paternal support could not be collected.58 But in the interwar years, these children were resented in all countries for the burden that they allegedly placed on overtaxed welfare funds.59 In an era when the sexually active single woman was pictured more as vamp than as victim, pathetic or heroic images of the unmarried mother lost their credibility.60 And concern for the survival of “illegitimate” children was often outweighed by a stronger desire to uphold marriage, which many feared would be undermined by any sign of sympathy for the single mother. Sweden’s law of 1920 entitled “illegitimate” children to paternal support, but deprived them of inheritance rights unless the couple was engaged at the time of conception. The law placed all such children under the guardianship of a municipal officer who was responsible for assisting and guiding the mother. Similar measures were adopted by Finland in 1922. Only Denmark followed the example of Norway and passed a law in 1937 providing that “children born out of wedlock have the same legal position in relation to their parents as legitimate children, except where explicitly stated otherwise.”61 Though more tolerant of the unmarried mother than those of other states, the Scandinavian laws still showed a marked mistrust of her judgment by denying her full parental rights and placing both her and her child under public guardianship. In the German National Assembly, the body that met in 1919 to write the constitution of the new Weimar Republic, the female delegates initiated a long and vehement debate on the status of the single mother. A diverse group that was distributed across the spectrum of political parties, including the radical Independent Socialists, the moderate Social Democrats, the liberal German Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the right-wing German National People’s Party agreed that a clause on the status of the unmarried mother and her child should supplement the constitution’s Article 119, which placed marriage and the family under the protection of the constitution. But on the definition of that status they parted company. The Independent Socialists, influenced by the Norwegian example, demanded that the illegitimate child be granted “a right to the name of his/her father and legal equality with legitimate children.” Luise Zietz, an Independent delegate, noted that these mothers’ moral standards were often “much higher than those of many ‘legitimate’ wives.”62 Elisabeth Roehl, who represented the Social Democratic Party, advocated equal rights to inheritance and support. “A nation bled white by the war,” she stated, could not afford to waste any of its human resources. But Roehl objected to any compulsory attribution of the father’s name, which she claimed that many unmarried mothers did not desire.63 Marie Baum, a delegate from the liberal German Democratic Party, objected that the situation of the child of unmarried parents was so different from that of the “legitimate” child that complete

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equality of rights was hardly conceivable.64 Moreover, added Gertrud Bäumer, who was also a Democratic Party delegate, such fictive equality might actually create problems for the unmarried mother herself, whose control of her child might be disrupted by too much paternal interference.65 Catholic and conservative delegates declared that an equal status for illegitimate children might undermine the stability and respect due to legitimate marriage.66 And this conservative position prevailed. The final version, which became Article 121 of the Weimar Constitution, made no reference to legal rights at all but guaranteed to illegitimate children “conditions for their physical, spiritual, and social development that are equal to those of legitimate children.”67 This clause defined the child of unmarried parents more as an object of philanthropic concern than as a citizen with rights. Indeed, the major innovation of the Weimar Republic was the assignment of rights of guardianship, not to the mother—who was usually deemed incapable of exercising them—but to a governmental agency, the Jugendamt, or youth welfare bureau. According to the legal scholar Camilla Jellinek, who presided over a national network of legal counseling centers for women, this measure somewhat improved the financial situation of female-headed households.68 The League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz) continued to insist, as in the prewar era, that the child should be under the mother’s guardianship and should bear her name.69 Unmarried mothers who were employed, dependents of an employed person, or destitute were eligible for maternity insurance and other forms of assistance in Germany. The rise of the Fascist regime in Italy, which consolidated its totalitarian rule in 1925, and the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany in 1933, created a new and disturbing perspective on many of these issues of sexual morality, including the status of single mothers and their children. For these movements cynically co-opted an originally progressive critique of conventional morality for use in the service of their militarist and racist agendas. Regardless of marital status, declared Heinrich Himmler (who was head of the political police, or SS) any mother of good blood who produced a child for the Volk was to be honored.70 After the National Socialists took power in Germany, unmarried mothers who could prove that they themselves and the fathers of their children were of acceptable “racial” stock received improved benefits. The discriminatory provisions of this law would not have been acceptable to Camilla Jellinek, who because of her Jewish descent was forced to give up all her public activities, nor to most of her colleagues in the League of German Women’s Organizations, which disbanded shortly after the Nazis took over.71 The right-wing government of Austria emulated the Nazi example. In 1934, after the Nazis took over in Germany, a Catholic leader, Maria Wolfring, was appointed by the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss as head of an organization known as the Mothers’ Protection Bureau (Mutterschutzwerk), which modeled its services to unmarried mothers on those of the Nazis and

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Fascists. At the opening of a home for destitute single mothers, Wolfring proclaimed that it was “a wonderful thing to be an Austrian mother.” Though they themselves had initiated many charitable efforts on behalf of poor mothers and children, two Austrian Catholic groups—the Catholic German Women’s League (Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund) and the Catholic Women’s Organization (Katholische Frauenorganisation)—refused to participate in this initiative, which they criticized both for undermining traditional morality and for exploiting motherhood in the service of the state.72 Criticism of state policies was silenced when Austria was forcibly incorporated into the Third Reich in 1938. The unmarried mother and her child in Scandinavia, Germany, and Austria were fortunate compared to their British counterparts. British law still offered no way for such children to be legitimated, and set paternal support obligations at a minimal level. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, a philanthropic organization founded during the war, joined NUSEC, in a campaign to change these laws.73 Among the legislative goals formulated by NUSEC was a measure designed to entrust the responsibility for collecting support payments to a public authority, to apportion these payments to the circumstances of the father rather than the mother, to allow for the legitimation of children by the subsequent marriage of their parents, and to give illegitimate children equal inheritance rights with their legitimate siblings in cases where parents died intestate.74 The outcome of these and other initiatives was the Legitimacy Act of 1926, which permitted the legitimation of children by the subsequent marriage of their parents, unless the parents had been married to others at the time of conception. This law, of course, affirmed the norm of the two-parent, nuclear family and helped only those children whose parents wished to form such a household. For the others, adoption by unrelated families—which was legalized during this period—was the preferred solution.75 In France, women’s groups also championed the rights of the unmarried mother. Feminist lawyers such as Maria Vérone and Marcelle Kraemer-Bach, who formulated the positions taken by the National Council of French Women, advocated legal reforms that would make paternity suits easier while preserving the mother’s rights of guardianship.76 The socialist Madeleine Vernet also argued passionately that “we can have no real progress while the mother, creator of life, can be dishonored by the very fact of her maternity.”77 And yet even Vernet had changed with the times. During the prewar years, she had rejected marriage as a form of servitude and had herself borne a child in an unofficial, though stable relationship. But in the postwar era Vernet married her companion and publicly repudiated “free love.” And she no longer extolled the emancipatory possibilities of unmarried motherhood. On the contrary, she declared, such an abstract ideal of liberation failed to take into account the difference in the needs of the two sexes; in a nonmarital partnership “the man risks nothing, but the woman risks motherhood.”78 These progressive groups and individuals were drowned out by the more numerous Catholic women’s organizations, who joined their male allies in

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a militant defense of marriage. To give the unmarried mother the rights of her married counterpart, they argued, would undermine the status of the legally constituted family.79 The political clout of the religious groups was apparent in the French law on social insurance that was passed in 1928. For the first time, the state sponsored maternity coverage for women whose income was under a certain limit, whether they were employed themselves or the dependents of an employed husband. But much to the outrage of feminists, unmarried mothers were not included in this benefit.80 In Spain, the confrontation between liberal and socialist feminists and the forces of religious conservatism occurred in the context of political upheaval and civil war. Under the Spanish monarchy, the status of women had been regulated by laws modeled on the Napoleonic Code.81 In 1921, soon after its founding in 1918, the first national feminist organization, the National Association of Spanish Women (Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Españolas), submitted a petition to the parliament (Cortes) requesting several improvements in the status of women, including equal parental rights for married mothers and, for unmarried mothers, the right to care for their children even when their fathers had gained paternal rights by recognizing them. In 1925, when this petition had not produced results, the feminist periodical Feminal published a series of articles that proposed revisions in the Civil Code.82 A military dictatorship that shared power with the monarchy from 1923 until 1931 brought only limited rights of suffrage for female heads of families. The fall of the monarchy and the founding of the Second Republic in 1931 opened the way for many forms of social change. Ruled by a coalition of liberal and socialist parties, the Republic not only gave women the right of suffrage (1931) but also modernized family law to permit secular marriage and divorce, give equal rights to husband and wife, and equalize the status of children born in and outside of marriage. These laws, which were upheld by several left-wing women’s organizations, including the communist AntiFascist Women’s Association (Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas) and the anarchist Free Women (Mujeres Libres), placed the new Spanish Republic “in the forefront of the parliamentary democracies of Europe.”83 But the Republic was immediately opposed by a counterrevolutionary coalition of conservatives, Catholics, and monarchists that in 1934 united in the Spanish Falange (Falange Española). Its female auxiliary was a group known as the “Women’s Section” (Sección Femenina), which was led by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of the Fascist General José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Like the French Catholic organizations, the Women’s Section far outnumbered secular women’s groups. Spanish women were predominantly conservative and religious, and the electoral setbacks suffered by the leftwing parties in elections held in 1933 were attributed largely to women’s votes.84 In 1936, republican groups formed a new Popular Front, which they inaugurated in a parade that included many liberal and socialist women. In a “Letter to Soldiers,” General Primo de Rivera cited the behavior of these abandoned women—who had shouted “Children yes! Husbands no!”—to

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justify the overthrow of the Republic.85 In 1941, after the Spanish Civil War and defeat of the Republic, the fascist regime headed by General Francisco Franco repealed the Republic’s marriage laws, condemned women who lived in nonmarital unions to fines and imprisonment, forbade daughters to leave their fathers’ homes except for marriage or a convent, and prohibited the employment of all married women whose husbands’ income was sufficient to support a family.86 Thus despite widespread perceptions of a “crisis of the family,” the laws pertaining to marriage, motherhood, and family relationships changed little in the interwar era. Only in Scandinavia and in Britain were marriage laws permanently changed, and these changes completed a reform process that dated to the prewar years. In other countries, paternal power was among the last remnants of patriarchal marriage to be abolished, sometimes not until the 1970s. The anxieties that were expressed through the defense of marriage, patriarchy, and “legitimate” child-rearing were deepened by the economic crises of the era, to which we shall now turn.

“T G D C”: T C A W M “A home without a mother is like a body without a soul,” declared the manifesto of the French Women’s Civic and Social Union.87 The mother at the hearth became an icon of the interwar era—a sentimental image that served powerful material interests. Although they showed signs of recovery in the mid-1920s, the postwar economies were unstable. Rates of unemployment fluctuated until their rise in 1929–30 signaled the onset of the greatest crisis as yet experienced by Western capitalism, the Great Depression. Women could hardly be blamed for rising rates of male unemployment. Their removal from their wartime jobs had restored the gender segregation of the labor market, and few competed directly for male jobs. The employed woman was nonetheless a useful target for anger that might otherwise have been directed against governments, politicians, and trade-union leaders. Although this attack was aimed at all working women, married women were singled out for special forms of discrimination. For while public opinion accepted the employment of the unmarried woman—though of course at a lower level than a similarly qualified man—the married women could be portrayed as fully occupied in the home. And her occupation was defined as motherhood. The notion that motherhood was a job—in fact a service to the state—that might deserve compensation had been developed by feminists and other progressives in the prewar era. Now it was co-opted in many countries to serve anti-feminist agendas: not only reduction of the female workforce but also population policies that assumed that full-time mothers were more fertile than their employed counterparts. Natalist groups, which gained greatly in influence in the interwar years, often urged their governments to offer cash subsidies for childbearing—a measure that was designed to compensate families for mothers’ lost wages and thus deter them from working.

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Feminists recognized the trap that had been set for them. In 1917, the British socialist Wilma Meikle had already warned that the return of peace would also bring back “the Great Domestic Cant of Good Wifehood and Good Motherhood.”88 The German legal expert Camilla Jellinek observed in 1921 that “sometimes you hear people say very frankly that women should stick with their natural function, having children, and everything else is superfluous and harmful.”89 In 1923, the editorial board of La Française complained of a tide of reactionary propaganda that defined the position of women as “the home and the pedestal . . . the home where they want to imprison women . . . the pedestal where they want to put her.”90 But an opposing strategy was difficult to devise. Feminists could not afford to affirm domestic motherhood, for this would betray the core constituency of professional and white-collar workers who because of their privileged status were often selectively targeted for dismissal. To allow these women to be sent home against their will would be to reverse gains made over an entire century of struggle for professional opportunities. But still less could feminist organizations afford to make the employed mother into a role model, for this might offend the majority of mothers who did not wish to work outside the home. The only solution was to break down the dichotomy between domesticity and employment by claiming that these were not rigid opposites but flexible options. Full-time domesticity, full-time wage work, or some combination of the two—all might be appropriate choices for the individual mother. The British “family endowment” controversy showed that keeping the mother’s options open was a complex task. Eleanor Rathbone, who had headed the Family Endowment Society during the war, became the president of NUSEC in 1919. Along with her colleagues Elinor Burns, Mary Stocks, Maude Royden, and Kate Courtney, Rathbone was convinced that wartime dependency allowances payable directly to mothers had improved the standard of living and the morale of working-class families, and argued for the retention of these subsidies in peacetime. Motherhood, Rathbone argued, was a job much like any other—indeed, in some cases “a career in itself.”91 It differed from other skilled work chiefly because it provided “no money remuneration for the mother’s task, no guarantee of her maintenance while she performs it, and . . . no consequential relationship recognized by society between the quality and quantity of her product and the quantity and quality of the tools and materials that she has at her disposal.”92 Such work deserved a salary, or “family allowance,” which Rathbone envisaged as a subsidy for each child under five—whether raised by taxes or by insurance was left open. Rathbone insisted that she had no intention of driving women from the workforce, and that on the contrary her proposal would improve the position of the working mother. She argued that it was unfair to stereotype the breadwinning role as male, for the many women who also supported dependents were as much in need of a “family wage” as men. Rathbone—a Fabian Socialist who believed in the power of social engineering to solve the most intractable of social problems—claimed that a shift in the responsibility for

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supporting children from the family to the state would invalidate the chief argument for gender discrimination: the belief that men needed more money because they were family breadwinners. She added that the mother’s entitlement to the allowance should not be predicated on her employment status; indeed “independent minded women” who were “not fitted by temperament for an exclusively domestic life,” might use some portion of the allowance to pay for child-care while they worked outside the home.93 Rathbone was well aware of the danger that subsidies for childbearing might put pressure on women to bear more children. But natalism found much less support among British elites—who tended to see reproduction among the poor chiefly as a drain on the welfare budget—than among their continental counterparts.94 Rathbone appealed to these attitudes by insisting that the allowances would bolster the status and self-respect of poor women and thus actually increase their ability and motivation to limit births.95 The illegitimate child’s entitlement, she suggested, should be contingent on the parents’ willingness to “stabilize their union”—a conservative stance by comparison to that of many continental feminists who defended the rights of the unmarried mother.96 After this proposal was included in NUSEC’s program in 1927, some members resigned and joined another feminist organization, the Six Point Group, whose doctrine of gender equality opposed any stereotyping of women as mothers.97 Too narrow a focus on maternity, these dissidents objected, obscured the larger issues. “The equalitarian knows that it is not maternity in itself which is the disability,” wrote Elizabeth Abbott, “it is the horribly low and unequal status of woman, the everlasting conception of her as a means to an end instead of as an end in herself, that makes not only maternity but sometimes every hour of a woman’s day a disability.”98 Along with activists of all nations, some of these women joined The Open Door International, an organization founded in Berlin in 1929 in order to defend the increasingly threatened rights of women in the workforce. “A woman, irrespective of marriage, parenthood, or childbirth, should have the right at all times to decide whether she should engage in paid work,” read this organization’s charter. “A free race is not born of slave mothers.”99 Though family endowment received the support of the major British socialist women’s organization, the National Conference of Labour Women, in 1922, other working-class women demurred. Married working women often feared that the subsidies might be used as a reason to dismiss working mothers from their jobs. Housewives, who contrary to Rathbone’s assumption usually controlled a considerable portion of their families’ budgets, often believed that the family was already a partnership and were suspicious of state intervention.100 Major opposition came from the male trade unions, who feared that the provision of family allowances would be a substitute for pay raises. When the Labour Party decided not to support family allowances in 1929, the discussion came to an end, and was not resumed until World War II.101 French feminists also worked toward a flexible definition of the maternal role that valued mothers’ work both in and outside the home. In France,

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where wartime losses had deepened the obsession with population growth, subsidies for child-rearing were supported across a political spectrum that ranged from religious conservatives to communists.102 Since the 1890s, some companies and governmental agencies had supplemented wages with child allowances that were normally payable to fathers. In 1919 the National Council of French Women enlisted women in the “struggle against depopulation,” and called for improved child welfare services and aid to large families. But, like their British colleagues, they insisted that there were many ways of mothering and defended the right of all women, regardless of marital or parental status, to employment opportunities and equal pay.103 Some feminists were highly skeptical about the consequences of payment for childbearing, chiefly because most of the proposals designated fathers, rather than mothers, as the recipients. The socialist Madeleine Vernet protested that childbearing should not become a commercial operation, but should be regarded as “an affair of the individual conscience.” Vernet called for a more general state “endowment” of all women from the age of twenty—a provision that she insisted must not release men from the obligation to support their children.104 The Estates General of Feminism, a meeting that included many organizations, endorsed child allowances in 1929.105 Because the 1920s was a decade of low male unemployment in France, opposition to the work of married women did not become serious until the onset of the Great Depression in 1931. But as unemployment figures rose, public opinion turned against married female workers. Natalist propaganda, which was widely distributed in schools, churches, and places of employment, portrayed the working mother as a sinister vamp who was willing to sacrifice the welfare of her children and her country to her own selfish ambition.106 In 1932, the Catholic women’s groups founded a new organization, the League for the Mother at Home (Ligue de la Mère au Foyer) to promote full-time motherhood. Though opposed to a legal ban on married women’s employment, this group proposed a supplemental allowance to nonworking mothers as a kind of maternal salary that might induce them to leave the workforce. “There is no better way of honoring the mission of the mother,” proclaimed the Women’s Civic and Social Union.107 Amid this hostile atmosphere, liberal and socialist feminists moved toward a resolute defense of the rights of all women, including wives and mothers, to accept employment. To be sure, they differed on the extent of such rights, for only a minority supported Open Door International, which militantly opposed all legislation designed to protect mothers by regulating their hours and working conditions. But they asserted not only that that the mother’s wages—particularly in homes where the father might be unemployed—were often necessary to her family’s survival, but that the mother’s employment often enhanced her own and her family’s well-being.108 “It is not the constant presence of the mother that ensures the good upbringing and education of the children,” declared an editorial in La Française. “It is the spiritual and emotional character of the mother—and of the father, let’s not forget his responsibility! . . . With the support of the school, the worker or civil servant

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can give the state both male and female citizens that are just as valuable as those produced by women who limit themselves to the domestic sphere.”109 In 1938, the decades-long debate on family law and population policy culminated in the appointment by the government headed by Édouard Daladier of a Commission on Population, which produced a new code of family law (Code de Famille) in 1939. Strongly influenced by the religious groups, the Code introduced governmental child allowances that were payable only to parents who were married. A supplementary payment was allotted to mothers who did not have paying jobs, and remitted directly to them. Mothers received a special subsidy for a first child born within two years of the couple’s marriage but only on the condition—to be certified by public child-welfare authorities—that they cared for their children properly. Starting with the third child, allowances were paid to the family breadwinner—if both parents were employed, to the father in recognition of his status as “head of the family.”110 Partly because of the unified opposition of women’s groups across the political spectrum, no law that forbade married women to work was passed. By contrast to French and British feminists who supported both child allowances and women’s employment rights, feminists in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden took a much more negative view of state payment for childbearing. In these countries, family-allowance schemes had little support from progressive or left-wing forces. Instead, they originated on the political right and were clearly intended to support new forms of discrimination against married women workers. In Germany, family allowances were advocated chiefly by an organization known as the League of Large Families (or Bund der Kinderreichen), which had close ties to the conservative parties and to the Catholic Center Party. Like the French natalist organizations, this group aimed to maintain patriarchal family structure as well as to build population by making governmental child allowances payable to male breadwinners. Although many right-wing women, including the members of the conservative housewives’ associations (Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine) supported these measures, most liberal and socialist feminists opposed them. Several delegates to the General Meeting of the BDF in 1924 pointed out that subsidies payable to fathers discriminated against single women who were breadwinners and subverted the important principle of equal pay for equal work.111 Gertrud Bäumer, who during the Weimar era served as a liberal delegate to the Reichstag as well as the editor of the BDF’s journal Die Frau, was one of many feminists who appropriated the language of eugenics and population policy to defend women’s right to employment. She claimed that cash incentives might damage population “quality” by encouraging imprudent reproduction, and that improved housing and education would protect children better than cash subsidies for childbearing.112 Socialist women took a similar approach. The aim of population policy, said the prominent socialist intellectual Henriette Fürth, was “not to bring about an increase in births, but to take care that only healthy and strong children are born and that all

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conditions for a favorable environment are created and guaranteed.”113 At its annual congress of 1929, the BDF divided on the issue of family allowances.114 Bäumer conceded to her opponents in the housewives’ associations that such allowances might be necessary in the existing dire emergency, but insisted that the “motivation and the will” to childbearing should under most circumstances be left to the individual, not manipulated by the state.115 Amid the economic crises that threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic, right-wing politicians attacked the right of married women—so-called “double earners”—to employment. This attack targeted the small female elite of civil servants whose rights to tenure and retirement pensions were coveted by men. The Constitution of 1919 had guaranteed equal access to all governmental positions and had specifically invalidated all the laws that had previously required women to resign such positions when they married.116 But like many of that constitution’s provisions, this one was ineffective. In 1925 a temporary austerity measure required the dismissal of female (but not of male) civil servants when they married. Policies that required teachers to leave their jobs when they married also continued in force. The women’s professional organizations contested several dismissals in court on constitutional grounds, but did not succeed in changing the law. In 1932, when the Great Depression had reached catastrophic proportions— in that year, 43 percent of the German workforce was unemployed—a so-called Double Earner Law (Doppelverdienergesetz) was introduced into the Parliament (Reichstag) that permanently invalidated the constitutional protection of female civil servants from dismissal upon marriage. In opposition to this law, the BDF moved beyond practical arguments to defend the rights of working mothers as individuals. “Our nation is not well served when capable workers are replaced by those who are less capable. And it is an injustice to working women not to recognize that they regard their profession not only as a means of financial support, but of giving meaning to life by the expression of their talents.”117 But the opposition ended in disunity and defeat. The liberal feminist deputies and organizations were abandoned by the women delegates of both the socialist and the conservative parties, who in solidarity with their male colleagues endorsed the bill. When a major women’s professional organization, the Union of Post-Office and Telegraph Workers, opted for a compromise solution (a partial payout of their pensions upon dismissal), liberals gave up a resistance that now seemed futile.118 In Austria, as in Germany, a series of legislative proposals targeted married women in the workforce. The National Association of Women Employees (Reichsverband weiblicher Angestellter), which was led by single civil servants, favored the removal of their married competitors.119 But other women’s groups joined the opposition. The solution to working mothers’ “double burden,” declared an editorial in the socialist periodical Die Frau in 1931, was to provide benefits such as guaranteed maternity leave and day-care centers, not discriminatory employment policies.120 The mainstream League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine) warned its members in 1933 that a proposed “Double Earner Law”

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(Doppelverdienergesetz) placed “all of the achievements of women over the past two decades” in jeopardy.121 Two Austrian Catholic organizations—the Catholic German Women’s League (Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund) and the Catholic Women’s Organization (Katholische Frauenorganisation)—joined liberal and socialist groups in defending the rights of married women. The Catholic women agreed that the dismissal of married women—who in fact were often breadwinners—undermined rather than supported family life. They also insisted that the loss of married female teachers and social workers would be a great misfortune to a society that could not do without their wisdom and experience. And they were repelled by the glorification of motherhood—now pervaded by National Socialist racism—above all other professional, educational, and spiritual aspirations. The coalition of Catholic women’s and professional groups did not succeed in defeating the Double Earner Law, which was passed in 1934, but they continued to protest it. On the Mother’s Day holiday in 1936, the Catholic groups and the Archdiocese of Vienna sponsored a day-long meeting for mothers who were employed.122 Dutch feminists opposed state subsidies for parenthood, which in the Netherlands as in Germany were supported by right-wing and religious groups that aimed to reinforce the father’s position as head of the family. In 1920, liberal and socialist feminist organizations formed a “Committee of Action against the Family Wage” (Comité van Actie tegen Gezinsloon). The Dutch Women’s Organization warned that any such scheme might give the state too much control over family life and childbearing—a fear that was justified in a country where Catholic and Protestant religious parties dominated politics. The feminist leader Wilmoet Wijnaents FranckenDyserinck even charged that payment for children might incite marital rape by fathers greedy for state subsidies.123 But this opposition was unsuccessful: a “Child Allowance Act” (Kinderbijslag), passed in 1939, provided for family allowances payable to fathers and excluding “illegitimate” children.124 In 1937, a legislative initiative by a Catholic-dominated government to ban married women from many workplaces aroused the concerted opposition of a wide spectrum of Dutch women’s organizations, which founded the Committee for the Defense of the Freedom to Work for Women and the Committee on the Dismissal of Married Women in the Civil Service. In order to discredit the widespread stereotype of the working mother as a ruthless egotist, the latter committee designed a questionnaire to investigate female civil servants’ reason for working. The results showed that these women’s work, which often supported children, parents, and disabled husbands, was the mainstay of their households.125 Because of the fall of the government in 1939, the measure was never passed. In neighboring Belgium, a similar coalition of feminists and trade unionists defeated legislative initiatives that would have denied civil service positions to married women.126 Swedish feminists were even more successful in defending the right of married women and mothers to paid employment—a success that was due both to their skillful tactics and the favorable climate in which they worked.

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As in other countries, the controversy centered on the very small group of married women who held desirable jobs in the civil service. As Silke Neunsinger has shown in her comparative study, political, social, and gender conflicts were far less bitter in Sweden than in Germany. A smaller percentage of Swedish wives worked for pay (9 percent in 1930, compared to 34 percent in Germany) and overall rates of unemployment in Sweden, even at the height of the Depression, were much lower (22 percent in 1932, and 43 percent in Germany). And unlike Germany, where the Depression years saw political polarization, the breakdown of parliamentary government, and the rise of the Nazi dictatorship, Sweden was governed by a worker/populist alliance of the Social Democratic and Agrarian Parties. In the 1930s, Swedish socialists shifted their emphasis from class struggle to national unity, picturing the nation as the “People’s Home” (Folkhem), where all citizens were valued and cared for.127 But even in this relatively benign environment, opposition to the employment of married women in the civil service was strong, and by 1934 thirteen legislative initiatives calling for their dismissal had been brought before the national parliament (Riksdag).128 The self-interest of male civil servants was embellished by nationalist arguments that the employment of mothers outside the home reduced birthrates and threatened the nation’s future development. A more positive perspective on the work of married women was created by Alva Myrdal, who would later become the best-known Swedish woman of her era. In her life and in her work, Alva Myrdal confronted the maternal dilemma. When Alva Reimer, who was born in 1902, married the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1924, she envisaged their marriage as an intellectual as well as a romantic partnership. After her marriage she continued her studies, almost completed a doctoral degree in child psychology, and gained prominence as an educator, author, and social reformer. But the arrival of three children in 1927, 1934, and 1936 plunged her into a severe conflict between her commitments to maternity and to these professional interests. Perhaps partly for this reason, she always emphasized parenthood and child-rearing as central issues for the state as well as the family. In 1934, she and her husband addressed an important social issue in a book entitled Crisis in the Population Question (Kris I befolkeningsfråget). The wide attention given to this controversial book made its authors—both of whom belonged to Sweden’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti)—into public figures. In 1935, Gunnar Myrdal was appointed as Secretary of a government-appointed Population Commission, and Alva Myrdal as a consultant on parental education. Alva Myrdal was also appointed to a governmental commission on married women’s work. At this stage of her life, Alva Myrdal identified herself more as a socialist than as a feminist. But she was deeply influenced by two prominent female parliamentarians— Kerstin Hesselgren and Elizabeth Tamm. Both women were members of an independent feminist group that met at Fogelstad (Tamm’s estate) and was well known for its positions on women’s employment, birth control, legalized abortion, and a number of other issues.129

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Alva Myrdal and her political allies avoided confrontational tactics and adroitly manipulated dominant political concerns to address the rights and needs of women. Drawing on the Myrdals’ recent book, they warned that the prevailing trend toward low marriage and birthrates might eventually produce a sparse and aging population that would be unable to maintain the nation’s cultural or economic vitality—a fear that was shared by the Population Commission. The female delegates rejected the solution proposed by right-wing parties—cash incentives for childbearing—and objected that such handouts would be of no help to the unemployed and would depress wages, alienate labor unions, and encourage childbearing for the wrong reasons.130 They also flatly contradicted the familiar argument that married women’s employment lowered birthrates. On the contrary, they asserted that the prohibition of married women’s work could only discourage marriage and motherhood by depriving couples of the woman’s income, which was often needed to support a new household. Alva Myrdal reinforced economic with eugenic arguments, predicting that these misguided prohibitions would deter ambitious and intelligent women from marrying and thus exclude the most “qualified” group from motherhood. Realizing that natalism had more popular support than feminism, the Committee defended “the right of the working woman to marry and have children” rather than the right of the married woman to work.131 Swedish feminists also cleverly appeased their opposition by protesting that the number of female civil servants was too insignificant to threaten the job opportunities of men. These tactics were not original—they had been employed by feminists elsewhere—but the success that they gained was unique. Swedish feminist groups such as the Frederika Bremer Association (Fredrika-Bremer förbundet) joined labor organizations to stage protests against the firing of married women, and a women’s political party, the Women’s List (Kvinnolistan), gave a prominent place in its platform to women’s rights in the labor force.132 And the result was the passage of a law in 1938 that prohibited the dismissal of women workers on account of marriage. Other legislation of the 1930s created a benefits program that included grants payable to mothers to cover the expenses of childbirth, public housing made available to large families, and governmental loans to newly married couples. The latter measure, which except for the absence of racial and political discrimination resembled a similar law that had recently been passed by the Nazis in Germany, was proposed by right-wing delegates and not endorsed by Myrdal and her associates.133 However precarious and limited its success, the defense of the rights of the married woman worker was important. In other countries, where feminist and trade-union movements were abolished by totalitarian governments, women workers were defenseless against male backlash. In Italy, Mussolini’s regime excluded women from most forms of professional employment, including many teaching and civil-service jobs, paid family allowances and marriage benefits to fathers, and trumpeted the slogan “Women go home!” (“Le donne a casa”).134 In Germany, the National Socialist regime dissolved

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all independent groups, including the League of German Women’s Organizations and the League for the Protection of Mothers, and organized women in a party affiliated umbrella group known as the National Socialist Women’s League (Nationalsozialistisches Frauenwerk). The Nazi government took over the discriminatory laws that had been passed during the Weimar period and added some new ones, such as quotas on the admission of women to universities, expulsion of women from certain professions, loans to married couples that required the wife to resign her job, and family allowances payable to fathers. Some of these measures were modified a few years later when unemployment figures decreased and women were needed in the workforce to replace men in military service.135 Less tyrannical but equally anti-feminist was the government of Ireland, where an independent republic (Eire) succeeded the Irish Free State in 1937. A women’s movement that had been active during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and had won the suffrage in 1918, had fallen into decline in the 1920s. Women politicians devoted their energies to mainstream national politics rather than to women’s issues, and did not openly object to discrimination against married women workers.136 The so-called Marriage Bar of 1929, which required female civil servants and local government workers to resign their jobs upon marriage, was institutionalized by a new Constitution passed in 1937. This Constitution stipulated that “the state shall . . . endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obligated by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.”137 In many ways, feminism declined in the 1930s. Amid the economic and psychological stresses of the Great Depression, the membership of the liberal and socialist groups dwindled. But as the historians Marjan Schwegman and Jolande Withuis have pointed out, this era was also marked by the forging of new coalitions and a vigorous defense of the rights of women to combine motherhood and employment.138 And this struggle was not merely defensive, but showed important changes in views of motherhood, citizenship, and women’s choices. In the prewar era (as we have seen in chapter 3) many feminists agreed with the highly influential Ellen Key that paid work outside the home for mothers was a “waste of women’s energy,” and that motherhood was or should be the married woman’s full-time occupation. The working mother was usually portrayed as a downtrodden victim of poverty and exploitation, and a truly fulfilling combination of career and motherhood was a utopian aspiration. But by 1940, most feminists regarded the combination of motherhood and a career outside the home as an option that every woman should be able to choose. To be sure, the emphasis was still on elites, chiefly on a small group of white-collar workers and professionals. The narrow focus on this group was chiefly due to the fact that they were singled out for discrimination, but class prejudice also played a role. “During the first third of the century,” recollected the British activist and author Vera Brittain, “the only support usually available to working wives was that of organized women, who repeatedly called attention to the ‘dysgenic’ effect of marriage-bars

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upon a society where the number of children produced by healthy, intelligent and disciplined mothers was already far too few.”139 Some feminists, however, vindicated the right of all citizens to realize their potential through work as well as love. “Democracy calls for the development of all talents, and the encouragement of all initiatives,” wrote the French lawyer Yvonne Netter. “And does activity not bring happiness?”140 But in the hostile atmosphere of the 1930s, the working mother could not look for much social support. She could claim only the freedom to find a personal solution. “Certainly, the combination of marriage, job and motherhood causes serious problems,” conceded the German socialist Adele Schreiber, “but it is up to the woman herself to find a solution that suits her own conscience and abilities.”141 In the concluding chapter of her book, Nation and Family, Alva Myrdal warned that the maternal dilemma could not be solved by individual efforts—it was a social problem that required a social solution. “The risk is great,” she continued, “that society will proceed so slowly in solving these problems of woman’s existence that new and even more desperate crises may invade the whole field of women, family, and population.”142 One of the prerequisites for a successful solution was the freedom to control reproduction in order to synchronize maternal and career commitments. And this will be the theme of chapter 7.

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F N  C During the interwar period, some feminist movements shifted their attitude toward birth control from skepticism to support. In societies that were only beginning to realize the extent of wartime casualties, this alliance of feminism and birth control could arouse both anxiety and misogyny. A popular novel by the French author Clément Vautel, Madame ne veut pas d’enfant (the very title became a natalist slogan) portrayed the sinister vamp Malthusia, whose lectures often opened with the command, “tu n’engendras point ” (“Thou shalt bear no children”). “In France, everything is coming together to help us,” she cackled fiendishly, “we no longer believe in God or the Devil; we love money more and more . . . we must dread the children that would prevent us from having fun.”1 Feminist authors gave a different picture of the modern mother. In her novel, Honourable Estate (1936), Vera Brittain portrayed two characters: Janet, married at the turn of the century, who resented the child whom she was forced to bear, and her daughter-in-law Ruth, who was an emancipated woman and a willing mother. “To begin with, I wanted the twins and we agreed about having them, whereas your mother was not only unready for a child and quite ignorant, but apparently never consulted,” explained Ruth to her husband. “Don’t you see that it is just because I am better qualified than your mother and still able to go on with my work that I care for the twins so much? . . . If our own mothers had been encouraged to learn what was going on in the world instead of being told their place was the home, the War might never have happened.”2 Brittain reaffirmed the claims of prewar maternalists such as Helene Stöcker and Nelly Roussel that, in the area of reproduction, the interests of individual women and those of the state were identical. In the interwar era, this formerly radical argument moved into the feminist mainstream as what Atina Grossmann has called a “motherhood–eugenics consensus, which assumed that motherhood was a natural and desirable instinct in all women, only needing to

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be properly encouraged, released, and regulated, and which understood the bearing of healthy offspring as a crucial social task.”3 But by the end of the interwar era, this consensus had been severely disrupted. Birth control literature carried contradictory messages: while preserving the notion of motherhood as a social task, it exalted desire above duty. The right of the parents was to choose to bear children; of the child to be wanted. These were principles that could legitimate decisions both for and against childbearing. Birth controllers often preached a new hedonism that reversed conventional moral notions by portraying personal happiness rather than reproduction as the primary purpose of marriage. The ideology of the citizen-mother was undermined by its misuse by governments in the service of natalism, militarism, and the many forms of employment discrimination that were described in the previous chapter. Eugenics, having reached the height of its influence in the 1920s, was discredited in the 1930s and 1940s by the horrific example of National Socialist racial and reproductive policies and by changing scientific paradigms. After sketching in the historical context, this chapter will look at feminist birth control activists and their positions on three issues: family limitation, eugenic legislation, and reproductive decision-making. This brief summary, which will draw on the many excellent histories of birth control movements in various countries, will exclude Italy and Portugal—nations that were under dictatorships that prevented the growth of such a movement during most of this period. Before the war, birth control had been supported by only a minority of feminists, chiefly on the political left. Broadened support in the interwar era was due both to ideological and technological change. The old Neo-Malthusian ideology that had advocated birth control as a remedy for the poverty caused by overpopulation was widely questioned in an era of declining birthrates. “To confront the fact of population decline with the assertion that there are too many people in the world or that it does not matter if the human race dies out,” remarked the British demographer Enid Charles, “is merely flippant and generally insincere.”4 Birth control movements reoriented their propaganda toward the welfare of parents and children—a focus that appealed to feminists, whose positive views of marriage and family were explored in the previous chapter. A gradual change in the attitudes of some churches—particularly the Anglican Church, which at its 1930 Lambeth Conference gave reserved support to the use of contraception in marriage—created a more permissive climate in Protestant countries.5 And the popularization of barrier methods such as the cervical cap and the diaphragm held out the promise that women might be able to practice contraception even without the cooperation of their partners. In many countries, birth control activists—among whom were many professed feminists—sought to make contraceptive advice and technology available, especially to the low-income population that had little access to medical care. The ideology and practice of birth control movements varied, and the two most internationally influential models emanated from Germany and Britain.

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In the German-speaking world, the birth control movement engaged a large group composed chiefly of radical, socialist, and communist women and men and from the beginning was associated with other progressive aspirations, including the reform of sexual mores. The Weimar Republic, where in the early years many policies were made by social democratic and liberal parties, provided a friendly climate for these efforts. Such laws as those that still theoretically prohibited the advertisement of birth control devices were loosely enforced and eventually struck down. The first birth control clinic of the postwar era was opened in 1919 by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who was also a crusader for homosexual rights, at his new Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. The mainstream feminists of the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) consistently supported access to contraception and discussed reproductive issues at their annual meetings and in committees. But they did not openly advocate birth control—which offended the religious and moral beliefs of some members— and opposed the legalization of abortion.6 The German birth control movement was invigorated in 1927 by a visit of the American activist Margaret Sanger to Berlin. Under Sanger’s inspirational leadership, the German Committee for Birth Control, composed chiefly of women physicians, set up a network of marriage counseling centers (Eheberatungsstellen), which were sponsored both by private organizations such as the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz or BfM) and by public health authorities.7 In these centers, contraceptive advice was often dispensed to both married and unmarried people (and Helene Stöcker’s clinic offered it “whether they intend (ed) to marry or not”8). Organizations such as the League for the Protection of Mothers and Family Hygiene (Liga für Mutterschutz und Familienhygiene) and the Reich Association for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene (Reichsverband für Geburtenregelung und Sexualhygiene) manufactured and sold contraceptive devices throughout the country.9 The Austrian socialists who controlled the government of the nation’s largest city, Vienna, set up a public marriage-counseling center to give advice on contraception and other sexual problems, but their plans to extend these services remained unfulfilled.10 The support of German-speaking radicals for the reform or repeal of abortion laws distinguished them sharply from their counterparts in other countries, many of whom avoided the issue. German-speaking communists glorified the Soviet Union for legalizing abortion and called for the complete repeal of all legal prohibitions.11 In 1919, they launched a campaign in German-speaking Switzerland. When a communist-sponsored proposal to decriminalize abortion was accepted by the City Council of Basel, which as a textile-manufacturing city was a center of labor activism, the city’s women’s organizations organized mass meetings to debate the proposal. Considering it too radical and a threat to sexual morality, the majority rejected it. Though not yet allowed to vote, the Basel women had enough influence to persuade the Council to repeal the law.12

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Social Democratic women’s organizations in German-speaking countries generally opposed the decriminalization of abortion but advocated legalization subject to medical, eugenic, and social indications (a progressive stance by this era’s standards).13 A modification of the German abortion law in 1926 to permit terminations to save the life or health of the mother made it the most lenient in all Europe. But communists who demanded complete decriminalization collaborated with socialists—a rare instance of such cooperation!—to sponsor a series of mass demonstrations in 1931. The movement spread to Austria, where socialist delegates to the Parliament (Nationalrat), including Adelheid Popp and Therese Schlesinger, proposed liberalized “indication” laws. Upon their seizure of dictatorial power in 1933, the German National Socialists banned the birth control organizations, forced their leaders into exile, regulated abortion according to a racial ideology that recognized only the eugenic indication, and legalized the compulsory sterilization of individuals whom they considered genetically defective. In Austria, abortion reform was also blocked by the rise of a right-wing dictatorship in 1934.14 The British birth control movement developed a more conservative ideology, which was shaped in large measure by the charismatic personality of Marie Stopes. Her best-selling books, especially Married Love, which was published in 1918, placed more emphasis on private, and specifically marital bliss—portrayed against a background of middle-class comfort—than on social reform or sexual radicalism. Stopes, who founded the Society for Birth Control and Racial Progress in 1921, was opposed to abortion, which she believed that contraception would make unnecessary. Her class-biased version of eugenic theory, very different from that of socialist birth controllers, associated poverty with hereditary deficiency. But though certainly prejudiced against some women, Stopes had strong feminist convictions. She affirmed the married woman’s right not only to sex education and birth control, but also to economic independence and professional self-fulfillment. “The pursuit of her work or profession and honorable achievement in it,” she wrote in 1920, “is not at all incompatible with, but is highly beneficial to her motherhood.”15 Of all this period’s birth control activists, Stopes had the widest international influence. Her effective and widely imitated “Mothers’ Clinic,” which opened in London in 1921, dispensed contraception and other forms of practical help to women regardless of income.16 Stopes’s example was followed in Northern Ireland with the establishment of the Society for Constructive Birth Control, which opened the first birth control clinic in Belfast in 1936.17 The women members of the British Labour Party took a more radical approach. The Workers’ Birth Control Group, under the leadership of Dora Russell, campaigned to make contraception accessible to working-class women in publicly supported maternal and child-welfare clinics. Birth control found less sympathy on the British than on the German political left. The male leadership of the British Labour Party, responding to its Catholic constituents, repeatedly refused the demand of the Party’s Women’s Section

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to include access to birth control in the Party’s program.18 The initiative thus passed to middle-class organizations, including the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), which endorsed birth control for married women in 1926. In 1929, the Health Ministry authorized the dispensation of contraceptive advice in public medical centers. With few exceptions British birth control organizations, which united into a coordinating body known as the National Birth Council Association, avoided the controversial topic of abortion reform until 1936, when a small group of militants, including Russell and the journalist Stella Browne, formed the Abortion Law Reform Association.19 The contrasting German and British approaches were publicized through the World League for Sexual Reform, founded in 1928, which supported the efforts of birth controllers in many countries, especially in Scandinavia. The Swedish Elise Ottesen-Jensen, who worked for birth control as journalist, organizer, and traveling lecturer, was a socialist and a supporter of German reformers such as Hirschfeld and Stöcker. In 1934 an organization under her leadership, the National Society for Sexual Education (Riksförbundet för sexuell Upplysning, or RFSU), opened a clinic in Stockholm. In 1938 the Swedish government provided public support for this and other clinics. OttesenJensen was also a militant supporter of abortion-law reform, and in 1934 was tried and convicted for referring a woman to an abortion provider.20 OttesenJensen had close ties to a feminist group centered in Fogelstad, which included the parliamentarians Elizabeth Tamm, and Kerstin Hesselgren (who were mentioned in the previous chapter), and Dr. Ada Nilsson, a physician and public health activist who advocated benefits to mothers (such as maternity insurance and well-baby clinics) and the free dissemination of contraceptive advice.21 The Norwegian Katti Anker-Møller, whom we have already met as an advocate of the rights of mothers during the prewar era, was an admirer of Stopes, some of whose works she translated into Norwegian. In 1922, upon returning from a visit to Stopes’s London clinic, she founded a clinic in Oslo, and by 1937 similar clinics existed in thirteen other towns. In 1939, these clinics received public financing. Møller did not agree with her British mentor on all issues—for example on abortion, which Møller believed should be legalized.22 In Denmark, where no such forceful leadership emerged, only one birth control clinic existed in 1932.23 The Dutch birth control movement declined in influence after the death in 1924 of its leader, the internationally renowned physician and sex reformer Johannes Rutgers. In the 1930s, however, the influence of Marie Stopes provided new momentum. In 1931, a clinic named for Aletta Jacobs opened in Amsterdam, and by 1940 eleven additional clinics had been established.24 In general, therefore, the democratic countries of Europe saw a slow, uneven, but nonetheless steady growth in the public acceptance of birth control during this era. A notable exception to this trend was France. In 1920, the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate enacted a law that penalized not only the sale of contraceptives and the performance of abortions, but also the

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public advocacy of any form of family limitation.25 Religious proscription reinforced political repression. In 1930, the papal encyclical Casti Connubii warned the Catholic faithful against “any use whatever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its power to generate life,” and against abortion, even when necessary to save the mother’s life.26 Many historians have criticized French feminists for their initial failure to protest the 1920 law, which Nelly Roussel termed the loi scélérate (abominable law). But some radicals continued to draw attention to the issue. In 1927 the teacher Henriette Alquier, a member of a communist teachers’ union, was tried for publishing an article that promoted “neo-Malthusianism,” and was acquitted.27 In the 1930s the founding of the periodical Problème Sexuel (Sexual Problem) by Berthie Albrecht, a member of the World League for Sexual Reform, and the opening of a clinic in Suresnes by the physician Jean Dalsace, reinvigorated the opposition to the “abominable law.”28 Religious prohibitions influenced legislation in other Catholic countries as well. Belgium passed a law based on the French model in 1923 and the Irish Free State prohibited the advertisement and sale of contraceptives in 1929 and their importation in 1935.29 Spain’s law of 1928 against the propagation of contraceptive theory or practice was briefly overturned in 1931 by the leftwing groups who founded the Second Republic. In the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona, radical physicians founded a birth control clinic in their House of Mothers (Casa de Maternidad), which provided a variety of services to mothers and babies, and pushed for the legalization of abortion in the autonomous region of Catalonia. These efforts were halted by the right-wing counterrevolution in 1939, and the Fascist government passed laws that upheld Catholic teachings.30 Proponents of what French feminists scornfully termed repopulâtrie (“populationitis”) and lapinisme (“rabbit-breeding”) blamed declining birthrates on the spread of the birth control movement. But this was a reversal of cause and effect; in fact, it was the widespread determination to limit family size that drove the expansion of the movement. Prohibitions against access to contraceptive technology could not prevent the use of the nontechnological methods, such as coitus interruptus, through which birth control had been practiced for a century or more. The “rhythm” method, which utilized the woman’s natural infertile periods rather than birth control technology, was accepted by the Vatican and came into use in Catholic countries in the 1930s.31 Between 1920 and 1933 the birthrate per thousand population fell from 25.5 to 14.7 in Britain; from 25.9 to 14.7 in Germany; from 21.4 to 16.2 in France; from 29.5 to 27.7 in Spain; and from 23.6 to 13.7 in Sweden. The decision to limit families arose chiefly from a new feeling of entitlement to the pursuit of happiness and self-realization. Contrary to the gloomy obsessions of natalists, the falling birthrates of the interwar years signaled no widespread rejection of motherhood—in fact (as we have seen in chapter 6)

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the number of women who married and had children actually increased. As Yvonne Knibiehler, the historian of motherhood, points out, many women of this generation aspired to be “more motherly and happier mothers than their mothers and their grandmothers.” Freed by household technology from heavy labor and by prosperity from pressure to work outside the home, middle-class mothers devoted themselves to their small families, preferably consisting of a girl and a boy, in houses made cosy and comfortable by modern conveniences. The growth of the toy industry and the increasing lavishness of Christmas festivities were signs of a newly child-centered culture.32 However, advances in the control of fertility raised more disturbing possibilities, including an individualism that could not be contained by this domestic ideal. The rationalization of reproductive behavior through the separation of sexuality and pregnancy, writes the German historian Karen Hagemann, constituted a “decisive step toward the emancipation of the female sex.”33 One possibility was the avoidance of motherhood without renouncing heterosexual satisfaction. Another was a new solution to the maternal dilemma: the planning of childbearing to fit into new life-plans. “Intelligent and perhaps truly feminist women want two things,” wrote the British novelist Naomi Mitchison in 1930, “they want to love as women, to have masses of children by the men they love . . . and they want to do their own work, whatever it may be.”34 Though feminists expressed widely different views on reproductive issues, they agreed that the elevation of maternity from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom—still a utopian goal—would add a new dimension to the maternal dilemma. They called on women to find a new balance between freedom and responsibility. “Evidently,” remarked the French feminist and politician Cecile Brunschvicg, “women no longer wish to be considered as destined only for motherhood. But we firmly believe that the more aware they are of their rights, the more they also realize their duties.”35 But duties to what, or to whom? The following sections will address feminist conceptions of freedom, responsibility, and choice.

“F M   F G”: B C  C Adele Schreiber, one of the first women to be elected into the Parliament (Reichstag) of the Weimar Republic, regarded reproductive choice as a right and duty of citizenship. Not for German mothers the medals for large families that were awarded in France—their honor was to be “the free mothers of a free generation.”36 But in this as in other areas of life, new freedoms brought new uncertainties. Couples who assumed “this terrible responsibility of the deliberate creation of life,” wrote Naomi Mitchison, were forced to ask such questions as “we willed this life, are we justified?” or “ought we to deny life to a being . . . who might be alive and happy?”37

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What were the ethical guidelines for reproductive decision-making? And how should mothers balance their obligations to their children, to society, and to themselves? Most feminist reformers based their reproductive ethic on relational rather than individualistic arguments, and portrayed birth control primarily as a benefit to children and families. This was in part a defensive strategy, for anti-feminists never tired of deploring the modern woman’s distaste for motherhood.38 Auguste Isaac, who was among the leaders of one of the largest French populationist organizations, the National Alliance against Depopulation (Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation), complained that mothers corrupted by materialism and frivolity had forgotten “the influence and the prestige that arise from a prolific maternity.”39 Nelly Roussel charged men such as Isaac, the proud father of eleven, with using patriotic rhetoric to justify “their own lack of self-control and glorify the suffering of their wives,” and claimed—in defiance of legal prohibitions—that mothers who responsibly limited their families served both their children and their country.40 The editors of the British suffrage periodical Time and Tide affirmed that the “real meaning of birth control” was “children, the happiness of children and the rights of children, and the chances of making fine citizens out of her children . . . That is why birth control, in its real sense, in its larger sense, has come to stay.”41 The era’s demanding standards of child-care were often invoked to support this rhetorical strategy. In a statement issued in 1927, the Dutch National Women’s Council (Nationale Vrouwenraad) asserted that “the more people understand the high minimum standards of hygiene that are necessary to the care of newborns and older children, the more the conception of offspring becomes an event that cannot depend simply on accident.”42 And indeed, these standards were constantly rising. Eglantyne Jebb, a British Quaker who had been a leader of her denomination’s campaign to assist children in wartime and continued as an international child-welfare activist, introduced into the League of Nations a resolution entitled the “Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” which was passed by that body in 1924. “Recognizing that Mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give,” the document affirmed the child’s right to all “the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually.”43 According to a French socialist periodical, the Voice of Women (La Voix des Femmes), these requirements included schooling, adequate housing equipped with bathroom and laundry facilities, and access to the natural world.44 One of Marie Stopes’s best-selling advice manuals admonished parents that “Baby” required “fresh air to breathe” and the opportunity “to play in the sunshine with his limbs free in the air; to crawl about on sweet, clean grass.”45 Obviously, these conditions could be provided by only a minority of prosperous families, and were beyond the means of the poor. Left-wing activists thus often resorted to traditional Neo-Malthusian arguments that birth control was a remedy against poverty. Henriette Alquier, the French teacher who was placed on trial in 1926 for advocating birth control,

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deplored the plight of the proletarian family, in which unwanted pregnancies too often produced children destined for early death or permanent illness. “I am the mother of a family,” she declared to the judge. “I am defending the birth of healthy children.” Lamenting the misfortune of a family that had lost four of its eighteen children, she assured the judges that “before these four coffins, none of you could have claimed that it was not a crime to conceive children who were condemned to death before they were born.”46 As working-class women had no access to the services that were provided to wealthier women by private doctors, the large families of the poor came to symbolize class injustice. Delegates to the annual conference of the British Labour Party in 1924 insisted that women of all classes were entitled to contraceptive advice and demanded that such advice be made available in publicly financed health centers (a demand that was fulfilled in 1929). “We stand for the woman who is very poor,” declared Mrs. Hagger, a delegate from Epsom, “and who is unable to get the information that she may desire.”47 The Swedish activist Elise Ottesen-Jensen traveled through the rural northern section of the country giving lectures on birth control and fitting diaphragms. She justified her work as a benefit to the mother who was “always in agony because she was afraid that she must give life to a new, unwelcome being who might burden the family still further.”48 One problem with this rhetorical strategy is that it seemed to call for a reduction of numbers among the poor, but not among the rich. It might therefore seem to support a variety of right-wing agendas—racist population policies, class snobbery, conservative opposition to the expansion of public social services. Left-wing birth controllers took care to point out that family limitation was not a desirable end in itself, but a means of coping with adverse circumstances. They urged nations that were threatened by population decline to encourage the poor to have more children by creating services for mothers, children, and families. The corollary of this argument was often that a state that provided such support could expect mothers to reciprocate by increasing birthrates: “First protection for mother and child— and then increased birth-rates,” demanded the German socialist Adele Schreiber. “First housing and food—and then large families!”49 Dora Russell saw the problem with these arguments, which turned women’s freedom of choice from an individual right into a temporary expedient. “Even if we lived in Buckingham Palace,” she said, “we would not want a baby every year.”50 Arguments for birth control as a remedy for poverty supported a highly important cause—the provision of contraception through public services. Nonetheless they were unconvincing. The uncomfortable fact was that birth control was much less frequently practiced by the poor and sick than by the healthy and prosperous middle classes, who were perfectly able to produce large and flourishing families but simply chose not to. “The tendency to refuse the maternal role is steadily increasing,” wrote the German socialist Alice Rühle-Gerstel. “And birth control is particularly popular among the classes that are not affected by poverty.”51 Did women whose health and

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economic status fitted them for motherhood have an obligation to produce children? Feminists, who often shared the obsession of their contemporaries with the dangers of population decline, sometimes passed harsh judgment on people who were in a position to have large families, but chose not to. The French feminist newspaper La Française condemned such couples—“their materialism is shocking.”52 Maude Royden, a well-known British suffragist and theologian, likewise affirmed that all healthy women wanted to have children, with the deplorable exception of those who were “too idle, cowardly, and selfish.”53 Though she affirmed women’s right to choose, Dora Russell nonetheless saw childbearing as an important moral commitment.54 “Some may find it hard to understand my passionate involvement, almost intoxication, with the idea of children as the future of mankind,” she wrote. “Bertie and I, for all the individualism of our personal lives, were inspired by an abiding sense of responsibility to humanity.”55 But the definition of reproduction as a service that women owed to society, the nation, or even “humanity”—an exalted term which in practice could only mean the state of which the prospective children would be citizens— lost some of its credibility in the interwar era. Feminists in all the belligerent countries had vainly hoped that peace would bring a reorientation of state population policies to serve human rather than military needs. “We stand for a population policy, but not one that uses mothers as instruments of the arms race,” said Gertrud Bäumer, a leader of the liberal German Democratic Party and the long-time editor of Germany’s foremost feminist periodical, in 1919, “but one that protects, cares for, and strengthens existing life.”56 But the rebirth of militarism in a new and virulent form disappointed this hope. In 1933, in a political atmosphere now saturated in the aggressive and racist rhetoric of the Nazis, Bäumer defended the private sphere of the family against governmental intrusion and insisted that “the will to reproduce is a matter for the individual, not for the state.”57 In the campaign organized by German left-wing parties for the legalization of abortion, which reached its peak in 1931, antimilitarism was a dominant theme. The German Communist Party struck a new note with a slogan— “Your body belongs to you”—which bypassed all instrumental arguments to affirm reproductive freedom as an individual right. Of course, this slogan sounded strange when it came from people who took their orders from the rulers of a totalitarian state where abortion rights had already been limited and would soon be utterly abolished. But this was nonetheless an effective propaganda tactic that drew huge numbers of women to the cause.58 The theme song of the antiabortion campaign—a poem by Bertolt Brecht that was set to music by Hanns Eisler—bitterly mocked the ideology of patriotic motherhood by placing it in the mouth of a heartless physician who says to his destitute and unwillingly pregnant patient, You will be a lovely mother, that’s for sure, And you’ll send some cannon-fodder off to war. You’re a woman—it’s your fate,

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To have babies for the state. So don’t argue—it’s too late, We’ll have no more fuss and bother! Just shut up and be a lovely little mother.59

Feminists across the political spectrum responded with increasing skepticism to the tributes to patriotic mothers that became ever more frequent with the heightening of military tensions. In the 1920s, a “Mother’s Day” holiday was sponsored by conservative groups in Germany and Austria and celebrated with patriotic ceremonies. Glad as she was to see mothers recognized, wrote Henriette Herzfelder in the journal of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine), she doubted the sincerity of such tributes in a state where most mothers were still the poorest and most oppressed of all citizens.60 In 1920, as they formulated the draconian law against abortion and the sale of contraceptive devices, French legislators also created the “Medal of the French Family” (“Médaille de la famille française”) which was awarded in bronze to mothers who had five to seven children, in silver to those who had six to ten children, and in guilded silver (vermeil) to those who had ten or more.61 In 1938 a sentimental monument showing mothers mourning their fallen sons, was dedicated in Paris to the “sublime mothers” of France. The editorial writers of La Française rejected these tributes from a government that still denied women the right to vote. “Alas for peace!” they exclaimed in 1938. “Don’t be so sure that these mothers won’t respond with raucous indignation, ‘Children? Cannon fodder? No, thanks.’ ”62 The rise of Nazism and Fascism, which promoted motherhood through a combination of thumping propaganda and coercive legislation, exacerbated these fears. From Italy, the British feminist Cicely Hamilton reported that “the aims of Fascism, where women are concerned, are conservative: the life domestic, a husband and a home, and children, future citizens of Italy, the more the better! Give her these, and she has all the interests she needs, and likewise does her duty by the State.”63 Winifred Holtby noted that the “cult of the cradle” transcended national boundaries. “In Italy, in Germany, in Ireland, and in France today fecundity is revered as a patriotic virtue. Babies are potential citizens and potential soldiers. . . . The mother who fills the cradle enables her sovereign to rule the world.”64 Virginia Woolf warned in 1938 that in Italy and Germany, the “monster” of male supremacy had come “more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not only between the sexes, but between the races.”65 Reacting to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Sweden’s representative to the League of Nations’ Social Committee, the feminist and politician Kerstin Hesselgren, asked “how could women wish to bear children in a world that is so hopeless, so insecure! I have heard numbers of women say this.”66 Austrian socialists ridiculed the Nazi schools for mothers where lessons in racial dogma and in knitting baby clothes were combined.67 Austrian

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Catholic women criticized the Nazis’ exaltation of motherhood on religious grounds—Catholicism, which venerated the Virgin Mary and respected the celibate as well as the married state, did not reduce the value of the individual woman to her sexual and reproductive functions.68 But were there more constructive ways for the state to encourage parenthood? To devise a democratic approach to natalism was the aim of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the authors of a controversial book entitled Crisis of the Population Question (Kris I befolkningsfråget) who in 1935 were appointed by the Swedish government to its prestigious Population Commission. The Commission’s charge was to recommend policies to reverse the trend toward small families and low birthrates—a trend that the Myrdals and many others believed was a threat to the survival of the Swedish nation.69 Alva Myrdal, who was influenced by the feminist birth control advocate Ada Nilsson, rejected the crude French natalist measures as well as most of the even more tyrannical laws passed by the German government since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The decision to bear children, she insisted, was intensely private, and could no longer be swayed by “exhortations to duty, to patriotic glorification, or religious obedience.”70 Nor should a democratic government engage in coercion: the Population Commission recommended that existing laws that restricted the sale of contraceptives be repealed, that family planning services should receive public support, and even that abortion should be legalized under some circumstances. But the Commission called on the state to encourage childbearing through positive measures such as the creation of state-subsidized housing designed to accommodate large families, recreational facilities for parents and children, medical services for mothers and babies, and affordable day-care that enabled mothers to pursue career or volunteer interests. Alva Myrdal also urged state educational institutions to encourage a positive attitude toward marriage, childbearing, and the family.71 Some of these measures—including legalized birth control, legalized abortion under certain conditions, welfare payments to impoverished mothers, and public housing for poor families—were passed by the Swedish parliament in 1937–38.72 This program met with a very mixed public response. Although Myrdal herself emphasized the differences between her own version of natalism and that of the Fascist nations, her colleagues in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party were not entirely convinced. They expressed considerable aversion to governmental involvement in reproductive decision-making. “No dictatorship, no children on command!” responded one woman to a poll conducted by the Party. “An attitude toward life which disregards the well-being of people and which focuses instead on fulfilling a debt to society cannot be accepted by Social Democratic women,” insisted another. “We must decide by ourselves whether we want children and how many we want.”73 The interwar years saw the growth of a stubborn individualism that resisted even benevolent attempts to regulate reproduction in the interests of society or the state. Most feminists, as we have seen, viewed this trend with ambivalence, for they still regarded motherhood as a right and duty of

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citizenship. But their resentment of the heavy hand of the state eventually brought many to question this notion. A few openly made the libertarian claim that the only guide to reproductive decision-making was to the individual’s own conscience. Among these was the British journalist Stella Browne, one of the few activists in that country who openly advocated the legalization of abortion as well as of access to birth control. “Apart, however, from the present laws and customs affecting women,” she wrote in 1917, “the fundamental question arises, whether maternity can ever be a duty towards any outside entity—state, individual, or deity. I deny that it can.”74 In 1935, still undaunted, she said that abortion was an “absolute right” that should be “available for any woman . . . For our bodies are our own.”75 Another libertarian was the French physician Madeleine Pelletier, who became a victim of the repressive French laws when she was convicted of performing abortions and confined to an insane asylum in 1939, where she died in the same year.76 “The prohibition of abortion is an attack on the human individual,” declared Pelletier in 1930. “For if we have any property, it is our bodies. Society has a claim to those assets that are in a certain sense public, but our bodies belong to us alone.”77

“A D   P”: F  E Should reproductive decisions be left entirely to the individual? How could the mother’s right to self-determination be balanced against the right of the child to be born healthy—as Ellen Key had put it, the “right of the child to choose its parents”? As we have seen from an earlier chapter, the eugenics movement gained many adherents among left wing and progressive groups, including some feminists, in the prewar era. Its appeal increased in the 1920s. Progressive eugenicists opposed the open racism and class bias that were professed by the right wing of their movement. But they, too, took health and fitness as criteria of human value. Many agreed with the influential Marie Stopes that “the power of parenthood ought no longer to be exercised by all, however inferior, as an individual right. It is profoundly a duty and a privilege, and it is essentially the concern of the whole community to encourage in every way the parenthood of those whose circumstances and condition is such that they will give rise to healthy, well-endowed future citizens.”78 In accordance with Lamarckian theories of evolution, French physicians attributed all hereditary defects to the effects of parental vices—chiefly alcoholism and sexual promiscuity—on the developing fetus. The physician and educator Just Sicard de Plauzoles, a prominent disciple of Adolphe Pinard, warned that “all educated parents should be regarded as criminals if they knowingly become the cause of the birth of a degenerate, infirm, or idiot child.”79 In France, where the open advocacy of birth control was prohibited, a concern for the health of the next generation provided an important rationale for the enhancement of women’s understanding and control of their

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reproductive functions. In 1924, the French physician Germaine MontreuilStraus and her colleagues founded a Committee on Women’s Education (Comité d’éducation féminine) within the previously all-male Society for Sanitary and Moral Reform. The Committee admonished mothers and prospective mothers that their first and “primordial” responsibility was to understand “the origins of life, the function of heredity . . . the consequences of immorality for the girl and the young man, the importance of health in founding a family, the responsibility of parents in regard to their children.”80 Young women were urged to choose their partners carefully—a subversive idea in a nation where many marriages were still arranged, chiefly according to the social status of the prospective partners. “Young girl, think of your future children and marry a healthy man!” read a poster that featured a picture of two plump babies.81 That the mother also had the right to protect her own health by refusing sexual relations with an infected husband was not openly stated but strongly implied, chiefly through very explicit information on the symptoms of venereal diseases in the male. “The venereal scourge hurts mothers and children,” warned another poster. “Women, learn to recognize it in order to combat it.”82 This campaign, which was carried by a group of energetic speakers to women throughout France, sought to overturn conventional beliefs that sexual ignorance enhanced a girl’s marital prospects and a wife’s fidelity. The warnings directed by local newspapers to respectable matrons against these highly immoral lectures served as an effective advertisement and often brought in large and curious crowds. A subsidy awarded to MontreuilStraus by the Ministry of Public Hygiene showed a growing official acceptance of sex education as a means to child health, if not to female autonomy.83 Campaigns for sex education also spread to Spain, where in 1922 the socialist Margarita Nelken (who was born in Madrid to German Jewish parents and later played a prominent political role in the Spanish Republic) cited the authority of French and German physicians to claim that “nothing is so harmful and prejudicial to morals as an educational system that hides the truth about nature . . . It is terrible to think that the immense majority of our girls know nothing of what will be their highest duty, which hinges on an natural act that they have been taught to consider repugnant.”84 After the founding of the Second Republic in 1931, a “School for Conscious Motherhood” was set up by radical physicians in the House of Mothers (Casa de Maternidad) in Barcelona. Instruction in the laws of heredity, asserted the anarchist physician Dr. Felix Marti Ibañez, would free women from “egotistic male tyranny” and give them rights including “self determination and the right to decide on their own maternity.”85 But most Spanish feminists, even the anarchist founders of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), responded skeptically to an ideology that they feared would discredit their movement.86 Education was not enough, for it could not protect women against the coercive pressures of the patriarchal family. Activists called on the state to

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support them in their aspirations to protect the health of the next generation. As we have seen, prewar feminists had been among the earliest proponents of health certificates as a prerequisite for legal marriage. Scandinavian countries were the first to write this requirement into their new codes of family law, which forbade the marriage of persons afflicted with a range of ailments considered hereditary, including mental retardation and insanity (or “lunacy”). Swedish and Finnish laws also prohibited marriage to those with venereal diseases, while Danish and Norwegian codes required only that each party present a health certificate to the other.87 In countries where women had won the right to vote and to hold office, laws requiring some kind of health certificate for marriage were often introduced by female representatives to national parliaments. The Dutch feminist Betsy Bakker-Nort, who was also prominent as a defender of married women’s right to employment, was a representative of the liberal Free Democratic Party and also belonged to the Committee for a Medical Certificate for Marriage (Comité ter Bevordering van het Geneeskundig Onderzoek vóor het huwelijk).88 This committee’s most prestigious ally was the physician Maria Anna van Herwerden. Although not active in feminist organizations, Herwerden was a prominent advocate for female physicians and medical students and a critic of pseudo-scientific justifications for gender discrimination. She rejected any tendency to pure genetic determinism and insisted that policy-makers should always recognize “the interaction of genotypical traits with life circumstances in the broadest sense.”89 The legislation sponsored by Bakker-Nort was very cautious, and required only that applicants for a marriage license should be provided with a brochure advising them on the dangers of hereditary disease (a law that had already been passed in Germany). But even this limited involvement of the state in marital choice was thought excessive by a Parliament composed largely of representatives of religiously oriented parties (both Catholic and Protestant), who rejected the proposal because it violated religious precepts.90 In France, the most prominent advocate of the pre-marital health certificate was Dr. Pinard. Starting in 1926, he introduced several proposals into the Chamber of Deputies that would have required the health certificate only of men, for he feared that the prospect of examining virginal brides would outrage public opinion.91 The feminist press supported this proposal— indeed, the young lawyer Laure Biardeau argued in the name of gender equality for the extension of the requirement to women.92 Pinard’s initiative was temporarily halted by public aversion to this unprecedented limitation on personal liberty and medical confidentiality. But in the 1930s the debate was dramatically revived by the novelist Louise Hervieu, who was also a painter until her blindness and other infirmities made painting impossible. Hervieu, who attributed her illness and those of her children to a venereal disease acquired from her husband, addressed the problem of hereditary disease in 1936 in a sensational novel entitled Sangs (Blood-Lines) and in 1937 in an impassioned tract, Le Crime (The Crime).

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Both of these books were directed primarily toward female readers, and both denounced careless reproduction as a crime against the next generation. “Do not accept your own contamination and the ruin of your children!” Hervieu exhorted her female readers. “It is a great crime against them, it is infanticide!”93 Along with many other reformers, Hervieu advocated the compulsory issuance to citizens of both sexes of a “Health Booklet” (Carnet de Santé), which would record medical data from birth to death and would be inspected on important occasions such as school entry, military conscription, and marriage. Hervieu created a public image of herself as emancipated woman as well as mater dolorosa. A Louise Hervieu Association, which was founded to advocate the Carnet, was lauded in the feminist press and by prominent feminist leaders.94 Hervieu dismissed all reservations about possible infringement of personal privacy: “the child, the future human being also has rights, which we violate because he is too weak to defend them.”95 The majority of French legislators still had reservations: in 1939 the Chamber of Deputies voted to adopt the Carnet but on a voluntary and confidential basis. Under the fascist Vichy regime, the prenuptial examination was made obligatory.96 Another way of protecting population “quality” was the legalization of voluntary or compulsory sterilization. In France, such a measure—though supported by a few prominent physicians and reformers—was not likely to gain widespread acceptance. Catholics opposed it because it violated the precepts laid down in the papal encyclical Casti Connubii, and natalists because it might have the effect of further reducing birthrates. But in predominantly Protestant Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia, sterilization figured prominently in debates on population policy. Though made infamous by the Nazis after their seizure of power in 1933, sterilization was not originally associated with the political right—indeed, like many other eugenic measures, it was originally proposed and supported chiefly by adherents of progressive or left-wing groups in all countries, including feminist groups. The laws proposed by these groups were intended to make voluntary sterilization available as a means to the exercise of reproductive responsibility. This definition of responsibility was held to justify a more coercive approach to those deemed irresponsible, chiefly the insane, retarded, or mentally “deficient.” Because these people’s afflictions were assumed to be hereditary and their reproductive patterns prolific, they were targeted as a threat to population “quality.” Another stereotype—that of the “mentally deficient” male as a rapist or sex criminal—played to the fears and prejudices of women, including many feminists. Of course, as groups such as welfare recipients, prisoners, and the patients of public medical facilities were most often affected, the proposed laws had a strong class bias—a serious ethical problem, which was often unrecognized or ignored even by socialist reformers.97 But by no means all feminists approved of sterilization—an issue on which their views differed according to their political and religious beliefs and national contexts.98 In the polarized political atmosphere of Weimar

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Germany, sterilization was debated by the leaders of the socialist and communist women’s groups and the members of the BDF. Although most German socialist and communist women did not identify themselves as feminists, they played the major role in defining their parties’ positions on issues concerning women and the family, and a few of them—such as Adele Schreiber and Henriette Fürth—were well-known advocates of women’s rights in many areas. The broader theme of this controversy was social policy, chiefly in regard to those classified as feeble-minded or insane. At first, both the socialist and the moderate feminist groups recommended the custodial care of these individuals (along the lines of the British Mental Deficiency Act, which had been passed in 1913) for indefinite periods in sex-segregated institutions. But they disagreed about the financing and control of these institutions. The members of the League of German Women’s Associations wished to entrust the custodial services to charitable institutions, many of which were directed and staffed by women. The socialist activists, on the contrary, insisted on the abolition of private charities and the transfer of custodial services to public institutions under the authority of local governments, many of which were controlled by socialists.99 After a proposed National Custodial Law, which would have mandated life-long confinement for the mentally “deficient,” was defeated in 1925, socialist politicians (who had not succeeded in supplanting the private charities) shifted their support to sterilization, which they argued was preferable to long-term custody on both humanitarian and financial grounds. Laws designed to legalize sterilization were sponsored by socialist party members on both the national and state level. All of these were based on the voluntary principle, but as they also provided that the mentally deficient, retarded, or ill could be sterilized with the consent of their families or guardians, their voluntary nature was questionable.100 By contrast, the BDF continued to support the custodial laws—a position that appealed both to the material interests and the moral values of the member groups, who prided themselves on their “motherly” concern for vulnerable members of society. Some BDF members objected to eugenic legislation not only on religious but on scientific grounds: “science cannot yet predict heredity, and especially in the case of mental illness, this is not yet possible,” remarked one delegate to the BDF’s 1925 meeting.101 Gertrud Bäumer, who chaired the Reichstag’s Committee on Population, complained that the emphasis on biological fitness ignored the spiritual aspects of parenthood. “The discussion over-emphasizes eugenics and population policy— that the production of children also involves the spiritual and intellectual process of child-rearing is often forgotten.”102 After 1930, when the National Socialist Party won its first major electoral victories, the political atmosphere was rapidly polarized between right and left extremes. In response to the great campaign for legalized abortion that was launched by the left-wing parties, the BDF—which had been aloof from these efforts—was urged by the minority of sex reformers among its membership to define its position on this and other reproductive issues.

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A group headed by Anne-Marie Durand-Wever, the head of the organization’s Committee on Marriage Counseling, cooperated with the Committee on Population Policy, headed by the Protestant conservative Luise ScheffenDoering, to draft a position paper entitled “Guidelines on Family Policy,” which was scheduled to be voted on by the organization’s annual conference in 1933. That conference never took place, for in response to the Nazi seizure of power the BDF disbanded itself on May 14, 1933, in order to avoid cooperating with Nazi guidelines, which demanded the removal of all Jewish members. But the organization’s journal, Die Frau, continued in print under an editorial board headed by Gertrud Bäumer. In June of 1933, Die Frau published the position paper on “Family Policy,” which the BDF had had no opportunity to pass. An introductory statement by Scheffen-Doering vowed loyalty to Adolf Hitler and endorsed “voluntary sterilization for life unworthy to be lived.” But the original text of the position paper, which was printed in its entirety, advocated the strengthening of the family through positive, state-sponsored benefits such as improvements in maternity insurance and education, and it made no mention of sterilization, voluntary or compulsory. The first clause stipulated that “the moral responsibility of parenthood is derived from a personal decision, of which no one can be deprived of any government.” In a commentary on this document, Scheffen-Doering cautiously admonished the new rulers to respect the religious conscience. “All new eugenic measures, all public marriage counseling, must respect this basic principle of sexual morality. . . . No ethically valid marriage can, as has been suggested, be contracted according to criteria of biological value, and children cannot be produced for any nation by compulsion.”103 The Nazi law that mandated compulsory sterilization for many categories of people came into effect six months later (January 1, 1934).104 Custodial laws for the “mentally deficient,” though not enacted on the national level, were adopted by many local governments after 1933. In Britain, by contrast, the attitude of feminists toward sterilization was more positive and less conflicted than that of their German counterparts, in part because the political environment permitted them a more prominent role in defining the issues. In Britain, fascist and communist parties of the sort that did so much to radicalize the debate in Germany played a much lesser role, and political parties showed little interest in population policy.105 Thus civic organizations, such as NUSEC and the Eugenics Society, were able to initiate legislation on population issues (including birth control, which both of these organizations supported) and to dominate national debates on these issues. Britain already had a law permitting the long-term confinement of those judged mentally deficient. In 1929, when state mental health authorities warned that the numbers of this group were nonetheless increasing, the Eugenics Society introduced the first of several sterilization bills into Parliament. Like most comparable measures in other countries, the British bill made sterilization voluntary, but excepted the insane or retarded, for

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whom consent could be given by a relative or physician—thus its voluntary nature was highly questionable.106 During the period from 1929 until 1937, the Eugenics Society enlisted allies among civic organizations, and among these feminist groups of all shades of opinion were prominent. One reason for the difference in German and British responses was that the British already had the custodial law for which the German mainstream feminists were still campaigning. Another was that in Britain the propaganda for sterilization was developed, not as in Germany by male-dominated parties, but by and for women. Placing a high priority on winning of women’s support, the Eugenics Society provided speakers for hundreds of local organizations, from the socialist Women’s Cooperative Guild to the conservative Mothers’ Institutes. As Lesley A. Hall has remarked, the arguments for sterilization were quite similar to those for access to birth control: both were presented chiefly as measures for the protection of the health and well-being of mothers and children. The Sterilization Bill was endorsed by the largest feminist groups: the NUSEC (led by Eva Hubback, who was also a member of the Eugenics Society); the National Council of Women; and the socialist Women’s Co-Operative Guild, which even recommended that sterilization be made compulsory in some cases.107 The influential Marie Stopes also supported compulsory sterilization as a means to what she called “racial progress.”108 The male leadership of the Labour Party opposed the Bill and denounced it as an instrument of class oppression, predicting that only poor people would be sterilized.109 But the Party’s Women’s Section broke with the leadership (as they had on the issue of birth control) and placed gender loyalty (as they saw it) ahead of class loyalty by endorsing the Bill “by a large majority” at their national conference of 1936.110 Some women’s organizations refused their support out of respect for the religious scruples of their members. The only group that opposed the Bill on feminist principle was the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, the successor to the Abolitionist Federation, which had successfully opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts in the midnineteenth century. The Association looked back to the theoretically voluntary, but actually compulsory health examination to which suspected prostitutes had been subjected, and expressed the fear that a sterilization bill would lead to similar abuses.111 Despite the strong support of these women’s organizations, the British sterilization bill was repeatedly rejected by Parliament. In Scandinavia, laws that mandated both voluntary and compulsory sterilization were supported by many feminist leaders and organizations. A very early example was the petition brought before the Danish Parliament in 1920 by Danish Women’s National Council, which represented the mainstream of middle-class feminist opinion, supporting the sterilization of the mentally retarded as a protective measure for women and girls against sex offenders. In 1929 and 1934, Denmark passed laws permitting voluntary sterilization that allowed relatives or guardians to give consent for the mentally retarded or insane.112 Influential throughout Scandinavia was the support of two eminent Swedish reformers, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, for the prevention of

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“socially undesirable parenthood,” by voluntary birth control if possible but by compulsion if necessary.113 Denmark and Finland passed laws that permitted voluntary sterilization and compulsory sterilization in some cases in 1934; Norway and Sweden in 1935. In Finland, too, women physicians, lawyers, and politicians played a prominent role in formulating and promoting this legislation, which mandated compulsory sterilization when “the offspring would inherit (the parent’s) defects or if it is likely that such offspring would by reason of such deficiency be uncared for.”114 Environmental as well as medical guidelines often worked unfairly to stigmatize poor parents. But some feminists perceived the ethical problems that were inherent in such policies. The British journalist Stella Browne, always a rebel, was among those who objected to the class biases that were built into the rhetoric of eugenics. She regretted that a working-class friend had not had the opportunity to develop the “gifts which, had they received anything of the cultivation lavished on any blockhead born into the classes which arrogate to themselves the name ‘fit,’ would have made her famous.”115 While she approved in principle of the proposed British sterilization law, Dora Russell regretted that “wholesale compulsion” seemed more acceptable to public opinion than “making ordinary men and women free to exercise their choice according to ordinary brains and human affections.”116 In 1927, the Dutch National Council of Women concluded their policy statement on “Population Policy” with the declaration that too little was known about the laws of heredity to exclude anyone from reproduction.117 Catholic women’s groups upheld their Church’s teachings. For example, the journal La Femme Belge, published by the Christian Women’s Social Movement of Belgium, called sterilization a “mutilation that violates the rights of individuals—a measure that nothing can justify.”118 After 1933, the alarming spectacle of compulsory sterilization and other eugenic policies in Germany alerted many reformers to the danger of giving the state so much power over individual decisions. Elise Ottesen-Jensen, who had lobbied for a eugenic sterilization law in Sweden, retracted her support of this measure in 1933 and devoted her energies to informing the public about sterilization in Germany, where she said it was used as a “weapon for superstition and violence.” When the Swedish sterilization law came into effect in 1934, she urged health officials to protect the rights of individuals to give consent.119 Carlos Blacker, General Secretary of the British Eugenics Education Society, complained that the sterilization bill to which he had committed the energies of his organization failed because of its similarity (which Blacker claimed was only superficial) to the National Socialist law. The Dutch eugenicist Maria Anna van Herwerden (whose mother was Jewish) was appalled by a German colleague who “in the name of racial hygiene spouted anti-Semitic politics, and received applause from his mostly youthful audience.”120 The editors of the French sex-reform periodical Problème Sexuel, who in 1933 had printed the text of the German sterilization

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law without comment, recognized by 1934 that it was part of a tyrannical agenda that suppressed all freedom of reproductive choice, especially among the poor.121 And even in Germany itself, women continued to protest cautiously against compulsory sterilization. “The sterilization of the inferior, for example, poses some problems for women that cannot be simply solved,” wrote Gertrud Bäumer shortly after the Nazi seizure of power. “For in the end this is also an application of technical means to biology, and it brings very mixed spiritual and social effects.”122 Another article in the same issue, this one by a Nazi apologist, complained that in certain circles “the introduction of ‘compulsory sterilization’ has caused some discomfort.”123 Revulsion against National Socialism gradually discredited the eugenics movement. As so often happens, scientific theory reinforced political conviction. Starting in the 1920s, some biologists and psychologists had rejected the crude assumptions that lay behind the sterilization laws, pointing out that the characteristics of the parents (phenotype) did not indicate their genetic makeup (genotype) and thus did not provide an adequate basis upon which to predict the health of their offspring.124 In the middle decades of the twentieth century, this theoretical direction, which emphasized the importance of environment over heredity in the physical and psychological development of individuals, would become dominant in the social and natural sciences.125

W  W  T M   P  H The resistance to eugenic and natalist legislation eroded the conception of motherhood as a public service and made way for a more individualistic view of reproduction. Birth control literature affirmed parental desire as the most important reason for childbearing. The first right of all babies, stated Marie Stopes, was “to be loved before birth as well as after birth.”126 But those who made this argument realized that its effect was highly ambiguous, for it could be—and clearly often was—used to justify decisions both for and against childbearing. If every child had a right to be wanted, then those who did not want children were justified in not producing them. This individualistic view of parenthood as an option rather than a duty was often included among the symptoms of a more general “crisis of the family.” As we have seen from the previous chapter, policy-makers of the interwar era, who regarded the preservation of marital and familial stability as essential to social order, often feared that these bonds could not withstand the pressures of modern life. The German social theorist Alice Salomon argued that the family, no longer supported by its traditional pillars—paternal authority and economic interdependence—was held together only by emotional ties. And even these ties were threatened: “the independence of its individual members” she predicted, might well be gained through the “disintegration of the family.”127

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Likewise Alva Myrdal, whose influential book on population policy began with a chapter entitled “The Maladjusted Family,” insisted anxiously that the modern family existed only to fulfill the emotional needs of its members, as an “opportunity for supreme intimacy.”128 Therefore, Myrdal and other progressive reformers advised governments to avoid coercion and to respect the individual’s claim to private happiness. Forcing parents to bear children was counterproductive, for it destroyed their pleasure in parenthood. “Children should be born as a matter of joy; whatever kills that joy misses its effect.”129 Some birth control literature even argued that marital happiness was more important to social order than population growth. Although Marie Stopes regarded reproduction as the ultimate purpose of sexual love—“Every lover desires a child,” began the first chapter of her popular advice-book, Radiant Motherhood—she advised couples to delay the first pregnancy for at least two years in order to allow time for the full development of their sexual relationship.130 Young marriages, she warned, were often permanently disrupted by the “inevitable dislocation and readjustment” caused by pregnancy and parenthood.131 And she insisted that state policies that forced such couples to bear unwanted children could lead only to social unrest. The “real root of revolution,” she wrote, lay in “the secret revolt and bitterness which permeates every fibre of the unwillingly pregnant and suffering mothers.” The unwilling mother’s children might well become “bitter, soured and profoundly unhappy” adults who would avenge their own wrongful births through revolutionary activity.132 If the happiness of families took priority over population growth, then could the avoidance of childbearing actually be socially desirable? As we have already seen, those who were afflicted with hereditary diseases were urged, even sometimes compelled, to refrain from reproduction. But voluntary sterility, at least on a temporary basis, could also be recommended even for the young and healthy. One of the period’s most contentious debates raged around the proposal made by the American judge Ben Lindsay for the legal and social acceptance of the so-called “trial marriage”—a union of young people who were not ready for a lifetime commitment. The partners would agree that the relationship would be childless and could be terminated without legal formalities if it did not prove satisfying.133 Lindsay and his many European supporters, who included Alva Myrdal, Dora Russell, Helene Stöcker, and the Dutch activist Wilmoet WijnaendtsFrancken-Dyserinck, believed that trial marriages would assuage the sexual frustration which fashionable Freudian doctrines of human nature identified as a major cause of social instability and crime—according to Russell, even of “nervous disorders bordering upon insanity.”134 “Comradely marriage,” wrote Francken-Dyserinck, would “bring the sex drive, which for so long has been scorned, cursed, and repressed into constructive channels.”135 Moderates such as Gertrud Bäumer found this emphasis on sexual satisfaction as an end in itself highly dubious, for it required the woman at least temporarily to give up her “right to motherhood.”136 But more radical

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thinkers dismissed this association of female sexuality with motherhood as an old-fashioned stereotype: among human beings as well as animals sexuality was the basic drive, and parenthood merely its accidental by-product.137 The Austrian socialist Marianne Pollak praised the modern girl, who refused to be the “old maid, condemned to a nun’s life” and had become the “self-conscious bachelor girl, who grows up early.” To the vanguard of the “sexual revolution,” marriage was no longer simply a “baby factory” (Kinderzeugungsanstalt).138 But the fact that marital happiness was now deemed to be a sufficient end in itself raised serious questions about reproduction. For why should the blissful partners ever encumber themselves with the offspring, that might destroy the precarious equilibrium of their relationship? “Why do we have them?” asked Dora Russell in some perplexity.139 In the consumer society of the interwar years, many identified personal narcissism as the motive for the acquisition of children as well as other valuable possessions. According to Marie Stopes, the couple who decided to bear a child was overcome by a “mutual longing . . . to initiate the chain of lives which shall repeat throughout the ages the bodily, mental and spiritual beauties of each other, which each holds so dear . . . Lovers who are parents give each other the supremest material gift in the world, a material embodiment of celestial dreams.”140 Margaret Sanger, widely read in Europe, likewise pictured motherhood as the completion of the mother’s “completely rounded self-development.”141 And Dora Russell compared the personal fulfillment to be gained from child-rearing to recreation: “there is no activity so delightful . . . as mutual cooperation between men and women over the care and education of babies and young children.”142 But if the parents’ only reason for having children was to gratify their desires, then why should they choose this form of gratification over the others that were now so lavishly available? Enid Charles, a British demographer and feminist, took account of the profound change in the valuation of children over the past century. Children were no longer an economic asset, but a liability—in fact, even more costly than the most luxurious of consumer goods. “Industrialism proffers a number of alternative and often more attractive ways of spending money,” she noted ironically. “Statistics clearly show that the choice between a Ford and a baby is generally made in favor of the Ford.”143 If they did not think of new ways to encourage reproduction, Charles predicted that all Western societies would see a “twilight of parenthood.”144 One solution to this problem—already envisaged during World War I— was the development of technologies that would remove reproduction from the vagaries of individual choice and make it completely rational. Charles referred her readers to the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, who seriously predicted in 1924 that “ectogenesis”—the production of children outside the womb—could be perfected by 1951.145 The era’s futuristic fantasies imagined societies in which women were liberated from the onerous duty of childbearing. In 1922, George Bernard Shaw’s play, Back to Methuselah, opened in an idyllic Garden of Eden where Eve was informed about human

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reproduction by the snake. “Life must not cease,” declared the snake. “It is silly to say that you do not care. You do care.”146 But Eve, the first reluctant mother, responded with “an expression of overwhelming repugnance.”147 The play concluded in the year AD 31,920, when the human race had evolved to the point that the young were born as fully developed adults from giant eggs, and child-rearing and the family had become extinct.148 But the much younger Aldous Huxley, more in tune with the pessimistic spirit of the age, set his novel Brave New World in a sinister, neon-lit totalitarian state, where children were produced in factories according to eugenic guidelines and reared collectively. The past, when “humans used to be viviparous,” was regarded with horror, and the name of “mother” was an insult.149 And the result was a culture of mindless conformity, where the capacity for love and joy was lost in empty pleasure, wasteful consumption, and easy sensual gratification. For Huxley, the end of motherhood meant the end of civilization. While affirming reproductive choice, feminists and others were thus deeply apprehensive about its consequences. Only a handful actually saw childlessness as a positive option. “I have no experience of maternity, nor of the desire for maternity, which is generally attributed to women,” wrote Stella Browne in 1915. “. . . As it is, many women have no maternal longings at all, and they should never become mothers.”150 Winifred Holtby complained that the “legend of the frustrated spinster” reinforced the stereotyped notion that women were incomplete without children and branded women who decided against marriage and motherhood with the stigma of abnormality. “Puritan morality,” Holtby concluded, “taught unmarried women that the loss of virginity doomed them to the torments of Hell in the next world; twentieth-century morality teaches them that the retention of virginity dooms them to the horror of insanity in this one.”151 But by separating sexuality and reproduction, the birth control movement in fact paved the way for the acceptance of childlessness, within or outside heterosexual relationships. Helene Stöcker, herself childless, extolled the value of sexual love as an end in itself. “Every genuine love is fruitful,” she wrote, “chiefly because it enhances the vitality and happiness of the individual person.”152 Let us return to our original question—how to be both a mother and a free individual? Prewar feminists had envisaged control over fertility as an important means to the resolution of this dilemma. Surely, they believed, reproductive freedom would enable women to combine the joys of motherhood with those of self-realization through professional work, love, and creativity. In the interwar era this prospect, still remote for most women, became imaginable. But the result was not the resolution but the sharpening of the maternal dilemma. For a conflict that was originally conceptualized chiefly as political—pitting the individual woman against the forces of church, state, and patriarchy—now took on an additional, psychological dimension. “Women want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them,” wrote Dora Russell.153 But what would those reasons be? If the main reason for childbearing was now personal gratification rather than necessity or duty, then how to weigh this form of

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gratification against others? If raised standards of child-rearing made children expensive, then how to decide between this and other expenditures? How to predict whether the outcome would justify the investment? Analyses of the “woman question” now shifted their emphasis from patriarchal oppression to psychological conflicts. And what would be the effect of such conflicted mothers on their children? This will be the theme of the next chapter.

“Babies’ Protest March.” Babies demand their mothers’ own milk, competent midwives, healthy parents, dry diapers, their own beds, sun and air, protection from flies, and good health. (American National Red Cross; Infants’ Bureau. Paris: Imprimerie G. Bataille, 1918? Artist: Jacques Carlu. Poster Archive, Hoover Institution.)

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“ T   R        H     ” : F         C-R   I      Y    

K  “A   H” In 1911, Ellen Key called the mother–child bond the purest of all human relationships and motherhood “the most perfect human condition, where happiness consists in giving and giving is the greatest happiness.”1 But interwar authors emphasized the darker side of mother-love, often picturing mothers as the enforcers of the repressive norms that arrested their daughters’ development. “Probably no ambitious girl who has lived in a family which regards the subservience of women as part of the natural order of creation ever completely recovers from the bitterness of her early emotions,” wrote the novelist Vera Brittain in 1933. Virginia Woolf was haunted by the ghost of her own perfect mother, whom she called (from the title of a cloying Victorian poem) the “Angel in the House.” “She was intensely sympathetic. She was utterly unselfish . . . in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.” Woolf imagined herself killing this dark spirit: “I turned upon her and took her by the throat . . . Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”2 By killing the “Angel,” Woolf expressed her personal aversion to motherhood. For many others, however, the rejection of this stereotype was a first step toward breaking old, destructive patterns and imagining new ways of parenting that cultivated the individuality of both mother and child. These new conceptions were often expressed in the language of psychology—a discipline which gained prestige as a framework for the understanding of human relationships. Feminists, to be sure, often found this a dangerous intellectual terrain, for many prestigious psychological theories were permeated with the era’s fashionable misogyny. Rejecting the traditional tendency to idealize mother-love, psychologists warned that mother-love, if not guided by the advice of experts, could be dangerous to children. But these theories were open to a variety of interpretations. Feminists—some trained in psychology—admitted

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that mothers were often inept and even destructive. But they attributed these flaws less to innate female weakness than to the wrenching emotional ambivalence felt by women who were forced to choose between their own self-realization and their maternal responsibilities. And they claimed that the solution to this dilemma would benefit both mothers and their children. “Close upon the heels of women’s emancipation,” wrote Dora Russell, would come “the emancipation of the child.”3 After sketching in the historical context, we will trace this argument as it touched on four issues: the role of anthropology in developing a new basis for family life, the mother–child relationship, the combination of motherhood and career, and the changing picture of fathers and the two-parent family. Because most historians of gender relations focus more on sexuality than on motherhood or child-rearing, they have often identified “biological determinism” as this era’s dominant paradigm. Indeed, one widely read volume on German women in the Weimar and Nazi eras is entitled When Biology Became Destiny. But a contrasting view is offered by the French historian Yvonne Knibiehler, who claims that the interwar years saw “the end of the maternal instinct.”4 The notion that mothers were innately gifted for the care of their children had in fact been under attack since the late nineteenth century. Physicians and public health advocates attributed high rates of infant mortality—a tragedy that was actually due to social conditions such as poor housing, impure water supplies, and inadequate access to pure milk—to the behavior of mothers themselves. These reformers regarded this behavior as the product chiefly of ignorance rather than instinct, and claimed that it could be altered by education. “Infant mortality,” wrote Dr. Gustave Variot, the head of the prestigious Institute of Child-Nurture (Institut de puèriculture) in Paris, “is due in large part to the ignorance of mothers and nurses, and we could save a great many babies if we propagated the essential rules of infant hygiene.”5 At the turn of the twentieth century, when sanitary methods of bottlefeeding were not yet widely available, physicians emphasized that breastfeeding was the foremost duty of all mothers. But they took pains to separate this biological function from other behaviors that they regarded as instinctive. Mothers were warned that such customs as picking the child up when it cried, feeding it when it was hungry, and rocking it to sleep could all have dire consequences.6 By the end of World War I, many infant-welfare centers had been taken over or subsidized by local governments, which employed paid and volunteer social workers to visit the homes of mothers and to educate them in proper child-rearing techniques.7 School courses in baby care were offered to girls in many public school system; France made such courses a standard part of school curricula for girls from eleven to thirteen years of age in 1923, and many British and German schools also required them.8 In the interwar years, these efforts were crowned with success. Improved sanitation and housing, lower birthrates, immunizations against some childhood diseases, and the development of sanitary methods of bottle-feeding

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resulted in a spectacular decline in infant mortality. Death rates in the first year of life fell by more than 50 percent: in Germany from 199 per thousand live births in 1901 to 68 in 1933; in France from 142 in 1901 to 66 in 1938; in Britain from 138 in 1900 to 68 in 1930; in the Netherlands from 149 in 1901 to 66 in 1938.9 Partly due to these results, interwar child-rearing experts shifted their emphasis from the physical to the mental health of children. The new interest in children’s emotional lives was also encouraged by changes in family structure. During the interwar period, falling birthrates, raised educational aspirations, and a gender ideology that promoted full-time motherhood encouraged intensive concern with the individual child. In working-class families, improved housing, paid vacations, and a rising standard of living that brought an end to most forms of child labor encouraged increased investment in children.10 In regard to the maternal role, the newly prestigious field of psychology transmitted contradictory messages. On the one hand, psychologists presented motherhood as an imperative of normal female biology. The Dutch physician Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, the author of some of the most popular works of advice on sexuality, tersely summed up the female character in the Latin phrase: “propter solum ovarium.” “Only through her ovaries,” declared Van de Velde, “is a woman that which she is.”11 Sigmund Freud, whose ideas gained popularity among educated people during this period, claimed that women who rebelled against femininity were afflicted with “penis envy,” which could be resolved only through the experience of motherhood (preferably of a male child).12 Freud’s disciple Karen Horney denied the universality of “penis envy” but not the supreme value of maternity “the blissful consciousness of bearing life within oneself,” which she claimed was often envied by men.13 The woman who decided against motherhood was pilloried as an emotionally disturbed or sexually perverted man-hater. “The legend of the Frustrated Spinster,” complained the British novelist Winifred Holtby, “is one of the most formidable social influences of the modern world.”14 On the other hand, women’s innate capacity for child-rearing (as distinct from mere biological reproduction) was widely called into question. In the prewar era, the field of psychology had been dominated by Darwinian theories that attributed the behavior of children chiefly to genetic tendencies that parents and teachers could do little to modify. Educators advised mothers against over-involvement in a process that was driven by its own natural laws.15 Advice manuals warned that too much maternal indulgence might undermine the parents’ most important goal—the building of a strong moral character. In the interwar period, psychologists were still less inclined to leave child-rearing to maternal instinct. Some important theorists—for example, the American Arnold Gesell, a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology— attributed the child’s development to innate biological patterns.16 But the widest influence was gained by two environmental theories—behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Behaviorism, which was associated chiefly with the American psychologist John Watson and gained its greatest influence in the English-speaking

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cultures of the United States and Britain, denied any form of genetic determinism and claimed that the human personality was entirely shaped by a process of conditioning that began at birth. Each mother, said Watson, should know that “almost nothing is given in heredity and practically the whole course of development of the child is due to the way I raise it.”17 But this was not meant as an endorsement of maternal wisdom, for behaviorists blamed all of the many forms of unhappiness that beset individuals or entire societies on the fatal errors of mothers. Like other intellectual trends of this era, behaviorism was shaped by the impact of World War I, which had revealed the vulnerability of the individual personality to stress, of society to unrest and revolution, and of nations themselves to defeat, decadence, and decline. All of these fears underlay the behaviorists’ dire warnings against spoiling, a practice that they attributed to small families and lazy or frivolous mothers. The spoiled infants of today, they cautioned, would become the criminals or revolutionaries of tomorrow. Dr. Frederick Truby King, a native of New Zealand who became Britain’s foremost authority on baby care, argued for a rigid infant feeding schedule on psychological as well as medical grounds. He accused mothers who were too indulgent to follow such a schedule of laying “the natural foundations of failure later on—failure through the lack of control which underlies all weakness of character, vice, and criminality.”18 In the older child, symptoms such as anxiety and nervousness, and behaviors such as thumb-sucking, masturbation, or precocious sexual curiosity were blamed on misguided mothering.19 Although the most prominent child-care experts were male, they found ample support among female physicians, nurses, and educators, some of whom wrote their own advice books. The wilful and cosseted child, said the German Hildegard Hetzer in her popular manual, would never learn “to live up to the expectations that life in human society imposes.”20 Psychoanalysis, though less influential than behaviorism, became well known for its sensational exposure of the hostility and sexual tension that underlay parent–child relationships. From its outset in the prewar years, psychoanalysis in both its Freudian and Jungian versions had rejected the sentimental Victorian image of the mother as her son’s guardian angel, and had portrayed her as a seductive figure whose will to domination, if not successfully rejected, would destroy his personality. Freud extended this theory to girls by making their development toward normal heterosexuality dependent on the transfer of their primary attachment from their mothers to their fathers. In the interwar era he changed his view of the human personality to include not only a sexual instinct that worked toward the continuation of life, but a death instinct that worked toward its extinction—an instinct that could have driven the extraordinary destructive energies unleashed by the war.21 A younger generation of analysts, some of whom were women, incorporated the new awareness of the dark side of human nature into their interpretation of the mother–child relationship. Melanie Klein, who was born to a Viennese Jewish family in 1882, studied analysis under Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, and Karl Abraham, and worked as a child psychiatrist in Berlin and

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later in London, where she established residence in 1927. Klein traced the origins of psychic development to the first months of life, rather than to the period (the fifth or sixth year) of the Freudian “Oedipus complex.” And she also broke with Freud by identifying the relationship to the mother, rather than the father, as the child’s most important formative experience. According to Klein’s “object relations” theory, the infant’s perception of the mother alternated between feelings of love when she satisfied its needs and intense anger and insecurity when she withheld satisfaction. Both of these feelings became part of the child’s personality, which was as naturally inclined to hostile and “bad” as to docile and “good” behavior. Klein and other child analysts helped to found the Child Guidance movement, which attributed children’s “bad” behavior to emotions that must be understood rather than (as the behaviorists did) to habits that must be de-conditioned.22 Another school of psychoanalysis that was popularized through the Child Guidance Movement was that of Alfred Adler, a Viennese analyst who had broken with Freud in 1911 because of a disagreement over the role of the sex drive in the human personality. Adler believed that self-assertion and the need to belong to a community, rather than sexuality, were the motive forces in human behavior. He identified the major barrier to mental health as the “inferiority complex,” a feeling of insecurity and inadequacy for which the individual often compensated through antisocial behavior. Adler, whose theories were disseminated in many advice manuals, traced this problem to parents—both those who treated their children harshly and those who spoiled them. He urged parents to find positive ways of building their children’s confidence and self-esteem.23 Adler and other popular psychologists prescribed empathy rather than authority as the guiding principle of parent–child relationships. To feminists, this cultural climate presented new problems and new opportunities. On the one hand, women were subject to new pressures, both to bear children and to raise them according to the dictates of an elite of experts. On the other hand, no psychological theory held undisputed hegemony—all gave rise to debates in which many points of view, including those of feminists, could be represented. This chapter will draw heavily on the work of three prominent feminists of the interwar era who also became known as experts on child-rearing: the British Dora Russell, the French Madeleine Vernet, and the German Adele Schreiber. In these women’s memories of their childhood, the mother–child relationship was an important theme. Schreiber, the daughter of a Jewish physician who had converted to Catholicism was born in 1872 in Vienna. Her mother, though educated and gifted, nonetheless showed conventional prejudices by forbidding her daughter to study medicine. “I was dissatisfied,” she wrote. “Family relationships were too constricting, and the customs that regulated a girl from a respectable family were too narrow—there was no goal for my youthful energies.” Schreiber’s separation from her mother through a move to Berlin was thus a necessary phase in her growth.24 Vernet, who was born in 1877, admired her politically committed mother, who

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supplemented the family income by taking in foster children for the public welfare authorities. Madeleine first realized her vocation for journalism and social activism by protesting in print against the inadequate funding provided for such services.25 The much younger Dora Russell was born Dora Black in 1894 and recalled a happy, tomboy childhood full of “noisy and uproarious play . . . which never seemed to trouble my mother. She would come to the back door . . . and cheer us on, or rush out to pick up one of us and see to a cut knee.”26 Unlike Schreiber and Vernet, Black attended university (at Girton College, Cambridge). Until she fell in love with a much older man, the eminent philosopher, mathematician, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, she fully intended to pursue an academic career. All of these women were professionally involved in fields related to child welfare. And although at first they identified themselves more as socialists than as feminists, all three became prominent advocates of the rights or women as well as those of children. In 1906, Vernet set up an orphanage near Paris that cared for children on welfare. Supported by contributions from labor unions, the orphanage sponsored a school that featured coeducation, a secular curriculum, and nonauthoritarian pedagogy—all very controversial in that era.27 She also advocated such causes as birth control and pacifism in a periodical founded in 1917, La Mère Éducatrice (The Mother-Educator). Schreiber first worked as a journalist who specialized in issues regarding women and children. Among the founders of the League for the Protection of Mothers in 1905, she split off from this group in 1910 and founded her own organization, the Association for the Rights of Mothers and Children (Verein für Mutter- und Kindesrecht). After World War I, Schreiber headed the relief efforts of the “mother and child” division of the German Red Cross and served as a delegate of the Social Democratic Party to the Reichstag from 1920–24 and again from 1928 to 1933. She became a highly visible spokesperson for socialism, feminism, and international understanding.28 In 1927, Dora and Bertrand Russell set up a school, which became famous, or notorious, for its unconventional pedagogy.29 All of these women combined their professional lives with marriage, and two were mothers. But they adopted this way of life with some ambivalence, for all started out as conspicuous advocates of sex reform and free love. Schreiber became notorious not only for her work on behalf of unwed mothers but for her affair with the man she later married; Vernet bore a child out of wedlock and wrote a famous attack on marriage which she retracted after marrying her companion; Dora reluctantly married Bertrand in order to legitimate their child (who eventually inherited his father’s title).30 Vernet and Schreiber kept their birth names when married, and Russell changed hers unwillingly. Schreiber, who married at the age of thirty-nine, had no children and regarded her political work as an alternative expression of her capacity for nurture.31 These women found support for their decision to combine marriage and motherhood with professional work in the ideology of “new feminism”—an ideology that was introduced in chapter 6. The “new” feminist of the

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interwar era refused to choose between love and professional fulfillment— after all, no such choice was required of men!—and proclaimed her right to have both (or, as a later generation would put it, to “have it all”). As Sheila Jeffreys has pointed out, this ideology could encourage divisive criticism of women who decided for whatever reason not to marry.32 But its central message was positive: equality must not require the servile imitation of men. Rather, society must be re-structured to involve both men and women in nurture and family life as well as work. “Equality means men coming up to our standards half the time,” said Dora Russell to Dale Spender in 1982, “. . . It does not mean that we should deny our nurturing, our strength as mothers, to meet theirs!”33 But would such a re-structuring of gender roles ever be possible? And what would be its implications for familial relationships and child-rearing?

M, F, P: T E  A As in the prewar era, social scientists of the interwar era turned to the origins and history of the family for answers to questions such as these. Two theories still competed for legitimacy, one of which claimed that both families and states had originally been mother-headed, and the other that some form of recognized fatherhood and male supremacy existed in all human cultures and could thus be considered a part of human nature. Nostalgic visions of an age when women ruled briefly energized feminist and pacifist groups as the war drew to a close. In France, an organization known as Action des Femmes appealed to a world weary of war with its dream of a matriarchal paradise of peace, order, and prosperity. A member of the group, Héra Mirtel, imagined this fortunate “Herland” in a utopian novel of 1920 entitled From the Fatherland to the Motherland (De la Patrie à la Matrie). The imagined “motherland” was a colony built by emigrants from France, which was divided into units of 1,000 inhabitants. Property was collectively held, the work day was limited to six hours, and community rituals were presided over by a committee of benevolent female rulers clad in purple robes—in fact, this was a matriarchal version of the Fourierist phalanstery. Of course, the national anthem of this happy country began “Allons, enfants de la Matrie!”34 A more down to earth tone was adopted by Mathilde Vaerting, a German psychologist who was appointed in 1923 to a professorship in Jena, thus becoming only the second woman to hold such a position at a German university. In 1921, she had published a book entitled A New Basis for the Psychology of Man and Woman under her own name and that of a fictional male co-author (whom she called Matthias Vaerting). Vaerting combined traditional, evolutionary thinking with the newer functionalist approach that emphasized the ways in which institutions filled basic human needs. Gender roles, she argued, were constructed more by culture than by biology, and their function was to structure power and authority.

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If gender was a functional rather than a biological identity, it followed that women could play the dominant role as well as men—a claim that Vaerting buttressed with the copious data from anthropology and prehistory (described in chapter 1) that seemed to prove the existence of a matriarchal age. While citing the research of Bachofen and his defenders, however, she denied their central premise: that women rulers, due to their innately maternal nature, had created a peaceable and nurturing utopia. Instead, she insisted (as had some prewar theorists such as Wilhelmine Drucker) that female rulers were no less tyrannical than their male counterparts. The issue was not the sex of the rulers, but the corrupting effects of power and oppression. Vaerting urged her contemporaries to forget the matriarchal Neverland and concentrate on achieving equality between the sexes. “It is absolutely essential,” she concluded, “that humanity should discover ways and means for the permanent realization of the ideal of sex equality, and for the permanent prevention of any form of monosexual dominance. In default, the millenniums that lie before us will be no less wretched than those which are now drawing to a close.”35 Vaerting encountered little but hostility and rejection from her colleagues at Jena, who accused her of promoting “feminism in the guise of science.”36 But she was widely quoted by feminists and socialists throughout Europe during the interwar years. In a war-torn world, the fantasy of a world ruled by benevolent and motherly women was still appealing. And utopian hopes had been raised by the new Soviet state, which announced to its credulous Western admirers that by restructuring the marriage relationship, child care, and the family it had inaugurated a new age of gender equality. Robert Briffault was a physician of mixed French and Scottish ancestry who after serving on the Western Front settled in London and became noted for popular works on philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. His monumental and massively learned work, The Mothers, which was published in 1927, ascribed to mothers, who transmitted values to the young during their long period of maturation, the key role in the creation of human civilization. Admitting that actual matriarchy— the political dominance of women—had probably never existed, Briffault nonetheless claimed that the first families had consisted of a mother and her offspring supported by a matrilineal clan, and had allowed women more influence than they possessed in the modern West. Appalled by his wartime experiences, Briffault called on mothers to save men from themselves. “The male child is born cruel. It is his natural propensity to inflict suffering and to destroy. Only social education can develop a tender disposition in him to any degree.”37 But visions of a world where women ruled were deflated by the era’s leading anthropologist. Bronislaw Malinowski was a native of Poland who, after studies in Germany and Britain and a research trip to the South Seas, was appointed to a chair in anthropology at the University of London in 1927. Malinowski’s first research interest was the origins of the human family. Adopting the fieldwork method—which involved the intensive study of a single culture—he traveled to the Trobriand Islands in 1914. He did not

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undertake this work in a totally impartial spirit, for he had already been convinced by his mentor, Edward Westermarck, that all civilizations recognized fatherhood. Malinowski chose the Trobrianders as his subjects partly because they seemed to be in much the same state as the prehistoric people imagined by Bachofen. Living in matrilineal clans, they did not recognize the biological role of the father, and preferred to believe (or so they told their inquisitive visitor) that babies were implanted in women’s wombs by spirits. Nonetheless, Malinowski noted that they recognized both male supremacy and the social role of the father. The mother’s brother was the head of the family, and the mother’s husband helped to raise her children. Malinowski concluded that whatever its views of reproductive biology, every culture recognized the need for a male as “guardian, protector, and regent” of the family. This assertion seemed to fly in the face of the empirical data—the Trobrianders, for example, permitted unmarried people of both sexes to have many sexual partners before settling down with a spouse. But Malinowski accepted their rather improbable assurances that their sexually active unmarried women, though they had no knowledge of contraception or abortion, almost never became pregnant, and therefore that mother-headed families were rare.38 As Malinowski confirmed the importance of fatherhood, he also suggested new approaches to the paternal role. Among the Trobrianders, the mother’s husband was not a patriarch (that role was allotted to the mother’s brother) and was therefore free to act as an indulgent and nurturing parent, almost as a mother. Under the name of “father,” the child recognized “the man in whose loving and protecting company he has grown up. . . . The father is a close companion of his children. He takes also an active part in the tender cares lavished on the infants, invariably feels and shows a deep affection for them, and later on shares in giving them instruction.”39 Malinowski was deeply attracted to this model of nurturing fatherhood, which he contrasted wistfully to the authoritarian behavior of the Western father. In the role of public intellectual to which his professional eminence had raised him, Malinowski debated Briffault in a BBC broadcast of 1931 entitled “Marriage, Past and Present.” Briffault criticized the marriage laws of his own era and looked forward to the decline of the patriarchal family and its replacement by the mother-headed household that he claimed was natural to the human race. Malinowski responded that marriage and the two-parent family were honored by all human cultures—even in polygamous families, he added, children knew who their parents were—and thus clearly fulfilled basic and universal human needs. Reviling the Bolsheviks and all their works, he asked rhetorically if a woman, “however intelligent, feminist, or progressive” would or should ever freely consent to “undergo the hardships and dangers of childbirth in order to give over her child to a glorified foundlings’ hospital or State incubator?” If not, she would need a husband and a father for her child. Whatever their disagreements, the two social scientists shared their era’s overriding concern for the socialization of men. Malinowski identified fatherhood

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as the best inducement to “the male to face his responsibility and take his share in the process of reproduction and of the continuity of culture.”40 Malinowski’s views prevailed partly because they accorded with a climate of opinion that regarded the two-parent family as the basis of social order. But matriarchal theories still remained popular in some feminist circles. For example, Dora Russell believed that she had persuaded her husband Bertrand that “the laws enforcing patrilineal descent were contrary to biological common sense . . . Matrilineal descent was clearly the more logical.”41 She was disillusioned when in the course of a contentious divorce Bertrand Russell successfully sued her for the custody of their two children. In Sweden, the vision of a world ruled by women was once again invoked to protest another war. Elin Wägner was a Swedish novelist and disciple of Ellen Key who belonged to the Fogelstad School, a group of feminists who combined socialist convictions with a deep respect for the traditions of rural society, and especially for women’s craft and homemaking skills. Some members of this group, including Kerstin Hesselgren and Elizabeth Tamm, entered politics as parliamentary representatives and social reformers (their achievements have been discussed in chapters 6 and 7). But Wägner objected that the price of political success was assimilation into male-dominated society. She herself upheld Ellen Key’s notion of femininity as a source of alternative cultural values. In a book entitled Alarm Clock (Väckerklocka), published in 1941, she claimed that the defeat of a peaceable matriarchy by the violent forces of patriarchy had inaugurated a disastrous history of injustice, warfare, and environmental destruction. Could it be that Western civilization had simply taken a wrong turn? Could it be that only the overthrow—not the reform—of patriarchy could reverse this destructive course? The ancient mother-world might be a myth, she concluded, but it should nonetheless not be forgotten.42

T E   C Feminists of the interwar era had high hopes that a new scientific understanding of childhood would transform the practice of motherhood. The British novelist Winifred Holtby, for example, rejoiced that “during the past twenty years children in Europe and America have been considered, propitiated, indulged and studied as perhaps they never had been before.”43 But the literature of child psychology was difficult to interpret, for psychologists often contradicted each other. Behaviorists claimed that the child had no essential nature, but was entirely shaped by its rearing. This might be taken to imply that each child’s development was unique. But developmental psychologists such as Arnold Gesell insisted that the child developed in stages that were measurable by tests and statistics, and that too much emphasis on individuality could disrupt this normal process. As for psychoanalysts, they believed that the child’s personality was produced by mysterious subconscious forces which parents could not hope to understand. Considering how confusing these prescriptions often were, it is not surprising that mothers

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failed to live up to them, or that handbooks for parents denounced maternal malpractice. Feminists turned these to their own purposes, arguing that women whose own individual development had been stunted by discrimination and disadvantage could never become good mothers. For example, the British socialist Wilma Meikle traced mothers’ deficiencies to the restrictions imposed by conventionally female upbringing. The average mother felt obliged to behave as “a little pocket saint . . . There is no fun left in her. She accepts motherhood in a spirit of self-immolation and sadly braces herself to meet its claims, instead of rejoicing in it in a spirit of simplicity and being a jolly comrade to her children.”44 In Vera Brittain’s novel Honourable Estate, the heroine Janet was trapped in an unhappy marriage, and was forced to bear a child in whom she saw “only the unwelcome image of his father” Obviously the child, Denis, became the innocent victim of his mother’s anger and resentment.45 In a story later cited by Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield likewise described a young mother who was traumatized by involuntary childbearing. “She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone through child-bearing. And what made it doubly hard to bear was, she did not love her children. . . . No, it was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys; she had no warmth left to give them.”46 Among all the various forms of frustration that perverted maternal love, that of the sexual instinct was most often deplored. Dora Russell traced mothers’ fussy preoccupation with hygiene to the prudish aversion to bodily processes that was fostered by traditional female education. And most of the sexual problems suffered by adults were laid at the door of mothers who had been unable to overcome their own inhibitions sufficiently to provide information to their children. There were still respectable households, complained the French suffragist and anti-prostitution activist Ghenia Avril de Sainte-Croix, where anyone who even mentioned “purity, morality, sexual misconduct, love, marriage, or even babies” would be considered dangerous.47 Too often, warned Adele Schreiber, the “unhealthy prudery” of mothers conveyed the message that the naked body and the sexual organs were “something especially dirty, something to be ashamed of,” instead of giving the necessary explanations.48 Though convinced that maternal behavior could be distorted by sexual repression, feminists preferred environmental to psychoanalytic explanations, which often came too close to biological determinism and gender stereotyping. Mothers’ emotional problems were often attributed to the oppression and disadvantage that they suffered. A novel entitled The Judge, by the former suffrage activist Rebecca West, portrayed Marion, a woman whose personality was warped by the experiences of seduction, abandonment, and a forced and loveless marriage. Her sexualized relationship with her infant son, Richard—“she became vexed with love for him, and longed to clasp him, to crush him as she knew she must not”—was the pathological result of these destructive experiences.49 The psychoanalyst Karen Horney, who was not

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only a disciple but also a perceptive critic of Freud, argued that the psychology of women was shaped not by innate “penis envy,” but by social factors such as male supremacy and female subordination in the family. Maternal overinvestment in children, moreover, arose from the general tendency of women who were deprived of other avenues to self-fulfillment to seek all their satisfaction in love and personal relationships.50 The French physician and socialist activist Madeleine Pelletier, whose profession put her in touch with the latest psychological theories, interpreted a news story about a jealous mother who had killed her daughter-in-law in similar terms. “Who is guilty?” asked Pelletier, “no one, or rather society. If the opportunities of women were not so limited, then mature women would lead an active life which would distract them from household intrigues and from morbid passions.” Freud merely confirmed Pelletier’s long-standing conviction that “the family is not a paradise . . . hatred in the family is more the rule than the exception. The family should disappear.”51 But most feminists did not share Pelletier’s pessimism, but rather imagined new forms of family life that would insure what Dora Russell identified as the child’s first right, “the right to be happy.”52 Many were inspired by Adler, who claimed that confidence and self-esteem were the most important characteristics of healthy children. Adele Schreiber, a strong advocate of Germany’s new democracy, believed that confident children grew into responsible citizens. She advised enlightened mothers to reject “ancient traditions of subordination and obedience, which forbade the child to think independently,” to respect their children’s individuality, and above all not to “break, oppress, intimidate or corrupt them.”53 The Swedish Alva Myrdal, a child psychologist who in 1936 founded the Social Pedagogical Institute, a training school for early childhood teachers, also believed that child-rearing should promote democratic values. “In a modern democracy, there is no one to obey, neither lord nor priest. . . . Why should we raise children for a society that no longer exists?”54 But where was the child’s true “individuality” to be found? How to resolve the contradiction between theories that attributed children’s personality wholly to parental influence and others that admonished parents to respect their children’s independence? The answer given by psychologists was that independence could not be equated with mere spontaneity or permissiveness. Like other traits, it needed to be inculcated by correct conditioning, and this required a demanding combination of pedagogical involvement and emotional distance. According to her daughter, Alva Myrdal’s approach to child-rearing aimed both to create perfect human beings and to encourage independence—aims that sometimes conflicted: “Alva’s ideal of liberty turned out to jar with the ideal of perfecting us.”55 Proper child-rearing required the restraint of most traditional forms of maternal behavior. The mother–child bond, once idealized as the epitome of love and selflessness, was now associated with a harmful overprotectiveness that might well undermine children’s confidence and produce the dreaded “inferiority complex.” Mothers who comforted their children whenever they

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fell down, warned the advice column of Vernet’s periodical, La Mère Éducatrice, actually made them more anxious. “On the contrary, isn’t it better to discourage their tendency to be too sensitive, and to expect them to deal with minor accidents with courage?”56 According to Dora Russell, over-involved mothers produced emotional cripples: “gradually he [the child] will lose his adventurous impulses and think that dangers lurk around every corner and refuse to go anywhere without his mother. This is her triumph. Now she knows that he indeed loves her.”57 But not only excessive indulgence, but also excessive strictness could deform the childish personality. As Melanie Klein advised, “bad behavior” must also be accepted. “A child that can never act up and can never be rude is never normal,” wrote a contributor to Schreiber’s anthology on child-rearing, and concluded that such a painfully inhibited child would never meet the standard of independent, self-sufficient, and rational adulthood that modern society required.58 The rearing of self-reliant children required a judicious mixture of permissiveness and vigilance. Intellectual curiosity was an important trait, but only if carefully directed. Feminist child-rearing experts insisted that children must be given access to scientific knowledge that would enable them to explore the physical world, and allowed to play without too much interference from parents. However, almost all urged that warlike toys must be banned from the playground. In fact, pacifists assigned to mothers an important role in preventing future wars. Vernet’s journal, La Mère Éducatrice, which devoted as much space to peace as to child-rearing, published two pictures— one of a boy with a toy gun, the other of a mother mourning her son—over a caption. “Mothers! Before you give your child a toy gun—think what guns do to mothers!”59 Parents were also exhorted to encourage gender equality, particularly in active sports. Images of healthy outdoor play paid tribute to this era’s cult of physical vitality: “today we prize the well-rounded training of both mind and body,” said Schreiber, “and particularly for girls.”60 As we have seen, feminist educators condemned the prudish custom of keeping children ignorant of sexuality and reproduction. But they certainly did not advise mothers to leave children to explore sexuality on their own— a form of negligence that was widely believed to have disastrous consequences! A large body of literature advised parents how to present the right information at the right time. As we have seen, prewar literature on sex education focused on the procreative role of females, often to the total exclusion of the father’s contribution. This tradition was continued by the French physician Germaine Montreuil-Straus (whose activities as an educator and public health worker have been explored in chapter 7). In 1925, she published a children’s coloring book entitled Maman dis-moi (Mother, Tell Me). Making no mention whatever of fathers, the book described pregnancy, birth, and lactation, and ended with a picture of a grateful son embracing his mother.61 The Scandinavian birth-control crusader Elise Ottesen-Jensen urged parents to discuss the father’s role, albeit in rather vague terms. “Father planted a little seed in your own little mother,” she advised them to say,

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“there it lay and slept in Mamma’s care.”62 In 1942, the work of OttesenJensen as well as that of other reformers such as Alva Myrdal, Ada Nilsson, and the members of Social Democratic women’s groups resulted in the incorporation of sex education classes in Swedish public schools.63 Sexual enlightenment was portrayed as a sensitive task that demanded psychological insight and a talent for storytelling. The British birth-control reformer Marie Stopes, whose Mother, How was I Born? was among the era’s most influential sex-education manuals, advised parents to start their teaching early, when the child was too young to feel embarrassment, and to stress the positive side of sexuality. Questions should be answered “truly, and if possible beautifully.” If properly instructed, the child would find this story “thrilling, and also solemn.”64 And the parent’s task did not end with the child’s physical maturity. For increasing opposition to child labor and heightened educational expectations extended the period of childhood through adolescence. The prescribed response to adolescent development was a restrained but nonetheless highly vigilant concern. Mothers must respect the child’s growing need for independence and avoid harsh judgments based on the outmoded standards of the past. “At no time do parents know their children as little as during adolescence,” wrote Schreiber, “but children never need their parents so much as between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.”65 However hopeful, these prescriptions for the renewal of parent–child relationships expressed an underlying anxiety about the mother–child relationship. Mother-love, once idealized as a flowing font of love and altruism, was now regarded as a force that was dangerous if not kept under tight control. Two personal accounts—those of Alva Myrdal’s two children, Jan Myrdal and Sissela Bok—suggest that this era’s scientific child-rearing methods may not always have achieved their aim, the production of confident and happy children. Jan portrayed his mother, despite her pedagogical expertise, as an inept parent who “simply was not good with children” and a cold and arrogant person.66 Sissela found Alva delightful, but aloof—an attitude that the young girl sometimes found disturbing, and sometimes enabling. She added that her busy mother showed good judgment by hiring a warm and vivacious young woman to be a “substitute mother” to her and her younger sister.67 And many feminist writers on child-rearing would also have approved of this decision. If mothers were indeed flawed, then one could argue that their influence should be diluted by the involvement of other adults—fathers or expert care-takers—in the care of children. After all, why should childrearing, which was an important social task, be entrusted only to mothers? This will be the theme of the next two sections.

T E   M As we have seen from previous chapters, public debates on the maternal role were driven by economic concerns. As women were blamed for taking jobs away from men, powerful groups opposed the employment of married

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women—an opposition which they justified by pointing to the importance of the mother’s full-time presence in the home. A family configuration composed of breadwinner and full-time mother was now presented both as pleasing to God and as highly beneficial to children. In 1937, a series of articles in the newspaper of the French Catholic organization, The Women’s Civic and Social Union (L”Union féminine civique et sociale) contrasted the healthy and well-disciplined children of the housewife-mother with the neglected brood of the career woman. “When these babies [of the housewife] are adults,” concluded one such article, “they will owe their sense of responsibility and their motivation to do their duty, come what may, to a woman who sacrificed herself for them day in and day out just because she was their mother.”68 This organization cited the results of research that showed that most employed mothers worked only out of economic necessity and would gladly quit their jobs.69 As we have seen, feminists faced both theoretical and practical difficulties in formulating an effective answer to such arguments. Some, to be sure, still rallied behind the socialist ideal of collective child-rearing as a means both to the support of working mothers and the socialization of children. Alva Myrdal, who knew that her own decision to hire a full-time governess was beyond the means of most women, campaigned along with her colleagues in the socialist women’s groups for public day-care in Sweden.70 Some socialists even praised the Soviet Union, where this ideal seemed to be on its way to realization. Dora Russell, Madeleine Pelletier, Helene Stöcker, Beatrice Webb, and many others traveled eastward to observe the new society, and especially its educational institutions, firsthand. But despite many positive impressions—even the enemies of the Soviet Union, wrote Dora Russell, had “to admit the loving care which the Russians give to their children”—most were troubled by the regimentation and conformity that pervaded the Soviet child-care centers.71 The notion that the child belonged to the state, though popular in the prewar era, had been discredited by the experience of World War I. “Children belonging to society!” exclaimed Vernet, “the rule of the barracks!”72 States that “educate and prepare their human material for starvation, slavery, and slaughter,” wrote Dora Russell, were “not to be trusted with our children.”73 Unlike these socialists, whose attitude was ambivalent, liberal feminists were thoroughly horrified by Bolshevism and reacted by defending the family, which with all its faults now seemed a bulwark of civilized values. For the German liberal politician and feminist leader Gertrud Bäumer, the home preserved the “orderly rhythm of life, the feel for connection and structure” that were the basis of all social morality.74 The British theologian and peace activist Maude Royden rejected the notion of motherhood as “a mere episode—the birth of the child—followed by its rearing in some Utopian nursery or co-operative creche,” and declared that the “factory-made child” was even less satisfactory than other mass-produced items.75 Aspirations to fully socialized child-care were deflated by the political controversies as well as the financial crises of the interwar era.

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But while affirming the importance of strong familial relationships, both liberal and socialist feminists questioned the necessity for the mother’s constant presence. They pointed out the real difficulties of raising children in the home—an environment designed to suit the comfort and taste of adults. Mothers who prided themselves on giving up their jobs and becoming fulltime homemakers, said the French socialist Marguerite Martin in the socialist periodical La Voix des Femmes (The Voice of Women), often actually mistreated their children by punishing normal childish rambuctiousness because it endangered the household furnishings.76 Children were too often punished for the mistakes of adults, lamented Adele Schreiber, who deplored the plight of the only child—“spoiled and at the same time deprived of real happiness,” burdened by the emotional demands of adults, and vulnerable to “all forms of nervousness and neurosis.” Schreiber’s remedy: “This child belongs in a kindergarten!”77 This period’s most influential preschool educator was the Italian educator Maria Montessori, whose “Children’s House” (Casa dei Bambini) was designed to be a child-centered and child-proof educational environment. In the interwar era, Montessori enjoyed international prestige, and was invited to many countries to give lectures and training courses and to visit the many nursery schools that used her system.78 Montessori declared that children’s right to grow “according to the laws of their nature” was violated by adults who treated them as “something inert and helpless for which they must do everything.” In the conventional home, she wrote in 1936, parents who did not want to be “disturbed or annoyed” attempted to confine and restrict the child “until he reaches an age when he can live in the adult world without distress . . . prior to this, he has to obey the parents like a person deprived of civil rights.”79 The Children’s House provided a more enabling setting for children’s growth, work, and activity. As we have seen, the Children’s House was originally intended to contribute to a project that was popular in the prewar era—the creation of cooperative households. In the interwar years, this project found little support. To be sure, those paragons of progressive thought, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, worked with an architect, Sven Markelius, to build an apartment house with a central nursery in Stockholm, which opened in 1932. But few people in Sweden—least of all the Myrdals themselves, who designed their own beautiful villa—or in other Western countries found the communal life appealing.80 But its separation from its original, utopian context probably increased the appeal of Montessori’s system to educators in many countries. In Vienna, a group of young socialist women led by Lili Roubiczek, a Montessori student, founded a nursery school for poor children which they called a Children’s House (Haus der Kinder) in 1922 and persuaded the city’s socialist government to include similar facilities in new public housing projects.The new system gained the support of the well-known psychologist Anna Freud (daughter of Sigmund), who later praised the Children’s House as the seed-bed of adult autonomy: “for the first time, not the praise or disapproval of adults, but joy

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in the success of one’s own work came into its own as a suitable impetus.”81 In Amsterdam, likewise, a group of teachers pioneered the Montessori method, which was later adopted by many Dutch public schools.82 Although Montessori and her colleagues identified themselves more as educators than as feminists, the system was praised in the feminist press. Madame Montessori, observed an editorial in the British feminist periodical Time and Tide, recommended “that every mother should be freed from the incessant care of the home for some part of each day. . . . The Children’s House not only relieves the mother of the care of the child while she is at work, it also awakens her to a higher sense of responsibility.”83 But attempts to expand early childhood education beyond these private institutions failed. In Germany, socialist educators campaigned to make kindergarten classes a part of a comprehensive and secular public school system open to children of all classes and religions. But at the Imperial School Conference, held in 1919, the socialists were overruled by their conservative and religious colleagues, who voted to keep kindergartens in private hands.84 In Britain the very limited increase in the number of public nursery schools, from fourteen in 1919 to twenty-eight in 1929, was due (according to the historian Kevin J. Brehony) both to budgetary constraints and to “the patriarchal view that the best place for young children was at home with their mothers.”85 France had a public system of early childhood education, the Écoles Maternelles (founded by the educator Pauline Kergomard in the 1880s), but according to the feminist newspaper La Française, these institutions were underfunded and inadequate, their hours were too short to serve working families, and their teachers often lacked training.86 And in Sweden, a parliamentary initiative by socialist women to gain public support for a national system of nursery schools failed in 1937.87 The failure to build public institutions was not only due to insufficient financial resources, but to a widespread belief that the raising of small children should be entrusted to the mother herself. And this view was held by a large group of women, including not only religious conservatives but also socialist feminists such as Madeleine Vernet. Vernet based her hopes for peace and the reconciliation of social conflicts on the mother–child relationship, which despite her knowledge of psychology she still believed to be the only source of tenderness in a mechanized and impersonal world. She hoped that women’s claims to political and social equality would strengthen, rather than weaken their commitment to motherhood. Though a strong supporter of equality in marriage, she opposed full-time work for mothers.88 “A woman owes nothing to her husband, even the sweetness of home—she gives it to him if she chooses. But she owes a nest to her little one.”89 But Vernet’s views were so controversial among her readers that in 1926 she opened the pages of her journal to their responses. Many readers agreed with Vernet, particularly working-class women who were more likely than their middle-class counterparts to view work outside the home as a burden. But other correspondents objected that child-rearing did not require the vigilance of the mother hen: “real affection,” wrote one reader, “is not

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a function merely of constant presence, but it resides in the invisible links that unite human beings.” Surely, the new household technology would lighten the burden of domestic work and give women the time to develop their individual interests. And thus “this heartbreaking problem, which sets her maternal heart against her conscience, will cease to exist, because her life will be a harmonious whole, in which each of her great duties—conjugal, maternal, and human—will be able to be completely realized.”90 In the hostile climate of opinion created by the economic crises of the interwar era, feminists in many countries defended the compatibility of career and motherhood. Negative stereotypes of employed mothers and their neglected children were counteracted with positive pictures of the working mother as the mainstay of her family. “Women’s work is ceasing to be provisional,” wrote Adele Schreiber, “Economic circumstances often require both parents to work. And the more important her professional work is to a women, the less inclined she will be to give it up.”91 Feminists also cited changing demographic patterns: in periods of high birthrates and short lives, a woman’s entire adult life might well have been occupied with the care of dependent children, but now the period of full-time parenthood had decreased as life expectancy had lengthened. And thus arose a new problem: how to fill the so-called empty years? A contributor to La Mère Éducatrice pointed out that maternity, though the noblest of callings, “does not take up the whole life of woman,” who after the child-rearing phase could return to “the place in society that she has never really left.”92 Doctor Houdré-Boursin, the author of popular French advice literature on maternity and child-rearing, advised that children should be raised at home until the age of three or four, “but when they start school, and the mother has free time during the day, then why not contribute her skills to society?”93 Dora Russell developed an ambitious life plan for the mother of the future: “the ideal would be for a woman to continue her education at least till eighteen, have her first child at twenty-four, then perhaps three others at two-year intervals. . . . At thirty-five every mother of four children would, in a community of good schools, convenient houses, and well-run restaurants, be free to take part again in public life.”94 Winifred Holtby held up her own mother, a local politician, as a paragon of post-parental independence. “I can visit or leave her without compunction, knowing that she has her life to live as much as I have mine.”95 But all this was more easily said than done. Vera Brittain, who in 1926 married George Catlin, a professor at Cornell, remarked that “my life with G. had raised in acute form the much-discussed issue so tritely summarized as ‘marriage and career.’ ” When her career as a journalist failed to thrive in Ithaca, Brittain decided on what she called a “semi-detached” marriage and spent half of every year in London. She bore two children and tried to continue her writing. “My life has been nothing but the two children,” she wrote to George, “with intervals of spasmodic effort to keep my end up in the world of journalism.” When her autobiography, Testament of Youth, was finally completed, she exulted: “How wonderful it was to have produced

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such a large book and brought up John and Shirley, too!”96 Dora Russell, who bore four children (two by Bertrand Russell and two by another partner), realized in 1931 that she was “a very different person from the young woman to whom having a baby had been an inconvenient interruption to intellectual life. . . . I had become a professional mother-figure.”97 And despite her success and prominence, Alva Myrdal felt confined by her familial responsibilities. “Since she wanted to combine home life, marriage and children with other significant work, she felt increasingly underutilized in her work capacity,” wrote her daughter. “. . . Already she was surprised by her lot and somewhat dissatisfied with it.”98 To whom could these overburdened mothers turn for help? Perhaps to the fathers of their children?

F  F Child-rearing, said the German socialist leader Clara Zetkin in 1906, “must not just be the work of mothers, but the common work of parents.”99 But in the writings of feminists of the prewar era, such positive views of the father’s role were few. Indeed, campaigners for the legal right of mothers to control their children often painted a dismal picture of the father as a remote, uncomprehending, drunken, or abusive figure. Utopian fantasies of heroic single mothers and matriarchal communities conveyed the message that children flourished in the absence of their fathers. Interwar feminists shifted their support to the egalitarian married couple and the cooperative twoparent family. But if he was no longer an authoritarian patriarch, how did the father fit into this new family unit? During this era, the paternal role evolved in response to long-term changes in family structure. With the transformation of independent craftsmen and farmers into wage-earning employees, fathers no longer controlled their children’s labor power. The shortening of workdays and the provision by many employers of paid vacations—a new policy during this period—gave fathers more time and opportunity to interact with their children. And the domestic servants upon whom middle- and upper-class mothers had depended were now much less available. All of these changes created conditions in which the erstwhile patriarch could become a parent. But feminist educators insisted that fathers must be educated to assume this new role. And the first lesson must focus on discipline in general, and corporal punishment in particular. “It is hard to believe that one still has to campaign against the beating of children,” wrote Schreiber, “but surveys show that this is still the most popular educational method, because it is the easiest.”100 Dora Russell regretted that the typical father was “a symbol of money and power rather than love,” who was known to his children only as “someone who comes home only for a short time and then is either tired and cross or else full of loving indulgence.” And though men were “responsible for this state of affairs,” she believed that it was often “harder upon them than it is upon their children.”101 Popular psychological theories admonished parents that harsh discipline often motivated antisocial behavior,

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but that reasonable treatment encouraged confidence, self-esteem, and independence.102 When appropriately exercised, paternal authority was presented as a necessary corrective to the flaws and shortcomings of mothers. Fatherless families now acquired a negative image. Single mothers, said the British socialist Margaret Cole, tended to “so exaggerate their function of protective love that the child cannot get loose or grow up at all.”103 Psychologists held up the more distanced and objective masculine style as the best antidote to excessive motherliness. According to Freud, a shift in orientation from maternal nurture to paternal authority was a necessary stage in the growth of both boys and girls. One of Madeleine Vernet’s correspondents remarked that parenthood should be a “happy collaboration” in which the mother’s indulgence was balanced by the father’s “firmer authority and clearer sense of purpose.”104 Dora Russell likewise called on fathers to save children from maternal overprotection. The mother, she said “wants her child for herself just as long as she can have him. . . . Fathers, from the fact of their longer absences, are not so intimately tangled with their children. They see them more as the outsider sees them, and judges them more objectively.”105 Most theorists did not prescribe the fusion of parental roles, but rather a new division of parental labor. As shortened workdays and paid vacations made leisure and tourism available even to working-class people, the father became the leader of the family’s sports and recreational activities.106 And amid this era’s cult of health and physical vitality, this role acquired a high prestige. Adele Schreiber’s calendar for mothers was full of photographs of healthy, smiling, naked children enjoying beaches and woodlands with their fathers. “The healthy, tough, and enterprising child is usually also the intelligent child,” read the caption of a picture of a child frolicking in the ocean, “an earlier era encouraged an indoor life and torpid passivity; today we recognize the value of balanced training of body and mind, and especially for girls.”107 Recreation could have an educational purpose; Schreiber admonished the father to be “a laughing teacher, a sunny educator . . . and as a comrade in sport and play, on walks through nature, in planting the garden.”108 In Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, which told the story of a large family, the Ramseys, on vacation, Mr. Ramsey (though hardly “sunny”) embodied the same conception of the paternal role. By leading his children on an adventurous expedition to a lighthouse, Mr. Ramsey also (symbolically) led them out of the shelter of maternal love and into the more demanding adult world, a trip that required “above all, courage, truth and the power to endure.”109 Most feminist authors assumed that the father, however important his influence, would never replace the mother. “Even though, in modern society, the father may not have a good deal of time to bring up his offspring directly, the time which he does give and the attitude which he takes up can be of quite disproportionate effect,” wrote Margaret Cole.110 A few, however, contended that the sharing of parental responsibility would provide the basis

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for the emancipation of the mother to pursue professional or personal interests outside the home. In 1938, Alva Myrdal spoke to parents in a radio broadcast provocatively titled “The Forgotten Father.111 She believed that only the sharing of parental responsibility would “make children possible” for working women. “Greater participation by fathers in child care, greater willingness to take turns in awakening early in the morning and staying at home on recreational nights,” she suggested, “would certainly adjust parenthood much more easily into modern life.”112 But Alva Myrdal herself did not have such a partner; Sissela Bok wrote that Gunnar Myrdal “was the opposite of the fathers Alva called for in her talks about parenting.”113 Madeleine Vernet insisted that parental roles must be different—the father’s job was to provide material, and the mother’s to provide moral security. But some of her readers advocated a more flexible division of labor.114 “I must say, much to the credit of my companion,” wrote one correspondent, “that he has never been afraid of dressing or bathing Baby, in order to leave me free to attend to an occupation away from home.”115 “Why don’t fathers take part in the cares and responsibilities of parenthood?” asked another correspondent. “Why does he almost always leave the mother exhausted, worn out by pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding, and the total care of small children? This is another aberration of our double sexual morality!”116 Dora Russell asserted that parenthood must rest on “mutual cooperation,” and was confident that “men unhampered by masculine pride and women without foolish dignity or feminist bias [would] find all the arduous and trifling activities involved in this task both exciting and delicious.”117 Only a nonsexist approach to child-rearing and education could prepare the new generation for this momentous change in the gender division of labor. The first step, said feminist educators, was to involve children of both sexes in the same household chores. Schreiber observed that boys were often willing and adept participants in the domestic work that was usually loaded on girls, stunting their physical and educational development. “The full comradeship of the sexes in later life,” she added, “and the basis for a marriage of equal comrades can be built or destroyed by the child’s upbringing.”118 The school, too, was given a role in the teaching of gender equality. Feminists of this era generally supported school instruction in child-rearing for girls, and a few declared that boys, too, should take these courses. Vera Brittain regretted that “very little attention is given in girls’s schools to mothercraft, and none at all in boys’ schools to fathercraft.”119 And the American-born lawyer and birth-control activist Chrystal Eastman commented in the British feminist periodical Time and Tide that home economics should not be only for girls. “Why not welcome the idea of a compulsory course in Domestic Science, but insist that it be general for boys and girls alike? Those who like it, of either sex, can take it up as a trade. Those who do not like it (and this will be the vast majority of both boys and girls) will not be injured by having learned to take care of themselves. . . . And it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of such common training in freeing the women of generations to come.”120

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M A The reception of psychology hastened the decline of maternalism and its exaltation of mother-love as a benevolent force in the family and society. For feminists this trend had mixed consequences. On the one hand, the tendency to make mothers responsible for all of the problems of society fueled the backlash against feminism, and could justify repressive measures designed to return women to their natural and God-given role. On the other hand, the demise of the idealized “angel in the house” could liberate the individual woman to decide against motherhood or to rebel against stereotyped expectations and look for new ways of mothering. Some envisaged the lifeplan—including a briefly interrupted career, institutional child-care, an egalitarian division of parental labor, nonsexist methods of child-rearing, and the prospect of a “post-parental” phase—that was adopted and developed by the “new” feminists of the 1960s. But the elaboration of this complex strategy did not solve but heightened the maternal dilemma. For in the absence of social support, it could be realized by only the most energetic and privileged of women, and sometimes not even by them. The contrast between aspiration and reality highlighted the difficulties that faced a woman who wished to be both a mother and an autonomous individual. Under such circumstances, feminists’ interpretation of the maternal role increasingly emphasized ambivalence, discontent, and psychic conflict. And this theme would become even more prominent in the period after World War II.

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T L  W W II In the years that immediately followed World War II, the ideology of patriotic motherhood seemed to have reached its apogee. The trend toward young marriages and large families that was known as the “baby boom” affirmed life and hope after the death and despair of the war years. Not only did many women leave their wartime jobs for full-time motherhood, but new welfare-state policies, some of which fulfilled long-standing feminist demands, supported mothers, children, and families. Many commentators predicted the imminent demise of feminism. But the opposite occurred. Within a quarter of a century, a new women’s movement energized a vocal group among the younger generation. At the same time, the development of new contraceptive techniques and increases in women’s educational level and workforce participation seemed to usher in a new era in human history, when motherhood would become an option to be chosen rather than a destiny to be accepted. But as it ceased to be a destiny, motherhood emerged even more fully as a dilemma. The two trends that have been traced throughout this book— heightened standards of maternal care on the one hand, women’s drive for independence and self-realization on the other—clashed in the postwar era. By 1970, many leaders of the new feminist movement claimed that the maternal dilemma was insoluble under existing conditions, and made that claim the basis of a new analysis of sexism, the subordination of women, and patriarchy itself. After sketching in the historical context—World War II and its aftermath—this chapter will examine three major postwar issues: laws affecting mothers, children, and reproduction; mothers in the labor market; and the rebellion against maternity. Unlike World War I, during which suffrage and other organizations were at the height of their influence, the war of 1939–45 inspired little feminist activity. In countries ruled by totalitarian regimes, such as Germany, Italy, and Austria (as of 1938), feminist organizations had been abolished well before the war, and most of their leaders had been condemned to exile or silence. In the democracies, feminist groups had steadily lost membership

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and funding and by 1939 were in decline. During the interwar years, the leaders of these organizations had followed the example of other progressive reformers and shifted their emphasis from the rights of women to those of human beings, especially of those who belonged to the racial, ethnic, and political groups that were persecuted by the Nazis and fascists.1 During the war, feminist activity was brought to a temporary halt in the many countries that were occupied by the Nazis. For example, most of the French organizations (with the exception of the Catholic Women’s Civic and Social Union) were disbanded and their periodicals discontinued in 1940. In Great Britain—for a while the only belligerent nation that preserved democratic government—most feminist leaders followed the precedent of 1914 and threw their support behind the mobilization of women. But by comparison to World War I, when women had been rewarded for their patriotism with the right of suffrage, World War II brought meager gains. Child allowances payable to mothers, which activists such as Eleanor Rathbone had demanded since World War I, were part of the new postwar welfare-state legislation, but such measures had long since lost their connection to feminism. Social services such as day-care centers, which were provided during the war, were discontinued in its aftermath. Although women in several countries received the right to vote in the wartime and postwar eras— in France in 1944, in Italy in 1945, in Belgium in 1948—this resulted more from a general commitment to democracy and postwar reconstruction than from specifically feminist activity.2 Postwar societies were haunted by the still vivid memory of fascist dictatorships. Despite their bombastic praise for the traditional family, both the Italian and German regimes had undermined it by abolishing all rights to personal privacy and making reproduction a public function that served the state. In other respects the two regimes differed. Mussolini’s policies were straightforwardly natalist, combining harsh restrictions on access to birth control and on the employment of married women with forms of public assistance—such as child allowances payable to fathers—that strengthened male supremacy in the home and in the state.3 The Nazi regime also enacted some benefits to families, such as family allowances (also usually payable to fathers), loans to married couples, and financial and institutional assistance to unmarried mothers. But unlike those of the Italian regime, Nazi policies were more concerned with racial purity than with natalism. Eugenic measures enforced prolific reproduction on the racial elite and compulsory sterility on stigmatized minorities, including the handicapped, mentally ill, and racially tainted.4 In wartime, the ideal of patriotic motherhood was degraded through macabre celebrations of Mother’s Day, which exhorted mothers to take pride in the death of their sons.5 However, National Socialist propaganda did not always present women in stereotypically domestic or maternal roles. In the immediate prewar and wartime years, posters that urged married women to join the work force portrayed women as heroic workers in many occupations.6

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The Nazi women’s organizations—the National Socialist Women’s Association (NS Frauenschaft), the German Women’s Bureau (Deutsches Frauenwerk), and the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mädel )— cannot be called feminist, for they had no freedom to set their own agendas or to criticize government policies. But a faint and distant memory of the feminist movement was kept alive by Gertrud Bäumer, who continued to edit Die Frau—formerly the organ of the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine)—until 1944. Always a patriotic German, Bäumer usually avoided censorship by publishing articles on politically neutral topics. Her political stance combined cautious criticism (which sometimes attracted the unfavorable notice of the Propaganda Ministry) with half-hearted approval of the Nazi regime. In 1940, she reprinted a speech by SS chief Heinrich Himmler that exhorted Germans to respect unmarried mothers (of course, only those of the racial elite), who bore valuable offspring for the nation, and warned women who refused their maternal duty that they were no better than deserters (in fact, the Nazis made abortion a capital crime in 1943).7 In an anguished letter, Dorothee van Velsen, a former leader of the German Women Citizens Association (Deutscher Staatsbügerinnenverband) asked Bäumer why—since protest was out of the question—she could not simply have ignored this distasteful tirade. Bäumer responded that her readers deserved to be informed about important policy questions, and the speech had made some useful points. She added defensively that “you can’t come up with any magazine in Germany, that . . . goes as far with criticism and independent thinking as Die Frau.”8 In Germany as elsewhere, the horrors of total war discredited these and other Nazi policies.9 After World War II, all the Western European states committed themselves to the support of families and children. State subsidies—known in Britain as “family allowances” and in Germany as Kindergeld (money for children)— helped parents with the costs of child-rearing. Many feminists of the interwar era had supported family allowances on the condition that the money be paid directly to mothers—a demand that was fulfilled in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. France allotted a special subsidy, or “allocation de salaire unique,” to mothers who did not work outside the home. In other countries such as West Germany, Ireland, and Italy, however, family allowances were distributed as a wage supplement, and thus usually to the male breadwinner.10 Postwar family policies were strongly natalist: France, declared General de Gaulle, who served a brief presidential term in 1945–46, needed twelve million beautiful babies.11 And in the short run, these policies were successful. In France, live births per 1,000 women aged 15–49 increased by about a third, from 60 in 1935 to 82 in 1960; during the same period this birthrate grew in Britain from 54 to 77; in Norway from 55 to 78; in the Netherlands from 77 to 90.12 But though in some ways a return to interwar natalism, postwar policies reacted to the recent experience of totalitarianism by emphasizing privacy. The invasion of the family by the state, declared Helene Weber, a Catholic

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delegate of the German Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-demokratische Union, or CDU), had violated “a divinely endowed order, which predates all political institutions and to which the state must accommodate itself.”13 In more secular language, the West German sociologist Helmut Schelsky praised the family as a bulwark against the coercive pressures of the state and as a safe haven for the “formation and development of the individual.”14 The patriotic duty of motherhood was not enforced by new coercive measures.15 In fact, the cheerful prospect of rising birthrates dispelled long-standing fears of population decline and created an atmosphere in which coercive laws— such as those that in some countries still restricted access to contraception and abortion—could be challenged. And though compulsory sterilization continued in Scandinavia, eugenic theory—now associated with antiSemitism and genocide—had fallen into such disrepute that the notions of population “quality” which had been invoked to justify coercive policies during the interwar years all but disappeared from discussions of reproduction.16 The general revulsion against totalitarian family policies also contributed to dramatic changes in experts’ view of the maternal role. Starting around 1938, a reaction against the stringent methods prescribed by experts of the interwar era was already well under way.17 By the war’s end, the frightening spectacle of totalitarian states and their uniformed, regimented, bannercarrying youth groups—in Hitler’s own words, “tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel”—had discredited parental sternness. The sociologist Theodor Adorno, himself a refugee from Germany, asserted that strict and rigid childrearing produced an “authoritarian personality” prone to prejudice and aggression, while more affectionate methods encouraged independent thought and constructive citizenship.18 Another testimony to the importance of parental affection came from the psychiatrist Anna Freud, who with her famous father Sigmund Freud had taken refuge in London. Freud and her British colleague Dorothy Burlingame concluded from their work in day-care centers and with the many children who were evacuated from bombed-out cities that the separation of the child from the mother was the most damaging of wartime traumas.19 The British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who had also worked with institutionalized children, based his theory of “maternal deprivation” on Anna Freud’s research. Another important influence was Melanie Klein’s picture of the infant psyche as a boiling cauldron of mixed loving and hostile emotions, chiefly directed at the mother. Bowlby warned that infants might react to their mothers’ absence, even for short periods, with overwhelming feelings of anger and guilt—anger at mother for leaving, guilt at perhaps having driven her away—that might cause permanent psychological damage. The mother’s constant and consistently loving presence, he declared, was “as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health.”20 Bowlby’s theories appealed to postwar policymakers who aimed to raise birthrates and reconstruct families. They were often used to justify such discriminatory policies as the closing of day-care centers and the denial of employment opportunities to married women. Nonetheless, most mothers

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responded positively to Bowlby’s emphasis on love and spontaneity.21 Likewise the American pediatrician Benjamin Spock, whose Common-Sense Guide to Baby and Child Care was translated into several European languages, urged mothers to cultivate their own and their babies’ capacity for love and expressiveness. “Enjoy your baby,” urged this influential manual.22 Postwar psychological theories contributed to the process of change that has been noted in earlier chapters: the transformation of motherhood from a lifetime identity to a finite and limited job. For although experts considered intensive maternal care to be indispensable in the first five years of life, they advised that the school-age child needed independence.23 A definition of full-time motherhood as an intense but short-term obligation fit well into the family patterns of the postwar era. Couples of all social classes now planned their families, and children were typically born close together during the first years of the marriage.24 And because female life expectancy had increased from about 50 years in 1900 to about 74 years in the 1960s, women could expect to live for 40 years after their youngest child entered school.25 Instead of responding to the newly prosperous economy as they had been expected to do, by withdrawing from the labor force, women entered it in ever greater numbers, and the fastest growing segment of the female labor force was that of older married women. Thus though it is often characterized as conservative, the postwar era was marked by rapid changes in the family, the status of women, and the maternal role. In this process of change, traditional feminist organizations played only a minor role. After the war, these groups—for example, the National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes françaises), the German Women’s Circle (Deutscher Frauenring, a successor organization to the BDF), the League of Swiss Women’ Associations (Bund schweizerischer Frauenvereine), the British Six Point Group (which in 1949 merged with the National Council for Equal Citizenship) and Women’s Cooperative Guild— continued their work, which was centered on issues such as the political rights of women and the reform of family law. But these groups did not attract many younger women. An obstacle to innovation in some areas was the growth of mammoth women’s organizations within Western European communist parties, of which the French and Italian were the largest. The women’s organizations sponsored by these parties, the French Union des femmes françaises (Union of French Women, or UFF) and the Italian Unione donne italiane (Union of Italian Women, or UDI) recruited large numbers of predominantly workingclass women. Under pressure to accommodate to a conservative political atmosphere, the communist parties abandoned many of the progressive views on women’s issues that they had promoted during the interwar era.26 Communist women continued to assert the right of mothers to work outside the home, aided by social services and collective child care. But they often downplayed these demands to join in the popular cult of domesticity and natalism.27 In Britain, where there was no strong communist party, the political interests of working-class women were represented by the women

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activists of the Labour Party. These women, though many were veteran feminists, placed national issues, such as those involved in the building of the welfare state, before specifically female concerns.28 Not until the rise of a new feminist movement after 1968 would left-wing women openly rebel against the male leadership of their parties. And the very existence of these groups, whatever their views, fueled a right-wing reaction against any form of feminism, which was often (however mistakenly) denounced as a part of a larger communist plot to subvert the family, religion, and the security of the Free World. Partly because of the conservatism of both liberal and communist women’s organizations, many of this era’s most innovative approaches to issues concerning women and their status were produced by intellectuals who, though deeply concerned with the status of women, did not identify themselves as feminists. They were often unfamiliar with the feminist theory of the past—names such as Helene Stöcker, Olive Schreiner, Nelly Roussel, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman fell into oblivion. Ignorant of history, these postwar thinkers often struggled to reconstruct ideas and theories that they could more easily have derived from the rich literature left by a century and a half of feminist thought and practice. As Karen Offen has so rightly pointed out, they laboriously “re-invented the wheel.”29 But the absence of historical consciousness also left room for fresh ideas. These thinkers were the critics but also the products of postwar culture—a culture that emphasized individualism, privacy, and self-realization. By turning their attention away from abstract theories and toward an exploration of the experiences and feelings of mothers themselves, they laid the foundation for a new feminist movement that would declare that “the personal is the political.”

“I  S  F  T D”: T L S  M During the postwar era, the restoration of the father-headed family seemed a step toward normality and stability. Callously overlooking the many families left without fathers, the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky predicted that with the return of male heads of household the women who had been “overemancipated” in wartime would wish only to retire to the privacy of the home. Likewise, the French sociologists Mattei Dogan and Jacques Narbonne concluded in 1955 that women were unlikely to make much use of their new right of suffrage.30 But in fact, feminist issues surfaced almost immediately. Postwar debates on these issues—including the parental rights of mothers, state benefits to the family, and the legalization of birth control— were often marked by a new emphasis on individual self-realization and personal liberty. The right of mothers to participate equally with fathers in decisions concerning their children had been guaranteed in some countries, notably Scandinavia and Britain, in the interwar years. But this right was still contested in the rest of Europe. The most conspicuous postwar debate on this issue

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occurred in West Germany, where the new constitution of 1949 (known as the Basic Law, or Grundgesetz) stated that “men and women have the same rights.” But the application of this constitutional guarantee to family law required a protracted struggle.31 In the debate on the Basic Law in 1948, Frieda Nadig, a parliamentary delegate from the Social Democratic Party, argued—as had socialists of earlier generations—that the family was not the stable creation of a divine order but the product of historical change and that the mother-headed family should be recognized by law and custom.32 The moderate German Women’s Circle (Deutscher Frauenring) defended the marriage relationship but agreed that patriarchy was alien to the democratic principles of the new West German state. A “collegial” form of marriage, argued a position paper submitted by this group, would promote the stability of families. Else Ulich-Beil, a leader of the German Women’s Circle who was also a divorced mother, noted that patriarchal laws had provided “the fertile soil where all kinds of unfairness and double standards of morality flourished. Let us have the courage to begin again,” she urged, “in the spirit of freedom and true devotion.”33 As Elizabeth D. Heineman remarks, these arguments differed from those of the past by emphasizing individual rights rather than traditional assumptions that mothers were superior parents.34 The ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), headed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his Minister for Family Affairs, Franz-Josef Wuermeling, continued to defend the father-headed family as a bulwark of social order.35 But when cases concerning parental rights went before the courts, decisions supported the growing consensus in favor of parental equality. In 1959, the Constitutional Court (the equivalent of the American Supreme Court) declared most forms of paternal authority unconstitutional.36 In other countries, equality of parental rights, which was also supported by both left-wing and liberal women’s organizations, took longer to achieve: until 1970 in France (where fathers still retained authority over their children’s financial affairs); until 1974 in Belgium; until 1975 in Italy.37 The status of the unmarried mother and her child was also revived by feminist politicians and reformers. But the postwar preoccupation with the reconstruction of the two-parent family made these mothers invisible, and the new prestige of psychology worked to their disadvantage. At the turn of the century, negative images of the single mother had been partly dispelled by sympathy for her plight and concern for the child who, as a valuable citizen, was held to deserve state support. Starting in the 1920s, however, psychologists created a darker picture of the single mother. In the postwar era, the American psychologist Leontine Young was a highly regarded authority in Britain as well as in the United States. Young completely ignored the social context of single pregnancy and attributed it to the bad judgment of emotionally disturbed young women. She urged that the children of single mothers should be relinquished for adoption.38 Likewise John Bowlby, whose theory of maternal deprivation apparently did not apply to the children of unmarried parents, advised social workers not to be deterred by

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“punitive or sentimental attitudes” from removing the child and placing it for adoption whenever possible.39 In Britain, unmarried mothers were granted a small, means-tested allowance from the state, but were often pressured or shamed into giving up their children.40 The writers of the German Basic Law refused to give equal status to the children of unmarried parents and substituted a rather vague clause from the Weimar Constitution that guaranteed “equal conditions” for their “physical and spiritual development.”41 The German law that placed children born out of wedlock under state guardianship was also preserved (with the provision that the mother could be appointed guardian under some circumstances). Not until the 1970s, under pressure from a new feminist movement, was the German unmarried mother given the same legal rights as her married counterpart.42 The issue of single motherhood raised a broader question: what form of motherhood should the state support? The postwar welfare state was based on a model of the “normal” family consisting of an employed male breadwinner, a full-time housewife, and their dependent children, and channeled most benefits to the family through its male head. But some countries defined the family more broadly. In Scandinavia, child allowances were paid directly to mothers, whatever their employment status, and thus supported mother-headed families, including those of unmarried mothers. In Germany child benefits were first distributed as a supplement to the paycheck of the family breadwinner, who was usually the father, and only families with three or more children were eligible. For that reason most single mothers, who normally did not have such large families, were excluded. But by 1964, the law was changed to detach these subsidies from wage payments, to start payments with the second child, and to direct payments to either parent—in case of disagreement, to the parent who paid the most toward the child’s support.43 Another policy that was particularly controversial was “single earner benefit,” allotted by the French and Belgian governments to full-time mothers. Catholic women’s groups such as the French Women’s Civil and Social Union approved of this disincentive to maternal employment. But members of liberal and left-wing women’s groups, though most shared the consensus in favor of support for families, opposed the single wage-earner benefit because it discriminated against employed mothers and in favor of full-time housewives, some of whom were wealthy.44 Christiane Rochefort’s fictional account of the French baby boom caricatured women who made statesupported childbearing into a career. The main character remarked scornfully on the Mauvin children, who owed their existence to their parents’ greed: “She [the mother] had only boys, and she was proud of that. She could furnish at least a squadron for the fatherland, and the fatherland had a right to it—it was paid for in advance. . . . I thought of the day . . . when they would all be buried on the battlefield and you would see on their tombstones: ‘Here lies Television Mauvin, Automobile Mauvin, Refrigerator Mauvin, Washing-machine Mauvin, Mixmaster Mauvin . . . and with the

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survivor’s benefits the parents could pay for a vacuum cleaner and a remodeled basement.’ ”45 The family allowance system was reformed in 1967, making conditions for receiving the single wage benefit more stringent (in 1972 it was subjected to means testing) and directing state support to particularly needy families.46 These and other changes in family policy suggest a broader transition in state policies, which ceased to promote an official vision of the family and focused on reducing poverty.47 A still more important social change was the broadening of access to contraceptive technology. Population statistics suggest that throughout the Western world class differences in the practice of birth control narrowed, and family planning was practiced by all social classes. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, founded in 1952 by a group that included the Swedish birth-control activist Elise Ottesen-Jensen, supported organizations that promoted family planning throughout the world.48 In predominantly Protestant nations, these organizations grew rapidly and were highly effective. A shift in the positions of the Protestant Churches—for example, the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, which declared in 1952 that the use of contraception in marriage should be left up to the individual conscience—created a tolerant atmosphere. In Sweden, the National Association for Sex Education (Riksförbundet för sexuell upplysning), founded during the interwar era, continued its work. The Dutch Society for Sexual Reform (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Sexuele Hervorming) increased its membership from 17,533 in 1946, the year of its founding, to 202,961 20 years later. By 1954 the Society supported 33 clinics and 9 consultation centers. A similar organization known as ProFamilia was founded in West Germany in 1952. Most laws that restricted access to contraception were repealed in Austria by 1953, in Germany by 1961, and in the Netherlands by 1969. By 1960, the British Family Planning Association supported 334 clinics.49 Starting in the early 1960s, the distribution of the birth-control pill greatly increased the popularity and effectiveness of family planning. In France, the strength both of secular natalist and religious Catholic opinion raised more formidable barriers to this process. As determined as ever to limit their families, French women were forced by the law of 1920, which blocked access to information about contraception and prohibited abortion, to resort to illegal abortion. And the same male legislators and politicians—from the communist Left to the Catholic Right—who condoned this practice in private took a sanctimonious public stand against the legalization of contraception and abortion.50 The Second Sex, published by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949, owed its sensational impact largely to its exposure of what the author called “the hypocrisy of the masculine moral code.”51 Well known as a writer and as the partner of the prominent philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, Beauvoir was uninterested in feminist movements, which she considered to have outlived their relevance. As a prominent author and intellectual, she felt little need of legal emancipation.

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Rather, her engagement with the question “what is a woman” arose from her personal situation, which she acknowledged had been shaped by her gender.52 Beauvoir remarked that maternal biology shaped conventional definitions of womanhood: “it is in maternity that woman fulfills her natural ‘calling,’ since her whole organic structure is adapted for the perpetuation of the species,” she wrote in the introduction to her chapter entitled “The Mother.” But she rejected this definition and insisted that the body, though part of women’s material situation, imposed no absolute determinism. In fact, reproduction had ceased to occur “at the mercy of biological chance” and was now “under the voluntary control of human beings.” Women’s problems arose less from their biological functions than from male-supremacist culture. The smug refusal of men to acknowledge openly what they condoned in private drove women into illegality, secrecy, and danger. Beauvoir was, of course, not the first to protest against the horrors of illegal abortion. What was new was her focus on the feelings of the woman herself, forced to “undergo the humiliation of begging and cringing” for help, caught up in “a confusion of fear and shame,” and vulnerable to physical injury or death. Beauvoir aimed less to change laws—indeed, twenty years would pass before she “came out” as a feminist—than to transform women’s consciousness through a new understanding of their situation. How, she asked, could they fail to “feel an inner mistrust of the presumptuous principles that men publicly proclaim and secretly discard? They no longer believe men when they exalt woman or when they exalt man: the one thing that they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there. It is at her first abortion that woman begins to ‘know.’ ”53 The vituperative response to Beauvoir’s book, which came equally from right and left, left no doubt that abortion, birth control, and female sexuality were still taboo topics.54 Nonetheless, a few activists dared to mention the unmentionable. In 1955 a young and devoutly Catholic physician, MarieAndrée Lagroua Weill-Hallé, met Évelyne Sullerot, a thirty-one-year-old woman who belonged to a class, which she described as “neither rich nor poor” and was the full-time mother of three small children. In 1956, Weill-Hallé, Sullerot, and a few of their friends founded an organization which they first termed “Maternité Heureuse” (“Happy Motherhood”) and later endowed with the more official-sounding name of the French Association for Family Planning.55 Following the letter of the law, the group limited its publicity to its members, and never openly advocated the legalization of abortion. But the prevention of illegal abortions was always among its aims. The young housewives and professionals who founded this group did not define themselves as feminists, and justified their participation with personal narratives. Sullerot described the consequences of unwanted pregnancies among her circle of friends—consequences that included marital conflict, thwarted professional ambition, the trauma of illegal abortion, and the enforced “silence about all that.”56 The literature produced by Weill-Hallé

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and her supporters offered few of the social and eugenic arguments that had been so often used by interwar activists. To be sure, a population problem existed—that of world over-population—but not one that threatened France or Europe. Individual well-being and marital harmony now emerged as the supreme and uncontested values of the birth control movement. Weill-Hallé cited cases from her own files to show the destructive psychological consequences of the rhythm method, the only contraceptive practice that was sanctioned by the Church. “How many nights of love,” she lamented “are ruined by false religious ideals!”57 At first this movement was supported neither by established feminist groups nor by the communist UFF, which maintained that birth control was a falsely personal solution to larger economic problems. “Birth control and voluntary motherhood are a trap for the masses,” declared the communist leader Jeanne Vermeersch. “It is a weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie against social legislation.”58 As a countermeasure, the French Communist Party (PCF) launched a highly conspicuous campaign to raise child allowances.59 In fact the birth controllers did not oppose social legislation. Most shared the conviction of Catherine Valabrègue, who produced some of the earliest books on birth control, that “methods that allow couples to have a child at the moment that they think most favorable” actually worked together with welfare-state policies to encourage marriage, childbearing and family formation.60 Though rejected by the ossified orthodoxies of right and left—Sullerot later recalled that her opponents sometimes quoted Lenin and sometimes St. Paul—family planning fit better into the agendas of newer and more experimental religious groups.61 Among these was a group known as Young Women (Jeunes Femmes), which was composed chiefly of young Protestant women, both single and married, and included many wives of pastors. The group’s periodical, Ariane, often contained uncomfortable and honest discussions of private life. Some contributors admitted that they had not wanted children; others that they had more children than they desired; all that their experience of parenthood was fraught with emotional conflicts.62 In the hopeful years leading up to Vatican II, some young Catholic women criticized the position of their church. The sacralization of fertility, wrote Geneviève Texier and Andrée Michel, served the ends of “the male who, proud of his reproductive potency, makes the family an instrument of his supremacy in the economic, social, and political realms.”63 By the mid-1960s, growing public support for the legalization of contraception put pressure on all the political parties. In 1965 the PCF reluctantly changed its position to affirm women’s “right to be mothers” under the best possible conditions.64 In 1967 new legislation allowed contraception to be prescribed by physicians, though advertising was still restricted, funding from public insurance was denied, and parental consent was required for women under eighteen.65 Meanwhile, the same transition in public opinion had occurred in some other countries. In Italy, the initiative came from within the communist

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women’s groups, which began discussing contraception in 1961. The continued opposition of the Party’s male leadership was a major cause of the formation of independent “New Left” and feminist groups in 1968. The law prohibiting the sale or advertisement of birth control in Italy was changed in 1971.66 These changes were accompanied by an extraordinary decline in religious belief and practice: in 1956 80 percent, but by 1975 only 35 percent of all Italian women attended Mass regularly.67 In Belgium an organization promoting family planning, the Belgian Society for Sexual Enlightenment (Belgische Vereniging voor sexuele Voorlichting) was founded in 1955, and the law of 1923 which had outlawed access to contraception and abortion was modified in 1973 to permit limited access to birth control.68 The only Western European country (apart from Spain and Portugal, which were still ruled by dictatorships) that saw no legal changes during this period was Ireland, where a movement by new feminist groups in the late 1960s for the legalization of contraception could not prevail over the opposition of the Catholic Church.69 The hopes of some Catholic women for a change in the Church’s position were finally dashed by the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which was promulgated in 1968. Abortion proved to be a still more controversial issue. Laws were liberalized to permit therapeutic abortions in Sweden and Denmark in the 1930s, in Norway and Finland in the 1950s, and in the Netherlands and Britain in 1967.70 The struggle for the liberalization or repeal of abortion laws began with the rise of new feminist movements in the 1970s.71 Though in many ways similar to that of earlier birth-control movements, postwar rhetoric was more openly individualistic and assertive. Birth-controllers of earlier generations had usually surrounded their claims to individual liberty with protestations of patriotic devotion and commitment to maternity. But for this generation—which Yvonne Knibiehler has called “the generation of refusal”—motherhood often seemed the enemy of individual autonomy, an ancient biological yoke that could now be cast off. Forgetting (to the great surprise of the historian Philippe Ariès, who supported the movement) that the practice of contraception in France went back at least a century and a half, activists hailed the dawning of a new era.72 “One can never sufficiently emphasize that this is the first time since the beginning of the world that woman faces a future when she will no longer be enslaved to the laws of her body, and when she will be able to make choices and plans,” exulted Sullerot in 1967.73 Birth control, wrote Dr. Weill-Hallé, would “free up (women’s) time to develop her talents and to exercise them for the benefit of the larger human community.”74 And few doubted that these goals could be attained by entering the paid labor market.

“W’ T R” Among the trends that we have noted is the transformation in conception of motherhood from a lifelong status to a role—an identity that could be taken on, thrown off, or combined with other identities. In 1956, Alva Myrdal and

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Viola Klein announced that women now occupied two roles: at home and at work.75 Of all the social transformations of the postwar era, the rapid increase in the employment of wives and mothers was the most conspicuous. Until the 1950s, such employment had been seen as a sign of bad times, poverty, and male unemployment. While strongly defending the right of women to work regardless of marital and parental status, most feminists of the interwar years had assumed that in the absence of financial necessity only a professional elite would choose to combine motherhood and career. And social disapproval of the employment of married women had reached a high point during the interwar era.76 But after an initial trend toward full-time motherhood, such attitudes gradually faded into obsolescence during the postwar era. An influx of married women transformed the labor force. The pace of change differed among Western European countries, but the trend was consistent: in France, where many married women had always been employed, the percentage of such women in the female workforce rose from 49 percent in 1954 to 53 percent in 1962; in Britain, where married women had customarily stayed home, the percentage rose from 43 percent in 1955 to 50 percent in 1967; in Italy, where the number of employed married women actually declined from 1945 to the mid-1960s, it increased dramatically after 1970.77 The class composition of the female work force also changed: whereas in earlier eras working-class women had been the most likely to seek employment, by 1960 women from high-income families, chiefly those with professional qualifications, were disproportionately represented in the labor force.78 Well-trained women found opportunities in the expanding social-services sector and in the schools, kindergartens, and medical facilities that were bursting with the offspring of the baby boom. The average age of the female work force rose, for the women who entered after a period of full-time motherhood often held their jobs until retirement. Unlike previous generations of married women workers, who had usually claimed that they worked out of economic necessity, these women tended to regard their work as an exercise of personal choice. They demanded the repeal of laws that had permitted, and in some cases required, the dismissal of women from employment—chiefly in desirable jobs in the civil service— upon their marriage, and had empowered husbands to forbid their wives to work. In Britain, the “marriage bar” for teachers was struck down during the war; similar laws in Germany were repealed in 1953 and the right of husbands to prevent their wives from working was revoked in 1957.79 In the Netherlands, a civil servant, Mevrouw Tendeloo, protested against her dismissal when she married, and was supported by a coalition of feminist groups, which argued that decisions about employment were best left to the individual woman and her husband. The Dutch regulation was finally struck down in 1957.80 “The married woman who leaves her home each day and goes off to work has become a familiar, if controversial figure in Western society,” wrote the British sociologist Pearl Jephcott in 1962. “Some see her as a symbol of

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freedom, but to others she is the epitome of irresponsibility and neglect.”81 Feminists’ attitudes toward the employment of mothers were based less on theory than on empirical research. The declared aim of the researchers was impartial data-gathering, but in fact they were also influenced by their own life history as academically qualified, middle-class professional women who often struggled with the new dilemma summed up in the phrase “women’s two roles.” Évelyne Sullerot—whom we have already met as a leader of the birthcontrol movement—was born in 1924 into a French Protestant family, spent her adolescent years in the Resistance, and upon the death of her mother took on responsibility for her family. After the war she trained as a teacher, but gave up this career to raise four children. Later, having found a new vocation as a volunteer in the cause of birth control, she continued her studies and became a highly successful academic sociologist.82 Alva Myrdal (whom we have met in earlier chapters) had produced three children, founded an education college, and authored several books, but until the 1950s was still chiefly known as the wife of the prominent sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who became a diplomat. In 1948, her life seemed at a standstill, for her own professional work had been interrupted by her husband’s move to a position with the United Nations in Geneva, and she had no occupation but that of housewife and hostess. “She entered a period of desperate powerlessness that I did not recognize at the time but understood later,” recalled her daughter, Sissela Bok, “She felt, I believe, buried alive, locked into the superficial role of hostess while shielding a wifely role that had become nothing but a mask.”83 When she herself was offered a job with the United Nations, she took it in 1949, even though this involved leaving her family for Paris and later New York—a decision for which her daughters, then aged thirteen and fifteen, never completely forgave her.84 The Dutch sociologist A.J. Schellekens-Ligthart, who in 1957 published one of the first studies of Dutch working mothers, was also known as a model of a new and still controversial female life-plan. A highly competent academic researcher, Schellekens-Ligthart was also married and the mother of several children.85 The Swiss Iris Meyer-Huber, a native of Basel who qualified as a lawyer in 1941, married a fellow lawyer, Peter von Roten, in 1946. The couple shared a legal practice until the birth of their daughter, Hortensia, in 1952. In that year Iris von Roten temporarily withdrew from the legal profession and concentrated on the writing of her book, Frauen im Laufgitter (Women in the Play-Pen), which appeared in 1958. Meanwhile, she cooperated with her husband, who was elected to the Swiss parliament in 1949, and with the League of Swiss Women’s Associations (Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine) in preparing a parliamentary initiative to grant Swiss women the right to vote, which they alone among all their Western European contemporaries did not yet possess. The initiative was rejected by Swiss voters in 1959, and Swiss women did not win the right of suffrage until 1972.86

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The works produced by these and many other researchers asked why mothers worked outside the home. The results were based on the responses of mothers themselves, often supplemented by detailed studies of the subjects’ workplaces, households, and communities. The subjects included both middle-class and working-class women, and the researchers acknowledged and analyzed class differences. Working-class mothers, such as the British factory hands interviewed by Pearl Jephcott, emphasized that they worked chiefly in order to earn money. Nonetheless, most asserted that employment was also a choice, for under conditions of full male employment few married women who were living with their husbands needed work to survive. Rather, the wages of mothers served to enhance the family’s standard of living by making it possible to purchase the consumer goods that, after wartime shortages, were now finally accessible.87 Even in Germany, where so many families were fatherless, researchers gave scant attention to the single mothers and widows who did not fit into this bright and shining picture of newfound affluence.88 Many working-class mothers complained that domesticity was boring, particularly when the children were in school and the mothers had “nothing to look at but these four walls.” They enjoyed the sociability of the workplace: “you get a laugh mixing with the girls.”89 But, despite a strong preference for employment, these women identified themselves chiefly as wives and mothers, were in general not ambitious for advancement, often chose to work part time when their children were of school age, and admitted to guilt about the effects of their working on their families and households.90 By contrast, middle-class women with university degrees, and particularly professionals who had worked before marriage, often expressed frustration at what they considered the waste of their talents in the home. “I certainly think that it is a pity that so many women, because they want a family, are more or less forced to spend their time doing domestic work, when they might be doing something more socially useful,” said a British participant in a survey by Judith Hubback entitled Wives who Went to College. Educated women made bad wives and mothers, said another participant, because “we are doing work for which we are entirely untrained and usually dislike.”91 For these women, few of whom mentioned financial motives, work was primarily a psychological necessity, and domestic obligations often an obstacle to overcome rather than, as for the working-class women, a primary obligation. Starting in 1936, Alva Myrdal had included among her many projects an ambitious study of women and employment, which was sponsored by the International Federation of Business Women. The research, which involved interviewing women in three countries—Sweden, the United States, and Britain—was complete by 1950, but Myrdal’s new career with the United Nations left her little time to write. Therefore, she entrusted the writing of Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, which appeared in 1956, to a collaborator, the British sociologist Viola Klein, who had already published a book on gender relations.92 Klein and Myrdal began by defining the maternal

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dilemma: modern women “were guided by conflicting aims: on the one had they want . . . to develop their personalities to the full . . . on the other hand, most women want a home and family of their own.”93 Though they took the social context into account, the authors presented this chiefly as a personal problem that could be solved by women’s own efforts. Motherhood, they proposed, should no longer be regarded as a life-long task, but as a phase which could be planned in the new perspective afforded by women’s lengthened life-expectancy. Female lives must be lived in three phases: the first devoted to study and career training, the second to full-time child-rearing and family, and the third to full-time work. For Myrdal, the “phase model” was new, for in her earlier book, Family and Nation (1940), she had advocated lifetime employment supported by child-care and other social services. In the 1950s, however, she and Klein seem to have been persuaded by current psychological theories that the “impersonal” atmosphere of a day-care center might reduce the child’s “sense of security, and lead to other undesirable results,” and that therefore “mothers should take care of their own children during the first years of their lives.”94 The end of the second phase, which (assuming that a woman married in her early twenties, had three children at two-year intervals, and returned to work when the youngest was nine) would normally occur when the woman was about forty years old, would probably be marked by an “acute emotional crisis.” But the retired mother’s feeling of “emptiness and lack of purpose,” could be dispelled by returning to what was assumed to be a rewarding career.95 Women could “have it all”—just not all at the same time. Myrdal and Klein did not regard careers for mothers purely as therapy; indeed, they insisted that, in a rationally planned society, no adult should remain idle, and that women after the period of “active motherhood” had not only the right but also the duty to work outside the home.96 Nonetheless, only well-off professional women—especially Myrdal, a native of prosperous and benevolent Sweden—could have seen employment chiefly as a psychological rather than an economic necessity. And only in the full-employment economy of the 1950s could anyone have assumed that the woman who re-entered the labor market at forty, after twenty years of absence, would be able to build a career. But the authors declared that no major “change in the organization of work,” but only a change in women’s attitudes, would solve the maternal dilemma. “The best of both worlds has come within their grasp,” wrote the authors, “if only they reach out for it.”97 How did this optimistic prospect correspond to the real lives of working mothers? Many social science researchers drew a more realistic picture. Mothers who worked outside the home seldom actually took a break for twenty years, as Myrdal and Klein recommended. Many returned when their youngest child entered school, and some never quit at all; for example, by 1974 about one-third of German working mothers continued full-time work throughout the childbearing period.98 And, rather than “phasing” employment and motherhood, they combined both in a work week that sometimes exceeded ninety hours.99

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Although some women—particularly in countries such as Germany, which gave little social support to working mothers—complained openly of fatigue, stress, and health problems, others took pride in the seamless performance of their double role. A.J. Schellekens-Ligthart, a Dutch sociologist who wrote the first study of working mothers in the Netherlands, assured the public in a newspaper interview that, however absorbing her academic career, her family came first. “When the children come home from school, they almost always find me here. I have lots of time for them after school, and when they are in school I have plenty of time for work and study. The evenings are for my husband—I can hear all about his work and his music, and when he is playing in a concert, I am there.”100 Contrary to the expectations of Myrdal and Klein that entry into the labor market would radicalize women, the new way of life often seemed merely another version of self-effacing femininity.101 But the effect produced by Myrdal and Klein was in fact more subversive. By identifying motherhood as one of two equally valuable “roles” rather than as women’s primary function, they had separated it from biological determinism and classified it as a cultural construction which was open to change and transformation. And if women’s roles could change with culture, then why not also those of men? Although in the 1930s Alva Myrdal had urged fathers as well as mothers to share child-care responsibilities, by 1956 her confidence in men had diminished and she had put the burden entirely on women. But this bias was soon pointed out by Eva Moberg, a young Swedish literary critic who was also active in liberal political circles. “We have to get away from the ‘two roles of women,’ ” she wrote in 1962. “Both men and women have one chief role, that of a human being. And in the role of human being, it is a moral duty, but also a great satisfaction . . . to take good care of our offspring.”102 Alva Myrdal agreed; in the preface to a volume edited by two Swedish social scientists, Edmund Dahlström and Rita Liljeström, she referred to “the two roles of men” whose “role in the family must be radically enlarged.”103 In his own contribution to this book, which was published in 1962, Dahlström concluded that the welfare state should no longer encourage a division of labor which allotted child-care to women and employment to men, but should instead enable both men and women to work in and outside the home.104 In the mid-1960s Swedish social policy was reoriented toward the working couple through the provision of public child-care and other social services.105 Other responses to Women’s Two Roles were more conservative: for example, the German sociologist Elisabeth Pfeil considered that Klein and Myrdal were wrong to imply that paid work could have equal priority with maternal obligations.106 And Évelyne Sullerot raised another disturbing question: though working mothers themselves usually assured her that their husbands were supportive, her experience with the husbands themselves suggested otherwise. The couples who attended her lectures on women and employment, she recalled, often found themselves quarreling vociferously in the question period.107 By 1970, the work of married women outside the home had begun to be accepted by public opinion.

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Considering the monotonous and unrewarding character of most waged work—especially of the jobs open to women—it is surprising that feminists should have seen employment in itself as the road to emancipation. This problem was noted by Simone de Beauvoir, who contrasted the interesting careers of middle-class professionals with the monotonous tasks of assemblyline workers. “There is no doubt that they get economic independence only as a class which is economically oppressed; and on the other hand, their jobs in the factory do not relieve them of housekeeping burdens.”108 However the middle-class origins and professional ambitions of most of these researchers inclined them toward an optimistic view of what they hailed as a new female life-plan. Problems that faced even the best qualified women—discrimination in hiring, pay inequality, gender segregation, sexual harassment—were hardly mentioned. Instead, the mere act of entering the workplace was hailed as a step toward personal liberation. “She claims the right to decide, or at least to have some voice in the decision, whether she will work when she is a mother or not. And this assertion of her individuality changes her consciousness and gives her life a new meaning,” concluded the German researcher Elizabeth Pfeil.109 Through re-entry into the work world, said the British sociologist Judith Hubback, woman must “evolve from exclusive femaleness towards the fulfillment of a wider personality.”110

“B  M O B” Although this era’s discussion of the maternal role was in a long tradition, the social changes of the postwar era brought it into a new phase. Earlier generations of feminists had assumed that the commitment of most women to motherhood was necessary to the future of society, which was otherwise threatened by a “twilight of parenthood.” But during the postwar baby boom such fears temporarily receded. Motherhood seemed to be undergoing a transformation from a lifetime identity to only one—and for some women, the less rewarding—aspect of a double role. Under these circumstances, would women continue to bear children? And, if so, then why? The context for the discussion of this question was set by popular psychologists who during this era shifted their focus from the personality of the child to the mother–child relationship. Continuing the trend toward defining childbearing as a source of personal satisfaction rather than a duty, many told women that the only valid reason for having children was the overwhelming sense of fulfillment that they derived from motherhood. “The provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood through the many phases of childhood . . . and knows that it is her care which has made this possible,” wrote John Bowlby.111 A woman who did not feel this “profound satisfaction” was often portrayed as a bad mother. Spock explained that effective child-rearing did not depend on objective knowledge—“you know more than you think you do,”

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he reassured mothers—but on the mother’s attitude. He warned that a mother who was not completely and spontaneously loving might raise a child who was, if not mentally disturbed, then at least “cold and unresponsive.”112 The British psychologist Donald Winnicott, also a highly respected authority, affirmed that “the mother’s pleasure has to be there or else the whole procedure is dead, useless and mechanical.”113 The shift of emphasis from objective factors such as hygiene and nutrition to the mother’s subjective state created an impossible standard—what mother, however devoted, could maintain a positive attitude day in and day out? And, like other theorists of this period, these psychologists assumed that all mothers lived in middle-class comfort and took no account of the many problems and crises that could disturb the emotional equilibrium of mothers in less fortunate circumstances.114 Thus even as they glorified motherhood, child psychologists strongly implied that many, even most women were unqualified for it. Widely cited works on the psychology of women transmitted the same message. According to the Freudian analyst Helene Deutsch, who devoted the second volume of her massive work on women’s sexual lives (published in 1945) to the topic of motherhood, narcissism—the love of self—and masochism—the need for self-sacrifice—were core elements of the female personality. By perfectly merging her own ego with that of her child, the mother could gratify both of these needs.115 But unresolved “masculine wishes,” among which Deutsch classified all drives toward individual development, could impair this delicate adjustment. And few modern women could ignore the claims of the ego. “There is hardly a woman,” Deutsch remarked, “in whom the normal psychic conflicts do not result in a pathologic distortion, at some point, of the biologic process of motherhood.”116 However perfectly performed, moreover, the maternal role offered no permanent satisfaction: the more self-sacrificing the mother, the greater her sense of loss when her child grew up and became independent. The only defense against this threat was the production of numerous children, a path that was now “largely barred as a result of cultural influences.” Deutsch implied that, for most women, the maternal dilemma was insoluble—motherhood stood in the way of individual self-realization, and often brought more psychic conflict than pleasure.117 Simone de Beauvoir, who cited Deutsch copiously, turned the psychologist’s theory on its head by attributing the mother’s misery not to her own failed personal adjustment but to the maternal role itself. For Beauvoir, as for her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, full membership in the human race involved the transcendence of the body and its limitations through the development of an autonomous self expressed through intellectual or artistic creativity. But she asserted that under existing conditions transcendence was attainable only by males, who were not encumbered but empowered by their reproductive function: “the advantage that man enjoys . . . is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male.”118 Woman by contrast was trapped in immanence and the body, alienated from her creative potential and enslaved to “her whole organic structure that

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is adapted for the perpetuation of the species.”119 Deluded by the culture’s glorification of motherhood, women might believe that child-rearing itself was a path to transcendence. But Beauvoir rejected this possibility. When they were both adolescents, her friend Zaza had declared that “ ‘bringing nine children into the world as Mama has done is just as good as writing books.’ ” Beauvoir recalled that she “couldn’t see any common denominator between these two modes of existence. . . . To have children, who in turn would have more children, was simply to go on playing the same old tune ad infinitum; the scholar, the artist, the writer created other worlds, all sweetness and light, in which everything had purpose. That was where I wished to spend my life.”120 Though conceding to Deutsch that women bore children in order to gratify narcissistic wishes, Beauvoir condemned this as a false and harmful fantasy. The vicarious identification of one individual with another could only violate the right of both to develop in freedom. Not only could maternity not confer “transcendence by proxy,” but it was not “enough to crown a woman’s life.”121 In a famous formulation, she characterized maternity as “a strange mixture of narcissism, altruism, idle daydreaming, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.”122 Beauvoir broke decisively with earlier feminist theorists and their vision of a chosen, enlightened and socially supported “new motherhood.” To be sure, she suggested in her conclusion that the position of mothers might be improved in some future socialist state, but such utopian visions had lost most of their credibility in the postwar era, and she did not develop this idea. Her central message was pessimistic: the maternal dilemma (at least under existing conditions) was insoluble, for maternity was the enemy of autonomy. “There is one feminine function which is almost impossible to exercise in freedom,” she concluded, “and that is maternity.”123 The Second Sex was widely read and exceedingly controversial. Beauvoir was attacked from all sides: conservative critics invoked religious doctrines, socialists the importance of reproduction to society, communists the evils of “bourgeois individualism.”124 Some feminists asserted that motherhood was a rewarding task, and criticized Beauvoir’s identification of human potential with maleness.125 But others affirmed and developed her insights. In 1958, the appearance of a book entitled Frauen im Laufgitter (Women in the Playpen), by the lawyer and activist Iris von Roten, caused almost as sensational a reaction in Switzerland as Beauvoir’s book in France. Von Roten, who had read Beauvoir, also aimed to gain an overview of the “problems of women’s lives, that arise from the double role—individual person, female person—in the context of male-dominated society.”126 Von Roten broke decisively with the mainstream Swiss women’s movement, whose propaganda in favor of woman suffrage featured a domestic and nonthreatening image of the Swiss woman. Like Beauvoir, von Roten characterized motherhood as a “burden without dignity” (“Bürde ohne Würde”). Conventional idealization of mothers thinly disguised men’s disgust for women’s reproductive functions: “they regard themselves as fully superior to what they regard as the shame of the female sex.”127 And as for mothers’

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fabled devotion to their children, it too often became a kind of vicarious satisfaction for women whose lives were otherwise empty. This kind of “mother-love,” which was threatened by children’s independence and autonomy, was more likely to have harmful than beneficial effects.128 When it was published in 1958, the book attracted so much negative criticism that von Roten’s former allies in the League of Swiss Women’s Associations immediately distanced themselves from her radical ideas, which they feared would discredit the suffrage movement.129 In the 1960s, many younger feminists saw their own situations reflected in Beauvoir’s book. When the British sociologist Anne Oakley read The Second Sex, she had two small children. “I was trying to adjust to the role of full-time mother and not succeeding very well. . . . I found it really inspiring, in common with many other people—many other women.”130 Joyce Goodfellow, another British reader of the same generation, also concluded that Beauvoir was right: “I feel the book should carry a health warning: ‘Beware of breeding; it cramps ambition, intellectual opportunity, and the bank balance, and it isn’t fair to the children.’ ”131 Whatever their opinions of Beauvoir, her readers agreed that she had broken the taboos that still constrained the discussion of motherhood. “There was nothing else that did what The Second Sex did in terms of analyzing why women are in the state they are in,” remarked Ann Oakley.132 Encouraged by Beauvoir, mothers of the 1960s often openly expressed ambivalent feelings. They complained about the social conditions of the postwar era—cramped housing, a lack of child-care facilities, and the dangers of an urban environment now dominated by automobile traffic—which afforded mothers little relief from the company of their young children. But their problems were even more psychological than practical. “I remember having spent four years and three months without ever being without small children for more than a few hours,” wrote Évelyne Sullerot. “Such a task requires the extinction of all personal life. One loses the sense of time. With increasing sleep deprivation, the days go by like a dream. . . . The frustration of every continuous effort gives rise to a peculiar sense of monotony and confusion. Repetitions, interruptions, new starts.”133 A young British mother, Val Charlton, recalled that the birth of her son in 1970 was “a tremendous shock . . . I really hated it; I loved him, but I hated the way of life. I was isolated, I was in the place by myself, I thought I was going insane.” Even before she joined a feminist group, Charlton had decided that “this is ridiculous, we can’t live like this, we need to do something about it.”134 As had their predecessors of the interwar years, feminists of the 1960s debunked the myth of mother-love by focusing on the pathological side of the mother–child relationship. In 1967, a new feminist movement was initiated in the Netherlands by an influential essay entitled “Woman and her Discontents” (“Dit onbehagen bij de vrouw”) by the literary critic Joke KoolSmit, who a year later joined the founders of a new organization called the “Men’s and Women’s Society” (Mann-Vrouw Matschaapij). Kool-Smit

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declared that motherhood could never be a creative activity, for the mother did not “create” her children—whether they were smart or stupid, difficult or easy to raise was largely a matter of luck.135 In 1966 the British literary scholar and Marxist theoretician Juliet Mitchell charged that the channeling of women’s pent-up energies into child-rearing damaged their children. “Anything the child does is . . . a threat to the mother herself, who has renounced her autonomy through this misconception of her reproductive role. There are few more precarious ventures on which to base a life.”136 And in Penelope Mortimer’s novel of 1962, The Pumpkin Eater, the mother of a large family realized that, having sacrificed her personal development, she had nothing to give her children: “In fact, lacking now my own instincts, values, and beliefs, I had nothing to offer them, and what they offered me— dependence, love, trust—seemed a monumental responsibility which I could no longer bear.”137 How could mothers and children be freed of this pathological bind? One solution was to shorten the period of full-time motherhood and allow the woman to return as soon as possible to her interrupted career. In the 1950s, almost all advice to mothers, including the influential work of Klein and Myrdal, had discouraged day care for children under school age. And mothers seem to have agreed, for few worked full time when their children were young.138 Socialist and communist women’s groups campaigned for the expansion of public day care, but without much success. In fact, day-care centers had acquired a negative image as the last resort of the poor and desperate. But by contrast, working mothers of school-age children asserted that their children did not suffer, but on the contrary gained in independence and self-reliance.139 By 1960, Bowlby’s theory of “maternal deprivation” came under an ever more intense critique. Among the first and most vocal critics was Iris von Roten, who wrote in 1958 that “the male-supremacist arrangement through which mothers are responsible for all their children’s needs for a quartercentury . . . is doubly tragic. For it is in the interests neither of mothers nor of children.” As long as children were sure of their parents’ affection, she continued, they were better off in a well-run day-care center than in an isolated home.140 Results based on institutionalized children in wartime, wrote the Norwegian sociologist Åse Grude Skard, were not applicable to the more secure lives of children whose mothers worked predictable hours and left them with loving substitute caretakers. Besides, the mother too had needs: “a woman is more than just a milieu for her child or her children—she has her own value as a human being and the problem must also be considered for what may serve her interests and development.”141 Many authors of the 1960s urged their readers (in the words of the French feminists Texier and Michel) to “distinguish between the quality and the quantity of contacts between mother and child.”142 The establishment of experimental day-care centers, often staffed by parents, was among the first projects of “new feminist” groups after 1968.143

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Another way of lightening the burdens of maternity was to expand the role of fathers. In the interwar era, as we have seen, feminist theorists had advocated the transformation of the patriarch into a nurturing parent. Not until the postwar era, however, did the laws of most countries support a flexible division of parental labor. In Sweden, social scientists coined the phrase “sex roles” to replace the customary definitions of motherhood and fatherhood. “Both men and women have one role, that of a human being,” asserted the sociologist Edmund Dahlström in 1962. “For both sexes, this role would include child care.”144 The sociologist Per-Olaf Tiller reversed Bowlby’s theory to lament the absence of fathers from their children’s lives, which left their sons without male role models.145 The concept of egalitarian parenthood was brought into Swedish policy discussions through the work of the “Sex-Role group,” which was founded in 1964 and included influential academics, journals, and leaders of parties and trade-unions.146 By 1968, the equalization of parental roles had become a goal of the new feminist movements in all countries. The French birth-control activist Catherine Valabrègue noted in that year that laws would soon give mothers and fathers similar rights and responsibilities—why should they not drop outworn roles and create a new style of family life?147 Juliet Mitchell recommended the deconstruction of the nuclear family and its replacement by diverse households and institutional settings in which child-rearing responsibility could be shared by parents, teachers, and other adults.148 The Dutch feminist Joke Kool-Smit looked forward to the day when women could see themselves “first as human beings, and only secondly as women.”149 But was this idea of the “human” truly gender-neutral, or was it modeled on men’s lives? And in either case, what were its implications for motherhood—a distinctively female function? Did motherhood belong to a set of outworn expectations that the modern human being could simply cast off? This fear was expressed in 1949 by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had a wide readership in Europe. Mead speculated that the blurring of gender boundaries might threaten continuance of the human race, which required that “women had to be willing to accept men as lovers, live with them as wives, and conceive, bear, feed and cherish their children. Any society disappears which fails to make these demands on its members and to receive this much from them.”150 Many feminist writers of this era asserted that the desire for children was so deeply rooted that women would, of course, continue to become mothers. “The dearest desire of the majority of women will always be to have children,” wrote Valabrègue. But why, if motherhood plunged them into a painful dilemma? “The younger generation of women wish to become mothers—they wish to care for their families and surround themselves with harmony,” stated Elisabeth Pfeil, “and at the same time they want to contribute to the support of their families and exercise a profession.”151 To a woman caught in this dilemma, maternity might well bring not the fulfillment, but rather the splitting of the self. The British sociologist Viola Klein argued that pressures to reconcile the

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demands of her two roles by acting “confident and businesslike” in the workplace and “sensitive, adaptable, unassertive . . . domestic . . . and if possible not too intelligent” in the home doomed the modern woman to emotional distress.152 Beauvoir’s contemporary, Françoise d’Eaubonne, pictured the modern woman in the grip of a wrenching conflict between mind and body, striving “to reconcile the subjectivity that she possesses as a human being and the object that she becomes as a servant of love and the species.”153 Subjectivity as a human being, objectification as a mother—these were antitheses that could not be reconciled. Even before the rise of a new feminist movement around 1968, a few thinkers directly stated that the refusal of motherhood was a step toward autonomy. Chief among these was Simone de Beauvoir, who rejected Mead’s contention that women must remain in the “iron grip of the species.”154 Though she conceded that motherhood, when “freely assumed and completely wanted,” might be rewarding, Beauvoir stated plainly that under existing conditions, it was slavery—an opinion that she never changed.155 In 1986, the year before Beauvoir’s death, she was asked by Yolanda Patterson whether she still believed that “maternity prevents women from finding her own identity.” Beauvoir responded that “as it exists today, I think so. Because the woman is too much of a slave.”156 As she recounted in her memoirs, she and Sartre decided against parenthood early in their relationship. Not only did she feel no narcissistic desire to rediscover herself in a child, but she refused to engage in “a purposeless and unjustifiable increase in the world’s population . . . I never felt as though I was holding out against motherhood: it simply was not my natural lot in life, and by remaining childless I was fulfilling my proper function.”157 The postwar era, which began in 1945 with a return to motherhood, ended noisily in 1968 when a new generation claimed the right to refuse it. “There is no reason, except the moral prejudice that women who do not have children are shirking a responsibility, why all women should consider themselves bound to breed,” wrote Germaine Greer, the British author of a widely read book, The Female Eunuch (1970).158 “Boss of my own belly!” (Baas in eigen buik!)” read the placards carried by Dutch feminists who picketed a gynecological congress in 1970.159 Should we have children, or have none? The choice belongs to us alone.

proclaimed German demonstrators in 1971.160 “The only rational attitude toward what society has made of maternity is to refuse it,” declared a French manifesto entitled “Slave Motherhood” in 1972.161 The words of this vocal minority signaled a broader trend. By 1966, the end of the postwar baby boom was marked by a slight but noticeable fall in birthrates in all of the Western European countries. From a postwar peak of 18.3 births per 1,000 population in 1959, France’s birthrate declined to 17.4 in 1966; that of the Netherlands from 21.3 in 1961 to 19.2 in 1966; that of England and Wales from 18.5 in 1964 to 17.7 in 1966.162 The continuation of these trends

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would result in birthrates below replacement rate by the mid-1980s and in negative growth rates after 2000.163 The “twilight of parenthood,” predicted by writers of the interwar era, had begun. The thinkers of the postwar era provided a basis for the new feminism that developed after 1968. Their contributions were important. By repudiating the cult of patriotic motherhood they defined childbearing as an individual choice, which might be supported but should not be constrained by the state. By validating individual experience, they laid the epistemological foundation for a new feminist scholarship. Nonetheless, their ideology of gender equality raised as many questions as that of the earlier generations who had stressed gender difference. For in their zeal to avoid biological determinism, the postwar thinkers had created an ideal of the “human” which in fact was modeled on male occupational, sexual, and ethical patterns. “Maternity, far from being presented as the supreme destiny of women,” suggested d’Eaubonne, “should be relegated to the important, but non-essential, status of paternity in the lives of men—that is to say, the fulfillment of a life that is already sufficient in itself.”164 The living out of this ideal brought, not a gender-neutral equality, but new forms of subordination. The “three-phase” life-plan, the equation of career success with emancipation, the double burden—all these were attempts to fit female existence into male dominated structures of work and family life. Even the renunciation of motherhood was an admission of inequality—for men did not experience the same pressure to choose between career success or other aspirations and parenthood. And in the world of work that women now entered in great numbers, they would encounter new forms of discrimination, inequality, and marginalization. Therefore, a new generation of feminists soon discovered the difficulties with the assertion of a gender-neutral, “human” identity that was in practice male-identified. Some decided that a radical critique of male supremacy could only come from an oppositional position—a positive female identity. In 1970, the Italian group Rivolta Femminile reclaimed motherhood as a distinctive aspect of that identity: “The transmission of life, respect for life, awareness of life are intense experiences for woman and values that she claims as her own.” And the discussion turned again to the maternal dilemma—to the conflict between the claims of the generically human and the distinctively feminine aspects of identity. “Woman’s first reason for resentment against society is being forced to face maternity as a dilemma.”165 The debate on the meanings of gender equality and gender difference would be continued by a new feminist movement.

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etween 1970 and the present lies a great deal of history, which included many changes in the status of women and of mothers. Nonetheless, the old problems persist. And of all these problems, the maternal dilemma is among the most intractable. The difficulty of reconciling maternal and familial responsibilities with individual aspirations is still a major obstacle to the equality of women in Western Europe and elsewhere. In this book, we have seen how the maternal dilemma was defined and debated by feminists during the early and middle years of the twentieth century. What light can this history throw on the present? First of all, our story calls many prevailing views of the relationship of feminism and motherhood into question. These views fall roughly into two categories. Post-structuralist theorists criticize feminists of past and present for purveying (in Judith Butler’s words) “universalistic claims” based on the “ostensibly transcultural structures of femininity, maternity, sexuality,” and thus creating a “normative and exclusionary” category of “women” that ignores differences of class, race, and sexual orientation.”1 This assertion that feminists were and still are too preoccupied with motherhood and other distinctively female functions is contradicted by the more popular trend known as “post-feminism.” Its proponents accuse feminists of a disrespect for the “real concerns of women,” the most important of which they identify as motherhood and family life.2 Neither of these accusations is borne out by the complex reality. It is true that the feminists discussed in this book sometimes—by no means always— showed insensitivity to differences of class, religion, and sexual orientation among women. It is not true, however, that they shared a “normative” conception of female nature that was centered on motherhood. On the contrary, their views of motherhood were exceedingly diverse. Maternalists such as Ellen Key exalted it as “the most perfect realization of human potential that the species has reached”; individualists such as Simone de Beauvoir dismissed it as “a strange mixture of narcissism, altruism, idle daydreaming, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.”3 Some feminists became mothers and others remained childless. Some were married; some were single; some lived in nonmarital relationships with partners of the same or the opposite sex. Some had large and some had small families. Some advocated, and others opposed, birth-control and abortion. Some pictured women as naturally gifted for motherhood, while others deplored their ineptitude. Some

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believed that children should be raised by their mothers, and others that they were better off in day-care centers; some urged all women to become mothers, and others wished to confine motherhood to a qualified elite. Some portrayed child-rearing as a blissful, others as a hellish experience. Some believed that mothers should be paid for childbearing, others that they should be employed outside the home. Some stigmatized unmarried and childless women as “abnormal”; most defended them against discrimination. Despite the considerable diversity among feminists’ views, certain trends are perceptible over the period covered by this book. One of these certainly led away from an essentialist view of motherhood as biological destiny or moral imperative. Increasingly, feminists thought of motherhood as a role— an identity that was not innate but assumed, and might be refused or combined with other roles. From the beginning of our period, some feminists asserted that childbearing and child-rearing was not enough to fill up the life or engage the talents of the modern woman—she needed some other focus. Many agreed with contemporary psychologists that an excessively intense or exclusive commitment to motherhood signaled maladjustment or mental disturbance. By 1970, the picture of motherhood as one of “women’s two roles”—the other usually defined as paid work—could be found in most feminist literature. Another trend of our period—the rationalization of child-rearing as a science—likewise distanced it from any form of biological determinism. Though only mothers could bear children, the rearing of these children might—and some experts believed that it should—be entrusted to other adults, even to men. The notion of childbearing and child-rearing as services to the state—even as a female analogue to military service—was advanced by some feminists, particularly in the period before World War I. However, they did not imply that motherhood was a biological destiny—it was a choice, for which women required incentives in the form of subsidies, social services, or expanded political rights. By the end of our period, this cult of patriotic motherhood had been discredited by the traumatic experience of totalitarian regimes. Increasingly, feminists saw parenthood as an individual decision that was motivated by desire rather than duty. For those who had no such desire, childlessness emerged as a viable—though still highly controversial— option. But by portraying motherhood as a choice that might sometimes be refused, these feminists did not downgrade its importance. Precisely because it was a choice, many asserted that it could for the first time become a vocation. And they emphasized that women’s reluctance to bear children did not always arise from an aversion to motherhood. Under existing conditions, the obligations of motherhood conflicted with women’s other aspirations, whether to education, career success, financial or personal independence, or other goals. Because these feminists believed that motherhood was a cultural construction that had evolved throughout prehistory and history, they insisted that the conditions under which women bore and raised children should and must be changed. We have seen that they proposed a host of

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solutions to the maternal dilemma, including new forms of social support for mothers, collective child-care, new forms of the family and household, the enhancement of the father’s role in child-rearing, the sequencing of childbearing and career obligations, and many others. In our own day, these solutions are still discussed. But the dilemma remains. Many feminists of the period 1890–1970 portrayed motherhood as the distinctive contribution of the female citizen. The cult of patriotic motherhood offends today’s sensibilities. But, as the political scientist Carole Pateman points out, “motherhood and citizenship remain intimately linked,” for the survival of nations depends on the willingness of women to bear children.5 Today’s Western European governments recognize that parenthood is an individual choice that the state can encourage but cannot compel. The nations of Western Europe have made great progress toward such goals as equal opportunity in education and in the workplace, universal access to contraception and sex education, the right to abortion, the elimination of the disadvantages suffered by unmarried parents and their children, and the acceptance of diverse forms of the family—which now include same-sex couples, single parents, and communal households—as suitable environments for children. And despite remaining restrictions on reproductive choice, women control their fertility to a degree that is unprecedented in history. European governments encourage childbearing through positive incentives such as child allowances, generous maternity and parental leaves, and government-subsidized services for children. In some ways, the maternal dilemma can be seen in a positive light, as the result of these favorable circumstances. For the greater her freedom of choice and the broader her options, the more complex is the individual’s decision for or against childbearing. In the present, increases alike in control over fertility and in women’s ambitions for career success and self-realization have made this decision increasingly difficult: “What was once the most natural thing in the world,” writes the German sociologist Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, “has now become very complicated, at least among certain groups. Nothing is spontaneous any more, everything is considered.”6 But mothers’ choices are also constrained by the continued existence of gender inequality. The history of the twentieth century has been marked as much by continuity as by change, and the issues confronting women in 2000 were surprisingly similar to those that they faced in 1970. “While many people have come to believe that the situation of women has been greatly improved over the past twenty years,” wrote Barbara Helfferich, the Secretary General of the European Women’s Lobby in Brussels, in 2000, “current statistics and anecdotal evidence paint a different picture.”7 In the European Union, overall employment rates for women are steadily increasing. According to one recent estimate, labor force participation rates for women between the ages of 30 and 34 years ranged from 61 percent in Italy to 83 percent in Sweden.8 The European Commission reported that about 70 percent of European women of working age were employed in 1997.9

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And mothers are almost as likely to be employed as other women in similar age-groups. For example, in France in 2000, 81 percent of women with one dependent child, 69 percent of those with two children, and 49.3 percent of those with three or more children were employed.10 Women’s work is important to their families—in 1996, 59 percent provided half or more of their households’ total income—and most women prefer employment to full-time housekeeping even in the absence of economic pressure.11 However, inequalities in pay and status persist; in France, for example, the average difference between men’s and women’s salaries was 27 percent in 1998.12 Women tend to be concentrated in low-paying and gender-segregated jobs; they are more likely than men to work part time (sometimes by choice); and they are more vulnerable than men to unemployment. The reason that is most often given for these disadvantages is still the maternal dilemma—the problem of combining work obligations and family life. “Having children is highly relevant to women’s participation in the labor market,” stated a report of the Economic and Social Committee of the European Union in 1997. Many European governments now subsidize child care. For example, in 1990 the majority of children below school age in France, Belgium, and Denmark spent at least some time in public child-care facilities.13 But recent budgetary crises have limited the growth of all public services.14 In 2000, the European Union’s Economic and Social Committee urged that “it is essential for men to shoulder their share of responsibility for home, children, and the elderly.”15 However, the role of men in the home has not increased in proportion to that of women in the workplace. In Sweden, where parental leave is available to both women and men, only one-fifth of men, but almost all women took advantage of this provision in the period between 1974 and 1990.16 With the increase in single-mother households, many children also grow up without fathers or other stable male caretakers. As it did in the past, the prospect of motherhood still shapes the mentalities and life-plans of women. Despite governmental and private measures that encourage girls to enter occupations previously dominated by men, they still tend to choose typically “female” occupations in education, the social services, retail sales, and office work, partly because they believe that these jobs, which offer flexible hours and the possibility of part-time work, can be easily combined with motherhood.17 Women are rare in the top echelons of industry, business, the academic world, and politics. And the lives of employed mothers are exhausting. “Every day, they have to combine two types of work: professional work and maternal work,” wrote Yvonne Knibiehler of French professional women. “And each one affects the other. The have to organize their time: full-time, part-time, optional time, compulsory time, convenient time, saved time, parental time, free time. . . each week, each day, each year, over the course of their lives. Time becomes their obsession.”18 Recently, a new “population crisis” has brought the conditions under which mothers raise children into the news. Birthrates have fallen off steadily since 1966 and are now are among the lowest in the world: as of 2003, the

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average number of children born to each Belgian woman was 1.48; to each German woman 1.29; to each French woman 1.8; to each Italian women 1.2; to each Swedish woman 1.29; to each British woman 1.6.19 In an eerie reprise of earlier natalist rhetoric, pessimistic pundits predict the dying out of European nations. “Europe’s population is shrinking and greying—with grim consequences,” proclaimed The Economist in 2003. The bankruptcy of pension funds, a struggle between generations for resources, even Europe’s “slow and inexorable exit from history” are numbered among the possible consequences of these demographic trends.20 In Germany, a forthcoming book by Elisabeth Niejahr is entitled “The Republic of the Old” (Altenrepublik). 21 In this context, the warnings of earlier generations of feminists that women who are forced to choose between child-rearing and individual selfrealization may avoid motherhood take on a new relevance. European governments propose yet more family-friendly social policies as a solution. But the effect of such measures on birthrates is limited; European women are wary of natalism, which they associate with the authoritarian regimes of the past, and resist pressures to produce more children for the state.22 The improvement of material conditions, however important, is clearly not enough. The disadvantages suffered by mothers are due to a more basic problem—the continuance of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman called “our androcentric world.” Male experience is the norm upon which all institutions of Western society—education, the family, the workplace—are based. Women are now allowed to take on roles previously reserved for men. But the price of integration into the male world is increased stress and conflict. Expected both to live up to male norms and to fulfill distinctively female functions such as motherhood, women are still caught between “two roles.” As Carole Pateman observes, only in a changed system in which women do not experience gender difference as disadvantage and subordination will the maternal dilemma be resolved.23 However, an interpretation of low birthrates that focused exclusively on any one issue—including gender relations—would be oversimplified. As Knibiehler wisely reminds us, childbearing is not an industrial process that responds to economic conditions and market incentives. Nor is it a social problem that can be solved by public intervention. The decision to bear a child is more emotional than rational, and is driven by such psychological forces as the need for love, connection, and self-affirmation, the desire to re-live one’s own childhood, even a longing for continuity beyond one’s own death.24 And therefore maternalists such as Ellen Key, Nelly Roussel, or Dora Russell, who extolled the gratification and fulfillment to be gained from parenthood, cannot simply be dismissed as the purveyors of reactionary gender stereotypes. In our own era, both men and women aspire to these rewards. As conspicuous a present-day phenomenon as the refusal or limitation of childbearing is the growth in the genuine desire for children—a desire that can emerge only when childbearing is, or is thought to be, freely chosen. One sign of this desire is the overwhelming popularity—particularly in the rich countries of Europe and North America—of reproductive technologies that

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overcome infertility and promise children to the childless. The future may see the disruption of the entire concept of “motherhood”—who is the mother, the donor of the egg, the birth mother, the woman who raises the child? 25 And eugenics, now practiced not by states but by individual parents who aim to determine the characteristics of their offspring, has made a comeback. The “right of the child to choose its parents,” fanciful when asserted by Ellen Key at the turn of the twentieth century, is now seriously asserted as lawsuits on behalf of handicapped children charge parents with “wrongful birth.” Clearly these new technologies bring new dangers as well as new opportunities to mothers and families. The desire for children is encouraged by some aspects of Europe’s postindustrial culture. Unlike their American contemporaries, Western European women and men are now reevaluating the work ethic that defines individual worth through career success and financial gain. The demand for 35-hour work weeks, long vacations, and early retirement ages expresses a deep and widespread desire for more time to develop the emotional and affective side of life. More than ever, the home is a retreat from the workplace, and the family—which now exists in many different forms—is an environment for self-realization. Western adults still associate children with the qualities that they miss in themselves—spontaneity, curiosity, energy, imagination. Thus, as Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim points out, contemporary parents expect that child-rearing will fulfill their emotional needs and help them to live richer and more balanced life. “From their children they expect a kind of salvation,” writes Beck-Gernsheim of some parents, “and a cure for the pathologies of adulthood.”26 This brings us to the question we have addressed repeatedly in this book— why have children? According to the French historian Philippe Ariès, a profound attitudinal change may shape child-rearing and family life in the twenty-first century. As we have seen, the twentieth century began as “the century of the child.” The fall in birthrates and the decrease in the number of children per family—a trend that by the 1920s was common to all social classes—was motivated largely by concern for the child as an individual. Careful investment in the health and education of its children often served the interests of the family in upward social mobility. Ariès sees the “baby boom” after World War II as a response to unprecedented prosperity and security. It was also a period when the renewal of family life and reproduction had a strong emotional and political appeal. For Ariès the low birthrates after 1970 represent a new pattern. They might also be interpreted as the continuation of a cultural trend that began in the 1920s—the redefinition of parenthood from a duty to a form of self-fulfillment. Today the planning of reproduction focuses less than in the early years of the twentieth century on the welfare of the child and more on that of the parents, for whom child-rearing is but one of many priorities. As the family unit becomes less stable, moreover, the investment in its future through the rearing of a new generation becomes less important. This does not, of course, mean that today’s parents do not love their children. However, they tend to integrate the child into a

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total life-plan—in the words of Ariès, as “one of the various components which make it possible for adults to blossom as individuals.”27 In social policy, too, the child is no longer the supreme concern.28 In part, this is due to striking improvements in child health. High death rates and poor health among infants and children no longer threaten the survival of nations. Public attention is now focused on other periods of life—on the fetus and the gene, which are the objects of medical, scientific, and religious controversy, and upon the elderly, the fastest-growing group in all Western societies. If these trends continue, the twenty-first century will not be “the century of the child.” But what it will be, only time will tell. Whatever the future may bring, feminists in the present face many of the same challenges as were confronted by the generations whose lives and work we have considered. The “maternal dilemma” is not only still present, but is experienced by an increasing number of women. For the near future, at least, it will continue, for both women’s desire for children and their drive for individual self-realization are trends that are here to stay. In their approach to these issues, present-day feminists must wrestle with the same problems that perplexed earlier generations. How should we reconcile the social with the individual dimensions of reproduction? How can we emphasize the importance of motherhood as a “social function” while still defending it as an individual and personal decision? How can reproductive freedom be protected against the new pressures that may result in the future, as in the past, from natalist pressures? How can women’s claims to equal opportunity in the workplace be reconciled with their special needs as mothers? How can we create a child-friendly society without discriminating against those who prefer to remain childless? What new forms of family and community life will enable both men and women to participate in the joys and stresses of child-rearing? What are the opportunities offered to women by new reproductive technologies, and what are the dangers? In our approach to these questions, our knowledge of history provides us with invaluable resources. We can be guided by the wisdom of past generations and learn from their rich legacy.

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N    I 1. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, in Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen (New York: Random House, n.d.), Act III. 2. Nelly Roussel, untitled article, Les Annales de L’Arriège, July 19, 1905, in clippings collection, Fonds Roussel, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris (BMD). 3. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Claudia Koonz, “Introduction,” in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Claudia Koonz, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), xi–xiv (quotation xii). 4. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 58, 97. 5. Ellen Key, Über Liebe und Ehe, trans. Frances Maro (Berlin: Fischer, 1906), 222. 6. “Maternité esclave,” quoted in Yvonne Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle: Femmes, maternité, citoyenneté depuis 1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1997), 171; see also Yolanda Astarita Patterson, Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), 25. 7. Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648–676 (quotation 654). 8. Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs 14 (1988): 119–158 (quotation 152). 9. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), passim. 10. Riley, “Am I That Name?,” 1–17. 11. Karen Offen, “Challenging Male Hegemony: Feminist Criticism and the Context for Women’s Movements in the Age of European Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions,” in Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 11–30. 12. Hubertine Auclert, “Les Femmes dans l’État,” in Le Vote des Femmes (Paris: Giard and Brière, 1908), 22–26 (quotation 22). 13. Spain was ruled by dictatorships from 1923 to 1931 and from 1939 to 1975; Portugal from 1926 to 1974; Italy from 1922 to 1945; Germany from 1933 to 1945. 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 15. Cf. Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 16. Cf. George M. Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National History,” The Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 587–604; Ian Tyrell, “Ian Tyrell Responds,” American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 1068–1072; Hartmut Kaelble, Der

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17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

N    historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999). Theda Skocpol, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (April 1980): 174–197. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3; cf. Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, “Concepts and Issues,” in Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements, 3–10. John Knodel and Etienne van de Walle, “Lessons from the Past: Policy Implications of Historical Fertility Studies,” in Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds., The Decline of Fertility in Europe: The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 390–419. Collections of articles: Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993); Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Jane Lewis, ed., Women and Social Policies in Europe: Work, Family and the State (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993); Valerie Fildes, Lara Marks, and Hilary Marland, eds., Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Paletschek and PietrowEnnker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements; Johanna Gehmacher, Elizabeth Harvey, and Sophia Kernlein, eds., Zwischen Kriegen: Nationen, Nationalismen und Geschlechterverhältnisse in Mittel- und Osteuropa, 1918–1939 (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2004); Mary Jo Maynes et al., eds., Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1996). Comparative works: Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the US and France, 1890–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Silke Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen—Die Krise der Männer: Die Erwerbstätigkeit verheirateter Frauen in Deutschland und Schweden, 1919–1939 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2001); Teresa Kulawik, Wohlfahrtsstaat und Mutterschaft: Schweden und Deutschland, 1870–1912 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999); Wiebke Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat: Schweden und die Bundesrepublik im Vergleich, 1945–2000 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002); Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America, and Australasia, 1840–1920 (London and New York: Croom Helm and Barnes and Noble Books, 1977). Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London: Sage Publications, 1976), 115–175, 235–281; Marie-Louise Janssen-Jurreit, “Nationalbiologie, Sexualreform, und Geburtenrückgang—Über die Zusammenhänge von Bevölkerungspolitik und Frauenbewegung um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Gabriele Dietze, ed., Die Überwindung der Sprachlosigkeit: Texte aus der neuen Frauenbewegung (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1979), 139–175; Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 1–51 and passim.

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22. Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (1978): 9–65. 23. Karen Offen, “Minotaur or Mother? The Gendering of the State in early Third Republic France,” Conference on “Gender and the Origins of the Welfare State,” Harvard University, 1987, mimeographed. I am grateful to the author for allowing me to use this unpublished typescript. See also Offen, “Exploring the Sexual Politics of Republican Nationalism,” in Robert Tombs, ed., Nationhood and Nationalism in France from Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 195–209. 24. Elisabeth Badinter, Mother Love: Myth and Reality: Motherhood in Modern History [1980] (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 4. 25. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Introduction: Mother Worlds,” in Koven and Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World, 1–42 (quotation 2). 26. See e.g., Carol Smart, “Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex: The Regulation of Reproduction and Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” in Carol Smart, ed., Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood, and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 7–32 and other essays in this volume; and Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 208–215. 27. Hubertine Auclert, “Programme électoral des femmes,” La Citoyenne (August 1885), cited in Karen Offen, “Minotaur or Mother?” 28. Badinter, Mother Love, xxiii. 29. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999), 288–317 (quotation 316). 30. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood; A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962); Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London and New York: Longman, 1995). 31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], in Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York: Random House, 1967), 193. 32. George Alter, “Theories of Fertility Decline: a Non-Specialist’s Guide to the Current Debate,” in John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 13–27; John C. Caldwell, “The Delayed Western Fertility Decline: An Examination of English-Speaking Countries,” Population and Development Review 25 (September 1999): 479–513; Ron Lesthaeghe and Chris Wilson, “Modes of Production, Secularization, and the Pace of the Fertility Decline in Western Europe,” in Coale and Watkins, eds., The Decline of Fertility in Europe, 261–292. 33. See the chart in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 17; and Simon Szreter, “Falling Fertilities and Changing Sexualities in Europe since c. 1980: A Comparative Survey of National Demographic Patterns,” in Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma, eds., Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 159–194. 34. Francine van de Walle, “Infant Mortality and Demographic Transition,” in Coale and Watkins, eds., The Decline of Fertility in Europe, 201–233; and John Knodel, “Demographic Transitions in German Villages,” in Coale and Watkins, eds., The Decline of Fertility in Europe, 337–389. 35. Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 177. 36. Cf. Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 37. Hubertine Auclert, Les Femmes au gouvernail [1914] (Paris: Marcel Giard, 1923), 327.

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38. Cf. Caldwell, “The Delayed Western Fertility Decline.” 39. H.G. Wells, Socialism and the Family (London: A.C. Fifield, 1906), 57; on the legal revolution see e.g., George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982); Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor, 199–217; Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 40. Cf. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). 41. “Amended Draft: Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” quoted in Edward Fuller, The Rights of the Child: A Chapter in Social History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1951), 74. 42. For example, Davin, Growing Up Poor, 208–214. 43. Offen, “Challenging Male Hegemony,” 18. 44. Lady Sybil Smith, “Men are Men and Women are Women,” Votes for Women, August 26, 1910. 45. Mabel Atkinson, The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement (London: Fabian Society, 1914), 22, 24; see also Riley, “Am I that Name?” 55–56. 46. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Woman and the Law: A Series of Four Letters by Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy (London: Women’s Emancipation Union, 1896), 6. 47. Helene Stöcker, “Die neue Mutter,” in Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen (Minden: J.C.C. Bruns Verlag, 1905), 75–83 (quotation 76). 48. Mrs. Donald Shaw, “Woman’s Sphere—Past, Present and Future,” The Vote, February 24, 1912. 49. Lenore Davidoff, “The Family in Britain,” in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 71–129. 50. Shaw, “Woman’s Sphere.” 51. Wells, Socialism and the Family, 31. 52. Cf. Shari Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 225.



“A  W”: M  P  H

1. Ellis Ethelmer (Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy), Woman Free (Congleton: Women’s Emancipation Union, 1893), 5. For another discussion of the material contained in this chapter, see Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity: The Debate on the Origins of the Family in Europe and the United States, 1860–1914,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1085–1113. 2. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women [1859], rpt. in Millicent Garret Fawcett, ed., On Liberty, Representative Government, The Subjection of Women (New York: Oxford, 1912), 432. 3. Ernest Legouvé, Histoire Morale des Femmes (Paris: Didier, 1874), 7, 247; see also Karen Offen, “Ernest Legouvé and the Doctrine of ‘Equality and Difference’ for Women: A Case Study of Male Feminism in Nineteenth-Century French Thought,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 452–484. 4. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 597.

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5. Odette Laguerre, “Le Droit de la mère,” La Fronde, August 1, 1903. 6. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State [1883] (New York: International Publishers, 1942) (no translator given), 8. 7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], in Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York: Random House, 1939), 193. 8. Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Improving the Status of Women [1792], trans. and with an introduction by Timothy F. Sellner (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 93. 9. E.A. Casaubon, La Femme est la famille (Paris: Chez Gautier, 1834), 8; cf. Claire Goldberg Moses, “The Evolution of Feminist Thought in France, 1829–1889,” Ph.D. diss, George Washington University, 1978, 200–206; and Susan K. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803–1844 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 10. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women, The Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, Vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983). 11. Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law [1861] (London and New York: J.M. Dent), 1954, 100. See also Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 35–44; and Adam Kuper, “The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Patriarchal Theory,” in Alan Diamond, ed., The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99–110. 12. Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 109–200. 13. For example, Paula Webster, “Matriarchy: A Vision of Power,” in Rayna Rapp Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 141–156. “Bachofen’s work has been appropriately criticized for its lack of empirical data and its substitution of mythology for history” (p. 143). Of course, very little empirical data was available before 1861! 14. Johann Jakob Bachofen, “Lebens-Rückschau” [1854], in Johann Jakob Bachofen, Mutterrecht und Urreligion: Eine Auswahl, ed. Rudolf Marx (Stuttgart: A. Kroner, 1954), 1–18; in English translation as “My Life in Retrospect,” in Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 3–21 (quotation 11). 15. The original edition is Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaicratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (Stuttgart: Krais and Hoffmann, 1861); it is reprinted in Johann Jakob Bachofens gesammelte Werke, Vols. 2 and 3 (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1943). A useful Englishlanguage compilation of excerpts from Bachofen’s unwieldy opus is Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1967. 16. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, 79 (quotations are from the English translation of Ralph Manheim). 17. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, 80. 18. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, 100. 19. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, 109. 20. Joan Bamberger, “The Myth of Matriarchy,” in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 265; see also Coward, Patriarchal Precedents, 34. 21. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress, from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (London: Routledge Thoemmes,

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22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

N    1897), 347; John Lubbock, The Origins of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man, Mental and Social Condition of Savages (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1870); John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies [1865] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See also Elizabeth Fee, “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Anthropology,” in Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 86–102, 94; and Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 179–204. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 50. August Bebel, Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, und Zukunft, Zürich (J. Schabelitz) 1883; English translation Woman in the Past, Present and Future (New York: J.W. Lovell, 1887); Paul Lafargue, La Question de la femme (Paris: Édition de “l’Oeuvre Nouvelle,” 1904). On socialist theories of primal matriarchy see Françoise Picq, “Sur la théorie du droit maternel: Discours anthropologique et discours socialistes,” Ph.D. diss, Université Paris IX, 1979. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology [1876], Vol. 1 (New York: Appleton, 1901), 654. Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage [1891] (London: Macmillan, 1903), 117. Otis Tufton Mason, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), 281–282. Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (London: C. Redway, 1897), 23. Cicely Hamilton, A Pageant of Great Women [1910] (London, n.p., 1948). Aline Valette, Socialisme et sexualisme: Programme du Parti Socialiste Féminin (Paris: A-M. Baudelot, 1893), 68. Valette, Socialisme et sexualisme, 92. Valette, Socialisme et sexualisme, 54; see also Marilyn Boxer, “Au service de la Patrie: Motherhood and French Socialism,” paper presented at American Historical Association, January 5, 2002. Céline Renooz, “Ma vocation scientifique,” in BHP, Collection Marie-Louise Bouglé, Fonds Renooz, “Predestinée: L’Autobiographie de la femme cachée” (unpub. ms, n.d). This is a hand-written manuscript in several volumes. See also James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three Modern French Women (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 116–151; and Laurence Klejman and Florence Rochefort, L’Egalité en marche: Le féminisme sous la troisième République (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques des femmes, 1989), 304–337. Cf. Allen, Poignant Relations, 135. Céline Renooz, La Réligion naturelle restituée (Paris: Publications néosophiques, 1907). Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thompson, The Evolution of Sex [1889] (New York: Scribner, 1890), 26–29, 271; see also Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: New Press, 1995), 77–78. Céline Renooz, Psychologie comparée de l’homme et de la femme (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Nouvelle Encyclopédie, 1989), 540. Céline Renooz, L’Ère de vérité: Histoire de la pensée humaine, Vol. 2, Le Monde ancien (Paris: Marcel Giard, 1924), 10.

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38. Céline Renooz, “Renaissance morale,” brochure, n.d. in BMD, Dossier Céline Renooz. 39. J.J. Bachofen, Le Droit de la mère dans l’antiquité. Préface de l’ouvrage “Das Mutterrecht” de J.J. Bachofen, trans. Groupe français d’études féministes (Paris: GFEF, 1903). 40. For more documentation, see BHVP, Collection Bouglé, Fonds Mme. Blanche Fournet-Kaindler. Fournet-Kaindler was a disciple of Renooz who seems to have played a considerable role in commissioning and publicizing the translation. A letter from the Danish Women’s Council (Dansk Kvinderad) to Fournet-Kaindler, dated July 2, 1903, states that the organization has received a copy of the translation and has placed it in its library. See also a review of Le Droit de la mère dans l’antiquité in Schweizerische Pädagogische Zeitschrift (March 16, 1906): 133. 41. J. Hellé, “Matriarcat et gynécocratie” (series title): “Le Mot et la chose,” La Fronde, October 19, 1903; “Éden,” La Fronde, December 1, 1903; “Paternité, maternité,” La Fronde, January 1, 1904; Odette Laguerre, “Le Droit de la Mère,” La Fronde, July 10, 1904. 42. Hubertine Auclert, Les Femmes au Gouvernail [1914] (Paris: Giard and Brière, 1923), 312–316. 43. Hubertine Auclert, Le Vote des femmes (Paris: Giard and Brière, 1908), 10. 44. Nelly Roussel, editorial in Les Annales de l’Arriège, 1905, in clippings file, Fonds Roussel, BMD. 45. Jeanne Oddo-Deflou, Le Sexualisme: Critique de la préponderance et de la mentalité du sexe fort (Paris: Librairie Illustrée, 1906), vii, 184. 46. J. Hellé, “Le Mot et la chose.” 47. Renooz, “Mémoirs.” 48. Madeleine Pelletier, La Femme en lutte pour ses droits (Paris: Giard and Brière, 1908), 37. 49. Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 68–72. 50. Caird, Morality of Marriage, 24–26. 51. Caird, Morality of Marriage, 50. 52. Caird, Morality of Marriage, 153. 53. Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (London: The Women’s Press, 1980), 289–290. 54. Bland, Banishing the Beast, 167–168; Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1992), 178–236. 55. George Robb, “Eugenics, Spirituality and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian England: The Case of Frances Swiney,” Journal of Women’s History 10 (Fall 1998): 108–109. 56. Frances Swiney, “Motherhood versus Womanhood,” The Malthusian, November 15, 1909. 57. Frances Swiney, The Bar of Isis or the Law of the Mother (London: C.W. Daniel, 1909), 53, 43. See also Swiney, The Awakening of Woman, or Woman’s Role in Evolution (London: William Reeves, 1908), 119–163. 58. Swiney, “Motherhood versus Womanhood.” 59. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Primal Power,” The Suffragette, June 6, 1913. 60. H. Rider Haggard, She [1887], ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 255–256; see also Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 82–88.

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61. Walter Besant, The Revolt of Man (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1882), cited in Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 45. 62. H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica [1909] (London: Everyman, 1993), 29. 63. Emilia Pardo Bazan, “La Educación del Hombre y de la Mujer: Sus Relaciónes y Diferencias” [1892], in Leda Schiavo, ed., La Mujer Española (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1981), 71–97 (quotation 75). On Pardo Bazan’s life and career, see Leda Schiavo, “Introducción,” La Mujer Española, 7–23. On the reception of these theories by Greek feminists, see Eleni Varikas, “National and Gender Identity in Turn-of-the-Century Greece,” in Sylvia Paletschek and Blanch Pietrow-Emkers, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 263–279. 64. Selma Sevenhuijsen, De Orde van het vaderschap: Politieke debatten over ungehuwd moederschap, afstamming en huwelijk in Nederland, 1870–1900 (Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer, 1987), 266–267; see also Selma Sevenhuijsen, “Mothers as Citizens: Feminism, Evolutionary Theory, and the Reform of Dutch Family Law, 1870–1910,” in Carol Smart, ed., Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood, and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 166–186. 65. “Frances Swiney’s ‘Het Ontwaken der Vrouw’ ” Evolutie, June 25, 1902. 66. Wilhelmine Drucker, “Vader- en Moederschap VI,” Evolutie, February 13, 1895. 67. Wilhelmine Drucker, “Vader- en Moederschap VII,” Evolutie, February 20, 1895. 68. Sevenhuijsen, De Orde van het vaderschap, 142. 69. Drucker, “Vader- en Moederschap VII.” 70. Louis Frank, Essai sur la condition politique de la femme: Étude de sociologie et de législation (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1892), xi. 71. Frank, Essai sur la condition politique, xvi. 72. Ellen Key, The Renaissance of Motherhood [1914], trans. Anna B. Fries (New York and London: Source Book Press, 1970), 102–103, 23. 73. Key, Renaissance of Motherhood, 27. 74. Key, Renaissance of Motherhood, 26. 75. Key, Renaissance of Motherhood, 27. 76. Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes: Studien von Ellen Key [1901], trans. Frances Maro (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1905), 42. 77. Helene Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen (Minden: C.C.H. Bruns, 1906), 178. 78. Ann Taylor Allen, “Mothers of the New Generation: Helene Stöcker, Adele Schreiber, and the Evolution of a German Ideal of Motherhood,” Signs 10 (Spring 1985): 418–438; Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 174–185; Bernd Nowacki, Der Bund für Mutterschutz 1905–1933 (Husum: Mathiessen, 1983). 79. See Bré’s statement in Berliner Tageblatt, February 7, 1905. 80. Stöcker, “B.F.M.” in “Lebensabriss,” unpublished typescript, SPC, Helene Stöcker Papers. 81. “Erste öffentliche Versammlung in Berlin,” Mutterschutz (1905): 45–48 (quotation 47). 82. Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen, 178, 83. Helene Stöcker, “Zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik,” Mutterschutz (1905): 3–11. 84. Lily Braun, Die Frauenfrage: Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und ihre wirtschaftliche Seite [1901] (Berlin: J.H.W. Dietz, 1979), 7.

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85. Lily Braun, “Das Problem der Ehe,” Neue Gesellschaft 1 (1905); rpt. in Braun, Selected Writings on Feminism and Socialism, trans. and ed., Alfred G. Meyer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 124–128 (quotation 125). 86. Braun, “Das Problem der Ehe,” 126. 87. Braun, “Das Problem der Ehe,” 128. 88. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild [1926] (Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1950), 412; English translation: Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. and ed. Harry Zohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1975), 373. 89. Marianne Weber, “Die historische Entwicklung des Eherechts,” in Frauenfragen und Frauengedanken: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1919), 10–19. On Marianne Weber see Guenther Roth, “Marianne Weber and her Circle,” introduction to Marianne Weber, Max Weber (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 90. Marianne Weber, Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung: Eine Einführung (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1907), 24–79. 91. See Marie-Luise Angerer, “The Discourse on Female Sexuality in Nineteenthcentury Austria,” in David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, eds., Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 179–195; Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 228–237. 92. Grete Meisel-Hess, Betrachtungen zur Frauenfrage (Berlin: Prometheus, 1914), 239, 240–241. 93. Marianne Hainisch, Die Mutter (Vienna: Verlag von Hugo Heller, 1913), 32. 94. Rosa Mayreder, “Mutterschaft und doppelte Moral,” in Adele Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme der Frau als Mutter (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1911), 156–162 (quotation 161). 95. Mayreder, “Mutterschaft und doppelte Moral,” 162. 96. Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen, 83. 97. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter [1903] (Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumueller, 1905), 295–296; Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams, eds., Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995). 98. Ludwig Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros [1922] (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963), 226; Karlhans Kluncker, Das geheime Deutschland: über Stefan George und seinen Kreis (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985), 97–107; Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 258–277; Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen, oder Begebenheiten aus einem markwürdigen Stadtviertel [1913], in Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, Gesammelte Werke in einem Band, ed. Else Reventlow (Munich: Langen, 1925), 750–751. 99. Otto Gross, “Vom Konflikt des eigenen und fremden” [1914], in Otto Gross, Von geschlechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe, ed. Kurt Kreiler (Frankfurt am Main: Robinson, 1980), 27–31 (quotation 27) and other essays in this volume. For historical background, see Martin Green, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love: Else and Frieda von Richthofen, Otto Gross, Max Weber and D.H. Lawrence in the Years 1870–1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1974); and Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997), 69–89.

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100. Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, The Freud–Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 503 (Jung–Freud, May 8, 1912); see also Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 151–176. Noll explains the considerable influence of Bachofen on Jung, a native of Basel whose grandfather, as rector of the university, had known the famous and eccentric scholar. 101. The Freud–Jung Letters, 504 (Jung–Freud, May 14, 1912). On Jung’s early development and his relationship to Freud, see John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein (New York: Knopf and Random House, 1993), 105–348; and Frank McLynn, Carl Gustav Jung (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 92–267. 102. C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido: A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1916), 3–41, 483 (original edition C.G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido: Beiträge zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Denkens [Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1912]). 103. Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu [1913], in Freud, Gesammelte Werke chronologische geordnet, Vol. 9 (London: Imago, 1940–52). Quotations are from the English translation: Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1952), 183, 190. 104. A few biographical facts on Hartley (1869–1929) are in Who Was Who: A Companion to “Who’s Who” Containing the Biographies of Those who Died during the Period 1916–1928 (London: Adam and Charles Black, Limited, 1929), 469–470. 105. Catherine Gasquoine Hartley, The Truth about Woman (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1913); Hartley, The Position of Woman in Primitive Society: A Study of the Matriarchy (London: E. Nash, 1914), 266. 106. For example, by Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000). 107. “Le Foyer intellectuel de l’Entente,” L’Entente (January 1908). 108. Helene Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen, 178. 109. Drucker, “Vader- en Moederschap IV,” Evolutie, January 30, 1895.

 F P  P: F, M,   L  W E, – 1. C. Gekoop de Jong van Beek en Donk, Hilda van Suylenburg (Amsterdam: Scheitema and Holkema, 1898), 454–455. For many more examples of the motherhood issue in literature, see Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 2. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (London and Boston, MA: John Lane and Roberts Bros., 1895), 41–42. 3. For example, Denise Riley, Am I that Name? Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard, 1996). See the argument of Gisela Bock, Frauen

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

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in der europäischen Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), 190–200. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, “The Custody and Guardianship of Children,” The Englishwoman’s Review 134 (November 15, 1881): 491–503 (quotation 493). Nelly Roussel, “Die Lage der Mutter in den verschiedenen Ländern: Frankreich,” in Adele Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1911), 487–493. Feminists of this era used two terms: the “illegitimate child,” and the “child of unmarried parents.” These terms will be used here to correspond as nearly as possible with the usage of the people who are quoted or paraphrased. See e.g., Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). See Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Odette Laguerre and Ida Sée, La Protection de l’enfance (Lyon: Société d’éducation et d’action féministes, 1906), 28–30. For a discussion of this trend in the American context, see Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 35–113; George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982), 193–224; Sylvia Schafer, Children in Moral Danger and the Problem of Government in Third Republic France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 25–140; Estella H. Hartshalt-Zeehandelaar, “Die Lage der Mutter in den verschiedenen Ländern: Holland,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 528–536; Mineke Bosch, “History and Historiography of First-Wave Feminism in the Netherlands, 1860–1922,” in Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 53–76. Laguerre and Sée, La Protection de l’enfance, 28. Cf. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 45–95. Frieda Duensing, Verletzung der Fürsorgepflicht gegenüber Minderjährige: Ein Versuch zu ihrer strafgesetzlichen Behandlung (Munich: Schweitzer Verlag, 1903); Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare, 48–80. Bosch, “History and Historiography of First-Wave Feminism,” 62. Lily Braun, Die Frauen und die Politik (Berlin: Expedition der Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1903), 29, 19. Louis Frank, L’Éducation domestique des jeunes filles: ou la formation des mères (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1904), xviii. Mary Nash, “The Rise of the Women’s Movement in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” in Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements, 243–262. Ida Blom, “Modernity and the Norwegian Women’s Movement from the 1880s to 1914: Changes and Continuities,” in Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker, eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements, 125–151; cf. Donzelot, The Policing of

254

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

N    Families, 20–21; and Robert van Krieken, “Social Theory and Child Welfare: Beyond Social Control,” Theory and Society (May 15, 1986): 401–429. Nelly Roussel, “Pour les mères,” Almanach Féministe (1907). Roussel, “Frankreich,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 487–493 (quotation 488). Schafer, Children in Moral Danger, 36. Jeanne Oddo-Deflou, ed., Congrès national des droits civils et du suffrage des femmes (Paris: Mme. Vincent, 1908), 124–125. Yvonne Kniebiehler, Les Pères aussi ont une histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 176. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 148–165. On the founding of these movements, see Karen M. Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 213–250; Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Offen, European Feminisms, 213–250: Ulla Jansz, Denken over sekse in de eerste feministische golf (Amsterdam: Sara/Van Gennep, 1990), 87–89; Emilie Benz, “Zur Geschichte der Frauenbewegnung in der Schweiz,” in Die Frauenbewegung in der Schweiz: Sechs Vorträge veranstaltet durch die Pestalozzi-Gesellschaft (Zürich: Th. Schröter, 1902), 1–33. Emilie Kempin, Die Stellung der Frau nach dem zur Zeit in Deutschland gültigen Gestzes-Bestimmungen sowie nach dem Entwurf eines BGB für das deutsch Reich (Leipzig: M. Schafer, 1892). Voeux adoptés par le Congrés International tenu a Paris en 1896 pendant les journées 8 au12 avril (Paris: Société anonyme de l’Imprimerie des Arts et Manufactures, 1896), BMD, dossier Congrès International 1896. Elmy, “The Custody and Guardianship,” 502. Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1989), 141–155. National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), “Parliament and Wives and Mothers” (London: N.U.W.S.S. Publications, October 1913). Ute Gerhard, Unerhört! Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990), 33. Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, Aufruf !, LAB, B Rep. 235-0 (Archiv des BDF) Microfiche 2764. Kempin, Die Stellung der Frau, 91. Marie Stritt, Das bügerliche Gesetzbuch und die Frauenfrage: Vortrag gehalten auf der Generalversammlung des BDF in Hamburg im October, 1898 (Frankenberg: L. Reisel, 1898). See also Anna Schulz, “Frauenforderungen an die Gesetzgebung,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 672–867; Dieter Schwab, “Gleichberechtigung und Familienrecht im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Ute Gerhard, ed., Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997), 790–827. Gertrud Woker, “Schweiz,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 536–544. Maria Deraismes, Les Droits de l’Enfant (Paris: E. Dentu, 1887), 33. Olga von Beschwitz, Begleitschrift zu der Petition des BDF an den Reichstag betreffend das Familienrecht (Frankenberg: L. Reisel, 1899), 9. Maria Cederschiöld, Den Svenska Gifta Kvinnans rättsliga Ställning: I Familjen och Samhället, på uppdrag af Fredrika-Bremer-Förbundets Komité för Lagfrågor (Stockholm: Aftonbladets Aktieschlags Tryckerei, 1903) (translated for me by Marja-Leena Hanninen).

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40. Louis Frank, Essai sur la condition politique de la femme: Étude de sociologie et de léglislation (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1892), ix. 41. Marie Popelin, “L’Autorité parentale,” La Femme Chrétienne, July 5, 1898. 42. Valeria Benetti-Brunelli, La Donna nella legislazione italiana (Rome: Forzani e C. tipografi del Senato, 1908), 32. 43. Aldolfo Posada, Feminismo (Madrid: Fernando Fé, 1899), 162; on the significance of this book see Nash, “The Rise of the Women’s Movement.” 44. Mme Bérot-Berger, Congrès National (n.c., n.p., 1908), 126. 45. Marianne Weber, Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung: eine Einführung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907), 457. 46. Bérot-Berger, Congrès National, 128; Ghenia Avril de Saint-Croix, ed., Dixième congrès international des femmes: Oeuvres et institutions féminines, droits des femmes (Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1914), 537; Beschwitz, Begleitschrift, 9. 47. Elmy, “The Custody and Guardianship,” 500. 48. Jacques Bertillon, De la Dépopulation de la France et des remèdes á y apporter (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1896); cf. Donzelot, The Policing of Families, 177. 49. Louise Ey, “Die Lage der Mutter in den verschiedenen Ländern: Portugal,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 561; João Gomes Esteves, A Liga Republicana das Mulheres Portuguesas: Uma organização política e feminista (1909–1919) (Lisbon: Comisão para a Igualdade e para os Direitos das Mulheres, 1991), 89–92. 50. Jill M. Bystydzienski, Women in Electoral Politics: Lessons from Norway (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 20. 51. Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, “The Project ‘The Nordic marriage model in a comparative perspective’ and its main results,” in Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, eds., The Nordic Model of Marriage and the Welfare State, Copenhagen (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2001), 13–34; Ulla Manns, “Den gifta frigörelse: Reflektioner kring röstratt och myndighet i svensk kvinnorörelse,” in Melby et al., eds., The Nordic Model, 131–146 (translated for me by Marja-Leena Hanninen). 52. Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, “Grundsätze und Forderungen der Frauenbewegung” [1907], rpt. in Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht, 1981), 287. 53. Ellen Key, Über Liebe und Ehe, trans. Francis Maro (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1907), 398. 54. Hubertine Auclert, Les Femmes au gouvernail [1914] (Paris: V. Giard, 1923). “Faire de la paternité incertaine, au lieu de la maternité certaine, le pivot de la famille; mettre la tâche facile du père au-dessus du travail douloureux et sacré de la véritable créatrice . . . est une absurdité autant qu’une injustice.” 55. Nelly Roussel, untitled editorial, Les Annales de l’Arriège, July 19, 1895, BMD, Fonds Nelly Roussel, clippings file. 56. Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (London: G. Redway, 1897), 31, 152. 57. Adele Schreiber, “Uneheliche Mütter,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 257–277 (quotation 258). 58. Ada Negri, “Maternità” quoted in Schreiber, “Uneheliche Mütter,” 257. 59. Weber, Ehefrau und Mutter, 561. 60. Arthur Keller and Christoph J. Klumker, eds., Säuglingsfürsorge und Kinderschutz in den europäischen Staaten: Ein Handbuch, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Verlag Julius Springer, 1912), 61, 752; Schreiber, “Uneheliche Mütter,” 259; Françoise Thébaud,

256

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

N    Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie: La maternité en France dans l’entre-deuxguerres (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1986), 222. Keller and Klumker, eds., Säuglingsfürsorge, vol. 1, 61, 102, 489. Kniebiehler, Les pères aussi, 159–174. Gustave Rivet, La Recherche de la paternité, Avec une préface par Alexandre Dumas fils (Paris: Maurice Dreyfous, 1890), xxxl. For example, Sigrid Undset, Jenny [1911], trans. W. Emme (New York: Knopf, 1929), 214–215. Olga Misaˇr. “Frauen und Mütter!” Neues Frauenleben 16 (March 1914): 65–67 (quotation 65). La Mutualité Maternelle de Paris: Compte Rendu (Paris: Siège Social, 1925). This and other sources can be found in the Dossier Mutualités Maternelles, BMD. See also Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10–43; Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes en France: XIX-XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1997), 29–71; Rachel G. Fuchs, “Legislation, Poverty, and Child Abandonment in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Summer 1987): 55–80. Amalasuntha, Sexueele verhoudingen in onze moderne maatschappij (Rotterdam, n.p., 1895), in IIAV, Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming. “Zesde Jaarverslag der Vereeiniging Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming, 1902–1903,” Archief van de Vereeiniging Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming, IIAV; Hartshalt-Zeehandelaar, “Holland,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 528–535. Archival sources on the Bund für Mutterschutz can be found in BAK, Nachlass Adele Schreiber; SPC, Helene Stöcker Papers; STAH, Medizinalkollegium II, nr. 22: Bund für Mutterschutz; and BAL, rep. 77: RdI, Bund für Mutterschutz. See also Jansz, Denken over sekse, 89; Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London: Sage Publications, 1976), 129; Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, “ ‘Equal or Different: That’s Not the Question’: Women’s Political Strategies in Historical Perspective,” trans. Jennifer Gustafson, in Drude von der Fehr, Bente Rosenbeck, and Anna G. Jonasdottir, eds., Is there a Nordic Feminism? Nordic Feminist Thought on Culture and Society (London and Philadelphia: UCL Press, 1998), 21–43. Woker, “Schweiz,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 536–544. Joseph King, M.P., Filius Nullius (London: St. Catherine’s Press, 1913); Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1973), 582–610. The Rights of Natural Children: Report of the Inaugural Proceedings of the Legitimation League (London: W. Reeves, 1893), 6. Ruth Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question (New York: Norton, 1990), 124–125; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: The New Press, 1995), 156–164. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, quoted in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 52. “The Question of Children,” The Adult 2, no. 6 (July 1898): 165–166. “The Question of Children,” The Adult 2, no. 7 (August 1898): 204. Léonie Rouzade, Petit Catéchisme de Morale Laique et Socialiste (Meudon: en vente chez l’auteur, 1904); Roussel, “Pour les Mères,” and many other articles contained in BMD, Fonds Roussel. Chambre des Députés, no. 2524, Session de 1897, Rapport au nom de la commission relative à la recherche de la paternité; No. 2011, Session extraordinaire de 1900, Proposition de loi relative á la recherche de la paternité, No. 2078, Session

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79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

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extraordinaire de 1900, “Rapport Rene Viviani”: No. 796, Session de 1911, “Rapport Maurice Viollette.” These and other documents are held in BMD, dossier Recherche de la Paternité. For background on these men and their ideas, see Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648–676. For an excellent historical account of this debate see Rachel G. Fuchs, “Seduction, Paternity, and the Law in Fin de Siècle France,” Journal of Modern History 72 (November 2000): 944–989. “Rapport Maurice Viollette,” 1911. For a more detailed summary of this dispute see Cova, Maternité et Droit des Femmes, 169–177; Pederson, Legislating the French Family, 105–161; and Fuchs, “Seduction, Paternity, and the Law.” Deuxième Congrès International des Oeuvres et Institutions Féminines (Paris: Imprimerie Typographique, 1902), 782. Nelly Roussel, “Ce qu’il faut lire,” L’Action, January 22, 1906; see also Jo Burr Margadant, ed., Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 218–261; Pedersen, Legislating the French Family, 166–170. Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 30–43. Chambre des Députés, no. 1142, Session de 1903, “Proposition de loi réglant la recherche de la paternité,” BMD, Dossier Recherche de la Paternité; see also Pedersen, Legislating the French Family, 144. “Rapport Maurice Violette,” 1911. See Paul Strauss, “La Recherche de la Paternité,” Le Droit des Femmes, November, 1912. Denise de Weerdt, En de vrouwen? Vrouw, vrouwenbeweging en feminisme en België, 1830–1960 (Gent: Masreelfonds, 1980), 78. Frank, Essai, 202. The text of the Belgian law is given in Keller and Klumker, eds., Säuglingsfürsorge, Vol. 1, 1199–2000. Nellie van Kol, quoted in: Selma Sevenhuijsen, De Orde van het vaderschap: Politieke debatten over ongehuwd moederschap, afstamming, en huwelijk in Nederland 1870–1900 (Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG, 1987), 149. On Drucker and her career, see Fia Dieteren, “De geestilijke eenzaamheid van een radicaal-féministe: Wilhelmina Druckers ontwikkeling tussen 1885 en 1898,” in Jeske Reys, Tineke van Loosbruk, Ulla Jansz, Maria Henneman, Annemarie de Wildt and Mirjam Elias, eds., De eerste feministische golf (Nijmegen: SUN, 1985), 79–100. Wilhelmine Drucker quoted in Selma Sevenhuijsen, De Orde van het Vaderschap, 132; Sevenhuijsen, “Mothers as Citizens: Feminism, Evolutionary Theory and the Reform of Dutch Family Law 1870–1910,” in Carol Smart, ed., Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 166–186. Wilhelmine Drucker, “Vader- en Moederschap V,” Evolutie, February 6, 1895. Sevenhuijsen, De Orde van het Vaderschap, 188–250. Franca Pieroni Bortolotti, Alle Origini del movemento femminile in Italia, 1849–1892 (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1963), 235. Benetti-Brunella, La Donna nella legislazione italiana, 42; Betty Baer-Stein, “Die Lage der Frau als Mutter in den verschiedenen Ländern: Italian,” in Schrieber, ed., Mutterschaft, 510–516. Louisa Ey, “Portugal,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 564–568. Gertrud Woker, “Schweiz,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 536–544; Susanna Woodtli, Gleichberechtigung: Der Kampf um die politischen Rechte der Frau in der Schweiz (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1975), 111–121.

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98. Cf. Ute Gerhard, Debating Women’s Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective, trans. Allison Brown and Belinda Cooper (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 95–121. 99. Beschwitz, Begleitschrift, 12. 100. Weber, Ehefrau und Mutter, 564. 101. Beschwitz, Begleitschrift, 12. 102. Helene Stöcker, Zehn Jahre Mutterschutz (Berlin: Oesterheld, 1915), 10. 103. Stöcker, “Unsere erste Generalversammlung,” Mutterschutz (1907): 76–80; see also Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 173–188. 104. “Mitteilungen des Bundes für Mutterschutz,” Mutterschutz (1905): 254; see Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, 173–187. 105. Helene Lange, “Die Stellung der Frauenbewegung zu Ehe und Familie,” in Die Frauenbewegung in ihren modernen Problemen (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1907), 64–77 (quotation 73–74). 106. Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 70–71. 107. Anderson, Utopian Feminism, 111–113. 108. Wetterberg, “Equal or different,” 21–43. On Ellen Key’s international impact see Tiina Kinnunen, “Eine grosse Mutter und ihre Töchter: Ellen Key und die deutsche Frauenbewegung,” in Meike Sophia Baader, Juliane Jacobi, and Sabine Andresen, eds., Ellen Keys Reformpädagogische Vision: “Das Jahrhundert des Kindes” und seine Wirkung (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 2000), 64–80; and Tiina Kinnunen, “ ‘Eine der Unseren’ und ‘Königin im neuen Reiche der Frau’: Die Rezeption Ellen Keys in der Frauenbewegung des deutschen Kaiserreichs,” Ph.D. diss., Tampere University, 2000. 109. Blom, “Modernity and the Modern Norwegian Women’s Movement.” 110. Ida Blom, “Voluntary Motherhood 1900–1930: Theories and Politics of a Norwegian Feminist in an International Perspective,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Politics, 21–39. 111. Mrs. Darré Jensen, “Illegitimate Children,” Report of the International Congress of Women (Toronto: G. Parker and Sons, 1909), 220–222 (quotation 221). 112. Katharine Anthony, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1915), 143–204; Grace Abbott, The Child and the State, Vol. 2. (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1938), 522–534 (partial text of law, 527–532). 113. Blom, “Voluntary Motherhood,” 24. 114. Camilla Jellinek, Jahresbericht der Rechtschutzstelle für Frauen und Mädchen, Heidelberg E.v. für das Jahr 1906 (Heidelberg: n.p., 1906), 7. 115. Camilla Jellinek, “Das uneheliche Kind und seine Mutter in der modernen europäischen Gesetzgebung,” Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie 10 (1913–14): 141–153 (quotation 153).



E  E?

1. M.A. (Mabel Atkinson), The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement (London: Fabian Society, 1914), 18. 2. Ute Gerhard, Unerhört!: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995), 148. 3. Helene Böhlau, Halbtier! (Berlin: Fontane, 1899), 298. 4. H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica [1909] (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), 160–161.

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5. To name only a few of these works: Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes en France: XIX-XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1997); Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Policies and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1076–1108; Gisela Bock, “Poverty and Mothers’ Rights in the Emerging Welfare State,” in Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot, and Françoise Thébaud, eds., A History of Women in the West, Vol. 5, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Belknap, 1994), 402–431; Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648–676; Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, eds., Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995); Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Gisela Bock, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte von dem Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), 231–238. 6. Eleanor A. Accampo, “Gender, Social Policy, and the Formation of the Third Republic: An Introduction,” in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, eds., Gender and the Politics of Social Reform, 1–27; Joan Wallach Scott, “ ‘L’ouvrière! Mot impie, sordide.’ Women workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy,” in Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia, 1988), 139–163; Joan W. Scott, “The Woman Worker,” in A History of Women in the West, Vol. 4, Georges Duby, Geneviève Fraisse, and Michelle Perrot, eds., Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War (Cambridge: Belknap, 1993), 399–426. 7. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “Système des contradictions économiques, où philosophie de la misère,” as excerpted and translated in Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, the Family and Freedom: the Debate in Documents, Vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 191. 8. Louise A. Tilly, Industrialization and Gender Inequality (Washington: American Historical Association, 1993), 1–14; Thane, “Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare State: The Case of Women in the British Labour Party and Social Policy,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 93–118. 9. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women [1869], excerpted in Alice Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers, From Adams to de Beauvoir (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 213. 10. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), 77; Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 39, 77. 11. Ellen Ross, “Mothers and the State in Britain, 1904–1914,” in John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility: The Quiet Revolution (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 48–65 (quotation 53). 12. Friedrich Naumann, “Die Frauen im neuen Wirtschaftsvolke,” Mutterschutz 2 (1906): 133–149 (quotation 133). 13. Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany 1850–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 170–217.

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14. Scott, “The Woman Worker”; Tilly, Industrialization and Gender Equality. 15. S.R. Steinmetz, “Feminismus und Rasse,” Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaften 7 (1904): 751–758 (quotation 763). 16. Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-siècle France.” 17. Elisabeth Schneider, ed., Die verheiratete Lehrerin: Verhandlungen der ersten Internationalen Lehrerinnen-Versammlung in Deutschland (Berlin: Hermann Walther, 1905), 16. 18. Alice Salomon, Charakter ist Schicksal: Lebenserinnerungen (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 1983), 49. 19. Helene Stöcker, “Lebensabriss,” unpublished typescript, SPC, Helene Stöcker Papers. Chapter 3, 9–10. 20. Aletta Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage and Peace (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 120. 21. Lily Braun, Memoiren einer Sozialistin: Kampfjahre (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1909), 226. 22. Elinor Accampo, “Private Life, Public Image: Motherhood and Militancy in the Self-Construction of Nelly Roussel, 1900–1922,” in Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 218–261 (quotation 237). 23. Kathleen Canning, “Gender and the Politics of Class Formation,” in Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture and the State in Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 105–142 (quotation 135). 24. Schreiner, Woman and Labour, 68. 25. Lily Braun, “Einleitung,” in Adele Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1912), 1–4 (quotation 2); translated as “Introduction to Motherhood,” in Selected Writings on Feminism and Socialism, trans. and ed. Alfred G. Meyer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 112. 26. For a sensitive discussion of these issues, see Bock, “Poverty and Mothers’ Rights.” 27. August Bebel, Women and Socialism, excerpted in Rossi, ed., Feminist Papers, 503–504. 28. Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage and other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (London: E. Redway, 1897), 132; see also Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 25–78. 29. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, De economische toestand der vrouw: een studie over de economische verhouding tusschen mannen en vrouwen als een factor in dem sociale evolutie, trans. Aletta H. Jacobs (Haarlem: H.D. Tjenk Willink, 1900); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mann und Frau: Die wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen der Geschlechter als Hauptfaktor, trans. Marie Stritt (Leipzig: Heinrich Minden, 1901). 30. Susan Zimmermann, Die bessere Hälfte? Frauenbewegungen und Frauenbestrebungen im Ungarn der Habsburgermonarchie 1848 bis 1918 (Vienna and Budapest: Promedia, 1999), 283–295; Mrs. Pember Reeves, Ethel VaughanSawyer, Mrs. Spence Weiss, Mrs. Bartrick Baker, Mrs. Stansbury, Mrs. S.K. Ratliffe, Miss B.L. Hutchins, and Mrs. O’Brien Harris, eds., Summary of Eight Papers and Discussions upon the Disabilities of Mothers as Workers (n.p.: Fabian Women’s Group, 1910), 22–24. 31. “Review of Women and Economics,” Englishwoman’s Review (October 16, 1899): 272–274 (quotation 273). 32. Marie Stritt, ed., Der internationale Frauen-Kongress in Berlin 1904 (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1904), 405.

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33. Lily Braun, Frauenarbeit und Hauswirtschaft (Berlin: Verlag Expedition der Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1901); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution [1898], Introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 76–121; Schreiner, Woman and Labour, 33–68. On Lily Braun see Jean Quataert, Reluctant Feminsts: Women in German Social Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); on Schreiner’s life and work see Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (London: The Women’s Press, 1980), 265–297. 34. Gilman, Women and Economics, 181. 35. Cf. First and Scott, Olive Schreiner, 274. 36. Lily Braun, Die Frauenfrage: ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und ihre wirtschaftliche Seite (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1901), 286. 37. Schneider, ed., Die verheiratete Lehrerin; see also James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 175–178. 38. Pember Reeves et al., eds., Summary of Eight Papers, 19; for a summary of this discussion, see Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 54–106. 39. Gertrud Woker, “Naturwissenshaftliche Streiflichter über das Problem Mutterschaft und Beruf,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 221–229. 40. Ulla Wikander, “ ‘Some Kept the Flag of Feminist Demands Waving’: Debates at International Conferences on Protecting Women Workers,” in Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler- Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States and Australia, 1880–1920 (Urbana, IL: University Of Illinois Press, 1995), 29–62. 41. Ulla Jansz, “Women or Workers? The 1889 Labor Law and the Debate on Protective Legislation in the Netherlands,” in Wikander et al., eds., Protecting Women, 188–209, plus many other articles in this useful volume. 42. Mary Lynn Stewart, Women, Work and the French State: Labour Protection and Social Patriarchy, 1879–1919 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1989), 178–179. 43. Stewart, Women, Work, and the French State, 183. 44. Alfons Fischer, “Staatliche Mutterschaftsversicherung,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 299–310. 45. On regulations in each country, see Fischer, “Staatliche Mutterschaftsversicherung”; Wikander, “Some Kept the Flag of Feminist Demands Waving”; Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 121–178. 46. Conférence de la condition et des droits des femmes (Paris: Imprimerie des Arts et des Manufactures, 1901), 70, cited by Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 130. 47. Braun, Die Frauenfrage, 547. 48. “La Mutualité Maternelle de Paris: Extrait des statuts,” in La Mutualité Maternelle de Paris: Compte rendu (Paris: Siège social, 1925); see also BMD, dossier Mutualité Maternelle; Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 111–139. 49. Annarita Buttafuoco, “Motherhood as a Political Strategy: The Role of the Italian Women’s Movement in the Creation of the Cassa Nazionale de Maternitá,” in Bock and Thane, ed., Maternity and Gender Policies, 178–195. 50. Buttafuoco, “Motherhood as a Political Strategy,” 187–195; Betty Baer-Stein, “Die Lage der Frau als Mutter in den verschiedenen Ländern: Italien,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 510–516. 51. Teresa Kulawik, Wohlfahrtsstaat und Mutterschaft: Schweden und Deutschland, 1870–1912 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1999), 289.

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52. Rosika Schwimmer, “Wichtige Momente in der Entwicklung des Mutterschutzes und der Mutterschaftsversicherung,” in Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft, 371–384; Sabine Schmitt, “All these Forms of Women’s Work which Endanger Public Health and Public Welfare,” in Wikander et al., eds., Protecting Women, 125–149. 53. Schwimmer, “Wichtige Momente,” 379–383; Gerda Neyer, “Die Entwicklung des Mutterschutzes in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz von 1877 bis 1945,” in Ute Gerhard, ed., Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts von der frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997), 744–758. 54. Braun, Die Frauenfrage, 547. 55. See Alice Salomon, “Das Problem der Mutterschaftsversicherung,” Die Frau 12 (September 1902): 722–732; Henriette Fürth, Die Fabrikarbeit verheirateter Frauen (Frankfurt am Main: Eduard Schnapper, 1902), 202; Karin Hausen, “Arbeiterinnenschutz, Mutterschutz und gesetzliche Krankenversicherung im Deutschen Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik: Zur Funktion von Arbeits- und Sozialrecht für die Normierung und Stablisierung der Geschlechterverhältnisse,” in Gerhard, ed., Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts, 759–771. 56. BAK, Nachlass Adele Schreiber, Vol. 29; the petition is reprinted in Helene Stöcker, ed., Petitionen des Deutschen Bundes für Mutterschutz (Berlin: Geschäftsstelle des Bundes für Mutterschutz, 1916), 9–12; and in translation in Eleanor S. Riemer and John C. Fout, eds., European Women: A Documentary History (New York: Schocken, 1980), 168–170; see also Ann Taylor Allen, “Mothers of the New Generation: Helene Stöcker, Adele Schreiber, and the Evolution of a German Idea of Motherhood, 1900–1914,” Signs 10 (Spring 1985): 418–438 (quotation 429); Bock, “Poverty and Mothers’ Rights.” 57. Reichsversicherungsordnung vom 19. Juli, 1911, # III, 195–200; Schmitt, “All these Forms of Women’s Work”; Irene Stoehr, “Housework and motherhood: debates and policies in the women’s movement in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 213–232; Zimmermann, Die bessere Hälfte, 188–191; Margarete Grandner, “Special Labor Protection for Women in Austria,” in Wikander et al., ed., Protecting Women, 150–187; Schwimmer, “Wichtige Momente,” 283. 58. Neyer, “Die Entwicklung des Mutterschutzes.” 59. Anne Cova, “French Feminism and Maternity: Theories and Policies,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 117–137; Cova, Maternité et Droits des Femmes en France, 121–178; Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 191–198; Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism”; Rachel G. Fuchs, “The Right to Life: Paul Strauss and the Politics of Motherhood,” in Accampo, Fuchs, and Stewart, eds., Gender and the Politics of Motherhood, 82–105. 60. Salomon, “Das Problem der Mutterschaftsversicherung,” 724. 61. Gilman, Women and Economics, 286–294 (quotation 286); Braun, Frauenarbeit und Hauswirtschaft, 21–31. 62. “Natuur en dwaling,” Evolutie, January 9, 1901; Ulla Jansz, Denken over sekse in de eerste feministische golf (Amsterdam: Sara/van Gennep, 1990), 163–169. 63. Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family, 118–119; Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 287–289. 64. Ernestine Federn, “Die Einküchenhäuser in Berlin,” Der Bund (June 1909): 8–10 (quotation 9). 65. Caird, The Morality of Marriage, 153.

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66. Ada Nield Chew, “The Economic Freedom of Women,” The Freewoman, (July 18, 1912): 52. 67. Braun, Die Frauenfrage, 197. 68. Valeria Babini, “Science, Feminism and Education: The Early Work of Maria Montessori,” History Workshop (1999): 44–57; Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 93–94. 69. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood [1936] trans. M. Joseph Costelloe, S.J. (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 120. 70. Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, 129. 71. Consiglio nazionale delle donne italiane, Atti del congresso internazionale femminile (Roma: Torre Pelice, May 16–23, 1914), 19. 72. Quoted by Kramer, Maria Montessori, 124. 73. Madeleine Pelletier, L’Émancipation sexuelle de la femme (Paris: Giard and Brière, 1911), 33. 74. Braun, Memoiren einer Sozialistin, Vol. 2, 396–398; Anna-E. Freier, Dem Reich der Freiheit sollst Du Kinder gebären: Der Antifeminismus der proletarischen Frauenbewegung im Spiegel der “Gleichheit,” 1891–1917 (Frankfurt am Main: Haag und Herchen, 1981), 53–65. 75. Edmund Fischer, “Die Frauenfrage,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 9 (1905): 258–265 (quotation 265); Edmund Fischer, “Die Familie,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 9 (1905): 535–539 (quotation 538). 76. Jeanne Schmahl, Économie domestique (Paris: C. Larny, 1901), 15. 77. Ellen Key, Mißbrauchte Frauenkraft, trans. Therese Krüger (Paris: n.p., 1898), 6. 78. Ellen Key, The Renaissance of Motherhood, trans. Anna E.B. Fries (New York and London: G.B. Putnam, 1914), 121. 79. Ellen Key, Über Liebe und Ehe: Essays, trans. Francis Maro (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1906), 436–440. 80. Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism”; Fuchs, “The Right to Life.” 81. Key, The Renaissance of Motherhood, 133. 82. Pember-Reeves et al., eds., Summary of Eight Papers, 18. 83. Pelletier, Émancipation sexuelle, 20. 84. Gertrud Bäumer, Die Frau in der Kulturbewegung der Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: J.F. Bergmann, 1904), 31. For other responses to Key, see Tiina Kinnunen, “ ‘Eine der unseren’ und ‘Königin im neuen Reiche der Frau’: Die Rezeption Ellen Keys in der Frauenbewegung des deutschen Kaiserreichs,” Ph.D. diss, University of Tampere, Finland, 2000; and Kinnunen, “Eine ‘grosse Mutter’ und ihre Töchter: Ellen Key und die duetsche Frauenbewegung,” in Meike Sophia Baader, Juliane Jacobi, and Sabine Andreesen, eds., Ellen Keys reformpädagogische Vison: “Das Jahrhudert des Kindes” und seine Wirkung (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Verlag, 2000), 64–80. 85. Gertrud Bäumer, Die Frau in volkswirtschaft und Staatsleben der Gegenwart (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1914), 281. 86. Jansz, Denken over Sekse, 179. 87. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 102. 88. Key, Renaissance of Motherhood, 138. 89. Pauline Kergomard, L’Éducation maternelle dans l’école (Paris: Hachette, 1892), 2. 90. Paul Strauss, Dépopulation et puériculture (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1901), 280. 91. Wally Zepler, “Das Mutterschaftsproblem” [1906], rpt., in Gisela Brinkler-Gabler, ed., Frauenarbeit und Beruf (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1979), 284–295 (quotation 287).

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92. Hedwig Dohm, “Gesichtspunkte für die Erziehung für die Ehe,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1909): 639–645. 93. BMD, Dossier École des Mères; Interview with Moll-Weiss in Le Figaro, August 21, 1904. 94. Linda L. Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), 83–84; Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 81. 95. Adolphe Pinard, La Puériculture (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1904) (quotation 125). 96. Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (1978): 9–65. On the Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus, see, Arbeitsgruppe “Geschichte des Pestalozzi-Froebel-Hauses,” ed., Das Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus: Fachschule für Pädagogik, Berlin (Berlin: Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus, 1991). 97. Marianne Hainisch, Frauenarbeit (Vienna: Hugo Heller, 1911), 25; Käthe Schirmacher, “Die Frauenarbeit im Hause: Ihre ökonomische, rechtliche und sociale Wertung” [1905], rpt., in Brinkler-Gabler, ed., Frauenarbeit und Beruf, 256–275. 98. Stoehr, “Housework and Motherhood,” 216–217. 99. Pember-Reeves et al., eds., Summary of Eight Papers, 6. 100. Hubertine Auclert, “La fonction maternelle rétribuée” [1914], in Hubertine Auclert, Les Femmes au gouvernail (Paris: Marcel Giard, 1923), 307–316 (quotation 309). 101. Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism.” 102. Robert Talmy, Histoire du mouvement familial en France, 1896–1899, Vol. 1 (Aubenas Union nationale des Caisses d’Allocations Familiales, 1962), 66–98; Jacques Bertillon, De la Dépopulation de la France et des remèdes à y apporter (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1896), 26; Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 29–120. 103. Voeux adoptés par le Congrès féministe International tenu à Paris en 1896 pendant les journées 8–12 avril (Paris: Société anonyme de l’Imprimerie des Arts et Manufactures, 1896). 104. Marilyn Boxer, “Au Service de la Patrie: Motherhood and French Socialism,” paper presented at the American Historical Association, January 5, 2002. 105. Marilyn Boxer, “French Socialism, Feminism and the Family,” Troisième République 3–4 (Spring–Fall 1977): 128–167 (quotation 143); Léonie Rouzade, Développement du Programme de la Société ‘L’Union des Femmes’ par la Citoyenne Rouzade, 13 Avril 1880 (Paris: L’Union des Femmes, 1880); see also BMD, dossier Léonie Rouzade. 106. Léonie Rouzade, Petit catéchisme de morale, laïque et socialiste (Meudon: en vente chez l’auteur, 1904). 107. Nelly Roussel, “Féminisme et Fécondité,”Le Rappel, October 19, 1900. 108. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 169. 109. Atkinson, The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement, 15. 110. H.G. Wells, Socialism and the Family (London: A.C. Fifield, 1906), 3. 111. Pat Thane, “Visions of Gender in the Making of the British Welfare State.” 112. Ida Blom, “Voluntary Motherhood 1900–1930: Theories and Politics of a Norwegian Feminist in an International Perspective,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 21–39. 113. Stoehr, “Housework and Motherhood,” 217; Schirmacher, “Die Frauenarbeit im Hause,” 256–275; Bock, “Poverty and Mothers’ Rights,” 406–407.

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114. Cf. Bock, “Poverty and Mothers’ Rights,” 409. 115. Key, Über Liebe und Ehe, 407. 116. Just Sicard de Plauzoles, La Maternité et la défense contre la dépopulation (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1909), 250. 117. Yvonne Kniebiehler, L’Histoire des mères, du moyen-âge à nos jours (Paris: Éditions Montalba, 1980), 296–297. Cf. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 45–47. 118. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 167; Klaus, Every Child a Lion, 118–125; Davin, Imperialism and Motherhood, 36. 119. Sicard de Plauzoles, La Maternité, 280. 120. Boxer, “French Socialism,” 140. 121. Wells, Socialism and the Family, 59. 122. Jeanne Oddo-Deflou, ed., Congrès national des droits civils et du suffrage des femmes (Paris, 1908), 53; see also Fonds Camille Béllilon, in Fonds Bouglé, Bibliothèque Historique, Paris. 123. “Woman, Endowed or Free?” The Freewoman, February 29, 1912. 124. Salomon, “Das Problem der Mutterschaftsversicherung,” 329. 125. Anna Maria Mozzoni, “I socialisti e l’emanzipazione della donna” [1892], in Anna Maria Mozzoni, La Liberazione della Donna, ed. Franca Pieroni Bortolotti (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1975), 213. 126. Atkinson, The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement, 19. 127. “The Spinster, By One,” The Freewoman, November 23, 1911; see also Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: The New Press, 1995), 282. 128. Schneider, ed., Die verheiratete Lehrerin, 9. 129. Key, Mißbrauchte Frauenkraft, 9. 130. Adele Gerhard and Helene Simon, Mutterschaft und geistige Arbeit: Eine psychologische und sóziologische Studie auf Grundlage einer internationalen Erhebung mit Berücksichtigung der geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1908), 321. 131. Hedwig Dohm, “Sind Mutterschaft und Hausfrauentum vereinbar mit Berufstätigkeit?” rpt., in Brinkler-Gabler, ed., Frauenarbeit und Beruf, 244–255 (quotation 254).



“T R   C  C  P”

1. Marie Stritt, “Frauenbewegung und Neumalthusianismus,” Die Neue Generation 1910, 439–446 (quotation 444). 2. Mona Caird, The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women (London: G. Redway, 1897), 135. 3. Maria Martin, “Dépopulation,” Journal des Femmes, June 1896; see also Karen Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 648–676. 4. Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism”; see also the contributions to Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 5. Arthur Newsholme, M.D., The Declining Birth-Rate: Its National and International Significance (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1911), 13.

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6. Among the many, many works that deal with this subject: Robert Talmy, Histoire du mouvement familial en France, 1896–1939 (Aubenas: Union nationale des Caisses d’Allocations Familiales, 1962); Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes en France: XIX-XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1997), 29–71; Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazis, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), passim; Ida Blom “Voluntary Motherhood 1900–1930: Theories and Politics of a Norwegian Feminist in an International Perspective,” in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 21–39. The comparison between France and the United States made by Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 10–43, is very illuminating. 7. Offen, “Depopulation, Nationalism, and Feminism,” 661. 8. Maria Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, trans. Frederic Taber Cooper (New York: Stokes, 1913), 474; see also Valeria Babini, “Science, Feminism and Education: The Early Work of Maria Montessori,” History Workshop 49 (1999): 44–57. 9. John C. Caldwell, “The Delayed Western Fertility Decline: An Examination of English-Speaking Countries,” Population and Development Review 25 (September 1999): 479–513. 10. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, “The Marriage Law of England,” Shafts (July–September 1890), 57–60 (quotation 59). 11. Francine van de Walle, “Infant Mortality and Demographic Transition,” in Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds., The Decline of Fertility in Europe: The Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 201–233; see chart, p. 212. 12. “Motherhood,” Common Cause, September 8, 1910. 13. Evolutie, June 11, 1895; quoted in Hugo Röling, De Tragedie van het geschlachtsleven: Dr. J. Rutgers en de Nieuw-Malthusiaansche Bond (opgericht 1881) (Amsterdam: van Gennep, 1987), 143. 14. Mrs. Edward Francis, “Race Suicide,” The Vote, January 21, 1911. 15. Ellen Key, Über Liebe und Ehe, trans. Francis Maro (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1906), 247. 16. Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (1978): 9–65, 16. 17. Marianne Hainisch, Die Mutter (Leipzig: Verlag von Hugo Heller, 1913), 16–17; cf. Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: The New Press, 1995), 242–247. 18. An example of the first category is Christl Wickert, Helene Stöcker 1869–1943: Frauenrechtlerin, Sexualreformerin und Pazifistin: Eine Biographie (Bonn: Dietz, 1991); of the second category, Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For further historiographical perspectives, see Ann Taylor Allen, “German Radical Feminism and Eugenics, 1900–1918,” German Studies Review 11 (1988): 31–56; and Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review 23 (2000): 477–506. Many more sources on this subject are listed in these articles. 19. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), 85–92; see also Bland, Banishing the Beast,

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

267

and Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, both of which show the variety of views that were represented within the eugenics movement. See Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain”; Soloway, Demography and Degeneration; Lesley A. Hall, “Women, Feminism, and Eugenics,” in Robert A. Peel, ed., Essays in the History of Eugenics: Proceedings of a Conference organized by the Galton Institute, London 1997 (London: Galton Institute, 1997), 36–51; Bland, Banishing the Beast, 222–249. Bernd Nowacki, Der Bund für Mutterschutz, 1905–1933 (Husum: Matthiesen, 1983), Section 4.5. WLHM, EES, SA/Eug./B.1: Early Papers re Formation; see also Pauline Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), 7–57; on the role of women see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 64–65; and Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, 110–137. WLHM, EES, Eugenics Education Society. 4th Annual Report, 1911–1912; Eugenics Education Society, 5th Annual Report, 1912–1913. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 80. L. Huc, “La Section ‘Eugenics and Child Study,’ ” Eugénique (1913): 119–133. Elmy, “The Marriage Law of England,” 59. Women’s Cooperative Guild, Maternity: Letters from Working Women, (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1915), rpt., in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizula, eds., The Mothers: Controversies of Motherhood (London: Routledge Thoemmes Press, 1994), 27. Wally Secombe, “Men’s ‘Marital Rights’ and Women’s ‘Wifely Duties’: Changing Conjugal Relations in the Fertility Decline,” in John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 66–84 (quotation 80). Blom’s results are discussed in this article. Anna Bergmann, “Frauen, Männer, Sexualität und Geburtenkontrolle: Die Gebärstreikdebatte der SPD im Jahre 1913,” in Karin Hausen, ed., Frauen Suchen ihre Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1983), 81–108. Cf. also Edward Shorter, A History of Women’s Bodies (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 3–16. Women’s Cooperative Guild, Maternity: Letters from Working Women, 28, 64. Frank Wedekind, The Awakening of Spring: A Tragedy of Childhood, trans. Francis J. Ziegler (Philadelphia PA: Brown Brothers, 1910), Act I. Claudia Nelson, “Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother: British Sex Education at the Fin de Siècle,” in Claudia Nelson and Anne Sumner Holmes, eds., Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 98–121. Nelson, “Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother,” 105. Ellis Ethelmer (Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Ben Elmy), Baby Buds (Congleton: Buxton House, 1895), 7. Ethelmer, Baby Buds, 38. H.Q. Röling, Gevreesde vragen: Geschiedenis van de seksuele opvoeding in Nederland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), 13. Mevrouw Baerveldt-Haver, “Eenige beschouwingen over de zedelijke opvoeding,” in Verslagen der Congressen gehouden bej gelegenheit van de Nationale Tentoonstelling van Vrouwenarbeid, Besprekingen over de Taak von Moeders en Opvoedsters, September 14–15, 1898 (Amsterdam: Versluys, 1899), 124–137.

268

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37. Nellie van Kol, “Een kiesch onderwerp,” Evolutie, May 31, 1893. 38. Röling, Gevreesde Vragen, 118–119. 39. Lydie Martial, “L’enseignement de la paternité à la caserne et dans les écoles de l’État,” 1902, brochure held in BMD, dossier Éducation sexuelle. 40. Ghenia Avril de Sainte-Croix, ed., Dixième congrès international des femmes: Oeuvres et institutions féminines; droits des femmes (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1914), 198–204. Cf. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 168–184. 41. Avril de Sainte-Croix, ed., Dixième congrès international des femmes, 174, 175, 202, 204, 490, 572. 42. E. Piecynska, L’École de la Pureté (Geneva: Ch. Eggiman, 1897), 11. 43. On Piecynska’s life and work see E. Serment, “Emma Piecynska, née Reichenbach, dans ses oeuvres,” Annuaire des femmes suisses 10 (1926): 81–143; and Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1960: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 155, 246. I am grateful to Karen Offen for sharing materials gathered in the course of her research on Piecynska with me. 44. Ellen Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes: Studien von Ellen Key [1901], trans. Francis Maro (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1902), 10–11. 45. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia, PA: F.A. Davis Co., 1910), 78. 46. Maria Lichnewska, “Die geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder,” Mutterschutz (1905): 137–170. 47. Marianne Hainisch, “Sexuelle Erziehung,” Der Bund (April 1908): 3. 48. Ella Anker, Women’s Suffrage in Norway (London: National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 1913). 49. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), 154–156. 50. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 160. 51. Ethelmer, Baby Buds, 42; see also Nelson, “Under the Guidance of a Wise Mother.” 52. Röling, Gevreesde vragen, 122. 53. Henriette Fürth, Die geschlechtliche Aufklärung in Haus und Schule (Leipzig: n.p., 1903), 23. 54. Marie Stopes, Married Love, quoted in Ruth Hall, Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes (New York and London: Harcourt, 1977), 129; a more skeptical view of Stopes’s testimony is given by Richard A. Soloway, “The Galton Lecture 1996: Marie Stopes, Eugenics, and the Birth Control Movement,” in Robert A. Peel, ed., Marie Stopes and the English Birth Control Movement: Proceedings of a Conference Organized by the Galton Institute, London 1996 (London: Galton Institute, 1997), 49–76, see especially 50–51. 55. Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 174. 56. Ellis Ethelmer (Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy), Woman Free (Congleton: Women’s Emancipation Union, 1893), 11. Two excellent and thorough accounts of British feminists and sexuality are given in Bland, Banishing the Beast, 95–185; and Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), 6–52. 57. Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (London: Chapman and Hall, 1909), 33–34. 58. Frances Swiney, The Bar of Isis or the Law of the Mother (London: C.W. Daniel, 1909). For an extensive account of British feminism and birth control, see Richard

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Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 133–155; and Bland, Banishing the Beast, 189–221. Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), 163. Maude Pember-Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), 219. Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family, 170. Fryer, The Birth Controllers, 173–192; Lesley A. Hall, “Malthus, Medicine, and Morality: ‘Malthusianism’ after 1798,” Clio Medica 59 (2000): 141–163; Richard Soloway, Birth Control, 133–155. Stella Browne, The Freewoman, April 18, 1912, quoted in Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies, 52; Jane Hume Clapperton, What do We Women Want? (London: W.H. Reynolds, 1880), 4. Charles Vickery Drysdale, “Freewomen and the Birth Rate,” The Freewoman, November 30, 1911. Clapperton, What do We Women Want?, 3. Aletta Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage and Peace (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 34; Hugo Q. Röling, “L’Énigme de la contraception aux Pays- Bas,” in Francis Ronsin, Hervé Le Bras, and Élisabeth Zucker-Rouvillois, eds., Démographie et Politique (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1997), 27–37. Aletta B. Jacobs, Vrouwenbelangen (Amsterdam: L.J. Veen, 1899), 66. “Een quaestie van moraal,” Evolutie, January 22, 1902. Ph. van Praag, “The Development of Neo-Malthusianism in Flanders,” Population Studies 32 (1978): 476–480. Röling, De Tragedie van het geschlachtsleven, 144. Röling, Tragedie, 148. Van Praag, “The Development of Neo-Malthusianism.” Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 98–100. Céline Renooz, La loi des sexes devant la science et morale (Paris: n.p., n.d.); Union de pensée féminine, L’Enseignement de la paternité (Paris: n.p., n.d.), in BMD, Dossier Éducation Sexuelle. Johannes Rutgers and Emma Piecynska, “La Question du Néo-Malthusisme,” Morale Sociale 3 (1901): 325–340 (quotations 331, 339). I thank Karen Offen for providing me with a copy of this article. Francis Ronsin, La grève des ventres: Propagande néo-malthusienne et baisse de la natalité française, 19-20 siècles (Aubier: Montaigne, 1980), 157. Madeleine Pelletier L’Émancipation sexuelle de la femme (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1926), 39. On Pelletier’s life and career see Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939: Feminism, Socialism and Medicine (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); and Marilyn Boxer, “French Socialists, Feminism, and the Family,” Troisième République 3–4 (1977): 128–167. Angus McLaren, “The Sexual Politics of Reproduction in Britain,” in Gillis, Tilly and Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 85–100; see also Willem de Blécourt, “Cultures of Abortion in The Hague in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma, eds., Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 195–212. Pelletier, L’Émancipation sexuelle de la femme, 56–58.

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N    Pelletier, L’Émancipation sexuelle de la femme, 32. Nelly Roussel, “Pour les Mères,” Almanach Féministe (1907). Nelly Roussel, “Pour le mariage, contre l’union libre,” L’Entente (July 1906). Gabrielle Petit, “Ce que nous voulons,” La Femme Affranchie, September 1904. James Woycke, Birth Control in Germany 1871–1933 (London: Routledge, 1988), 54; Anna-E. Freier, Dem Reich der Freiheit sollst Du Kinder gebären: Der Antifeminismus der proletarischen Frauenbewegung im Spiegel der “Gleichheit,” 1891–1917 (Frankfurt: Haag und Herchen Verlag, 1981), 73–81. Schreiber-Roussel, January 25, 1910; December 27, 1911; January 12, 1912, in BMD, Fonds Nelly Roussel, Lettres, Dactylographies Signées. Helene Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen (Minden: J.C.C. Bruns, 1906), 177. LAB, B-Rep 235, BDF, “Protokolle (Stenogramme) der 8. Generalversammlung 1908 in Breslau,” 426, Film nos. 2967–75. “8. Generalversammlung,” 384. Cf. Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London: Sage, 1976), 145–174; Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht, 1981), 112–114. Else Lüders, “Eindrücke von der Generalversammlung des Bundes deutscher Frauenvereine, Breslau, 6–8 Oktober, 1908,” Die Frauenbewegung, October 15, 1908, 154. Ernestine Federn, “Aktuelles in der deutschen Frauenbewegung,” Der Bund, Zentralblatt des Bundes österreichischer Frauenverene (February 1909). Nowacki, Der Bund für Mutterschutz, Section 4.5. Doris H. Linder, Crusader for Sex Education: Elise Ottesen-Jensen (1886–1973) in Scandinavia and on the International Scene (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1996), 22. Ida Blom, “Voluntary motherhood 1900–1930.” Piecynska, L’École de la Pureté, 17; Rutgers and Piecynska, “La Question du Néo-Malthusisme,” 340. Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen, 35. Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes, 1; the work is also translated into English as Ellen Key, The Century of the Child [1909] (New York: Arno Press, 1972). Ellen Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes, 13. Grete Meisel-Hess, Die sexuelle Krise: Eine soziologische Untersuchung (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1909), 272–317; Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 181–192. George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married, in The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and the Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (New York: Brentano, 1911), 219. Key, Über Liebe und Ehe, 191–192. Stöcker, Die Liebe und die Frauen, 102. On Brieux and his cultural context, see Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 170–174. Eugène Brieux, Damaged Goods, in Three Plays by Brieux, trans. Mrs. Bernard Shaw (New York: Brentano’s, 1913), 197. Brieux, Damaged Goods, 239. Christabel Pankhurst, “Concerning Damaged Goods,” The Suffragette, February 20, 1914. Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, 473.

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108. Nelly Roussel, “Ma Réponse,” L’Action, July 5, 1906. 109. “O Sudario,” A Semeadora (February 15, 1916): 2, quoted in João Esteves, As Origens do Sufragismo Português: A Primeira Organização Sufragista Portuguesa: A Associção de Propaganda Feminista (1911–1918) (Lisboa: Editorial Bizâncio, 1998), 108. 110. Alix Westerkamp, “Gesetzliche Bestimmungen,” in Anna Pappritz, ed., Einführung in das Studium der Prostitutionsfrage (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1919), 92–98. 111. Camilla Jellinek, “Die venerische Ansteckung und das Strafgesetz,” Centralblatt des Bundes deutscher Frauenvereine, November 1, 1909. 112. Westerkamp, “Gesetzliche Bestimmungen,” 86. 113. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 57. 114. Voeux adoptés par le congrès féministe internationale tenu a Paris en 1896 pendant les journées 8 au 12 avril (Paris: Société anonyme d’Imprimerie des Arts et Manufactures, 1896). 115. “Gesundheitsattest für Ehekandidaten,” Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie 5 (1908): 859. 116. Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, “The Project ‘The Nordic Marriage Model in a Comparative Perspective’ and its Main Results,” in Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, eds., The Nordic Model of Marriage and the Welfare State (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2000), 13–26. 117. Key, Über Liebe und Ehe, 153. 118. Avril de Sainte-Croix, ed., Dixième Congrès International des Femmes, 441. 119. Helene Stöcker, “Unsere erste Generalversammlung,” Mutterschutz (1907): 76–80. 120. Matthew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain c. 1870–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 23–52; Ellen Hume Pinsent, “Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded,” The Nineteenth Century 67 (1910): 43–57; WLHM, EES Eug/B3: “Feeblemindedness.” See also Mark Jackson, “ ‘Grown-Up Children’: Understandings of Health and Mental Deficiency in Edwardian England,” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland, eds., Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 149–168. 121. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, “Can the Cats Legislate for the Mice?” Votes for Women, August 22, 1913; Dora Marsden, “The Poor and the Rich,” The Freewoman, July 25, 1912. 122. Francis, “Race Suicide”; see also the discussion in Bland, Banishing the Beast, 239–242. 123. “Die achte Generalversammlung,” Centralblatt des Bundes deutscher Frauenvereine, December 15, 1908; see also the favorable reference to Schreiber’s speech in A. Ploetz, “Mutterschutz und Rassenhygiene,” Archiv für Rassen und Gesellschaftsbiologie 5 (1909): 134–135. 124. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 114–115; Ronsin, La grève des ventres, 157–163. 125. Nelly Roussel, “Lettre ouverte a M. le docteur Toulouse,” Regéneration (March 1903). 126. Nelly Roussel, Par la révolte: Scène symbolique (Paris: Godet, n.d.), quoted in Pedersen, Legislating the French Family, 168. 127. Blom, “Voluntary motherhood.”

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128. Henriette Herzfelder, “Mehr Mutterschutz!” Der Bund, October 1910. 129. Mrs. Edward Francis, “Race Suicide,” The Vote, January 21, 1911. 130. Christabel Pankhurst, “What Women Think-II,” The Suffragette, January 23, 1914; Bland, Banishing the Beast, 247. 131. WL, Women’s Freedom League, “Minutes of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Women’s Freedom League, Held on March 28, 1914 at Caxton Hall, Westminster,” unpublished typescript, 62, 67. 132. Freier, Dem Reich der Freiheit, 80–81. 133. Bergmann, “Frauen, Männer, Sexualität und Geburtenkontrolle,” 94–95. 134. “8. Generalversammlung,” 420. 135. Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade, 135.



“T V  B”: M, C,   S  W, –

1. Ellen Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes: Studien von Ellen Key, trans. Francis Maro (Berlin: Fischer, 1905) 1; original edition Ellen Key, Barnets århundrade (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1900). 2. A. Maude Royden, National Endowment of Motherhood (London: Mrs. Burns, c. 1918), 3, WL Pamphlet Collection. 3. Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918 (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987). 4. Hubertine Auclert, Le vote des femmes (Paris: V. Giard et E Brière, 1908), 48. 5. Ellen Key, Über Liebe und Ehe: Essays von Ellen Key, trans. Francis Maro (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1906), 407. 6. Madeleine Pelletier, La femme en lutte pour ses droits (Paris: V. Giard et E. Brière, 1908), 41. 7. Gisela Urban, “Das Frauendienstjahr: Ein praktischer Anfang,” Der Bund (July 1915): 10–11 (quotation 10). 8. Anna Pappritz, “Umgestaltung der Frauenbildung durch die Dienstpflicht,” in Institut für soziale Arbeit, ed., Das weibliche Dienstpflicht (Munich: Verlag der Ärztlichen Rundschau, 1916), 79–96 (quotation 89). 9. Darrow, French Women and the First World War: War Stories from the Home Front (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), 39. 10. Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 282–287. 11. Anne Cova, Au service de l’Église, de la patrie, et de la famille: Femmes catholiques et maternité sous la III Republique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 91–94; Françoise Thébaud, “The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division,” in Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot, and Françoise Thébaud, eds., A History of Women in the West, Vol. 5, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1994), 21–75; Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. Margaret Ries (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), 20–21; Gertrud Bäumer, “Nationaler Frauendienst,” Die Frau 21 (1913/14): 721–724. 12. Paola Grosson Baronchelli, La donna della nuova Italia: Documenti del contributo femminile alla guerra (Maggio 1915–Maggio 1917: Racolti ed ordinati) (Milano: R. Quintieri, 1917), 133; see also Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1944 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

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1992), 26–28; and Allison Scardino Belzer, “Femininity under Fire: Women in Italy during the First World War,” Ph.D. diss. Emory University 2002, 62–64. Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women’s Movement, 1918–1928 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 16–21. Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 32. Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Köln: Böhlau, 2000), 156–164; Bäumer, “Nationaler Frauendienst.” Daniel, The War from Within, 76; Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, “Memoiren,” unpublished typescript, BAK, Nachlass Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, Vol. 308. Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes in France: XIX-XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1997), 179–228. Headline, La Française, May 8, 1915. Henriette Herzfelder, “Unsere Berufsfrauen und der Krieg,” Der Bund (January 1915): 1–8 (quotation 1). Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1959 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 20. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes in France, 185. Annamaria Galoppini, Il lungo viaggio verso la parità: I Diritti civili e politici delle donne dall’unità ad oggi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980), 61; Belzer, “Femininity under Fire,” 69–89. Daniel, The War from Within, 37–126. Jane Misme, “Les hommes ne sont pas raisonnables,” La Française, December 16, 1916. Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls, 167–168. Françoise Thébaud, Les Femmes au temps de la guerre de 1914 (Paris: Stock/L. Pernod, 1986), 258–264. Reinhard J. Sieder, “Behind the Lines: Working-Class Family Life in Wartime Vienna,” in Richard Wall and Jay Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1988), 109–138; Daniel, The War from Within, 127–230; Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Mary Gabrielle Collins, “Women at Munition Making,” in Catherine W. Reilly, ed., Scars upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago Press, 1981), 24; see also Belzer, “Femininity under Fire,” 74. Paul Weindling, “Social Hygiene and the Birth Rate in Wartime Germany,” in Wall and Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War, 417–437; Cornelie Usborne, “ ‘Pregnancy is the Woman’s Active Service’: Pronatalism in Germany during the First World War,” in Wall and Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War, 389–416. Marie-Monique Huss, “Pronatalism and the Popular Ideology of the Child in Wartime France: The Evidence of the Picture Postcard,” in Wall and Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War, 32–367, illustrations, 342, 346. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 179; Daniel, The War from Within, 136; Daniel, The War from Within, 189–207. Daniel, The War from Within, 138–147; Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls, 167–168; Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 67–71; Usborne, “Pregnancy is the Woman’s Active Service.”

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34. Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 26–33. 35. Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 1–11. 36. Henriette Fürth, “Die Frauen und die Bevölkerungs-und Schutzmittlefrage,” Archiv für soziale Hygiene und Demographie 9 (1915): 10–33 (quotation 33); Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement, 7–12; Cova, Au service de l’Église, 90–96; Thébaud, La Femme au temps de la guerre, 108–109; Bernd Nowacki, Der Bund für Mutterschutz 1905–1933 (Husum: Matthiessen, 1983), 83–95. 37. Baronchelli, La donna della nuova Italia, 151–165. 38. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, “The Claims of Mothers and Children,” in Marion Phillips, ed., Women and the Labour Party (London: Headley Bros., 1918), 3. 39. 39. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 98; “Les Féministes et la Tutelle des Femmes,” La Française, October 30, 1915; BMD, Dossier Tutelle. 40. “Geheimes Zivilkabinett Seiner Majestät des deutschen Kaisers und Königs von Preussen, Grosses Hauptquartier, Oct. 14, 1916,” in BAL, R/18, 9348, “Massregeln Gegen den Geburtenrückgang, 1916–1917.” 41. Nowacki, Der Bund für Mutterschutz, 83–95. 42. Helene Stöcker, “Bevölkerungspolitik,” Die Neue Generation, 1915, 363. 43. Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare, from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 122–123. 44. Grayzel, Women’s Identities, 86–87. 45. Baronchelli, La donna della nuova Italia, 173–177; Belzer, “Femininity under Fire,” 62–64. 46. Grayzel, Women’s Identities, 99; see also Susan R. Grayzel, “The Mothers of our Soldiers’ Children: Motherhood, Immorality, and the War Baby Scandal, 1914–18,” in Claudia Nelson and Anne Sumner Holmes, eds., Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 122–140. 47. Quoted in Grayzel, Women’s Identities, 94. 48. Marie Carmichael Stopes, The Race, in “Gold in the Wood” and “The Race:” Two New Plays of Life (London: A.C. Fifield, 1918), Act II. I am grateful to Lesley A. Hall of the Wellcome Institute, London, for sending me a copy of this play. 49. Emmeline Pankhurst, quoted in Grayzel, Women’s Identities, 96; Sylvia Pankhurst quoted in David Mitchell, Monstrous Regiment: The Story of the Women of the First World War (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 282–283. 50. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 [1933] (New York: Penguin, 1989), 141. 51. Maude Royden, “Morals and Militarism,” Common Cause, April 30, 1915. 52. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewlett, Children in English Society, Vol. 2, From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act, 1945 (London: Routledge, 1973), 582–611; National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, Legitimisation of Illegitimate Children by the Subsequent Marriage of Their Parents (London: Carnegie House, 1924). See also the archive of this organization in WL. 53. Margarete Minor quoted in Ernestine Federn, “Die Abendversammlungen,” Der Bund (June 1916): 11–12 (quotation 11). 54. Thébaud, Les Femmes au temps de la guerre, 272–274; Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 179–228.

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55. “Beschlüsse der Kriegstagung und der Gesamtvorstandssitzungen des BDF in Weimar am 25–30 Juni 1916,” Die Frauenfrage: Zentralblatt des BDF, July 16, 1916. 56. Günter Erning and Jürgen Reyer, Entstehung und Entwicklung der öffentlichen Kleinkinderziehung in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus, 1987), 64–65; Lili Droescher, Die Erziehungsaufgaben der Volkskindergärten im Krieg (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1917). 57. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, “An den nationalien Ausschuss für Frauenarbeit im Krieg,” May 3, 1917, BAK, Nachlass Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, Vol. 205; MarieElisabeth Lüders, “Richtlinien für Kinderfürsorge,” Die Frau 24 (1917): 612–618. 58. Ute Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und Politik im ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Rupprecht, 1989), 104. 59. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, Fürchte dich nicht: Persönliches und politisches aus mehr als 80 Jahren, 1878–1962 (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963), 71–120; see also Daniel, The War from Within, 74–76. 60. Daniel, Arbeiterfrauen, 84. 61. Margaret McMillan, The Nursery School (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1919), 21–22. 62. McMillan, The Nursery School, 26. 63. Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls, 176. 64. Kevin J. Brehony, “The Kindergarten in England, 1851–1918,” in Roberta Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 59–86; Thom, Nice Girls, 164–186. 65. Daniel, The War from Within, 158–159. 66. “Zur Frage der Bevölkerungspolitik,” Die Gleichheit, October 13, 1916. 67. Davies, “The Claims of Mothers and Children”; Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (1978): 43–45; Dwork, War is Good for Babies, 208–220; for the text of the Act see the appendix to Janet E. Lane Clayson, The Child Welfare Movement (London: G. Bell, 1920), 242–261. 68. Susan Pedersen, “Gender, Welfare and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 983–1006. 69. Katherine D’Olier, Courtney, Eleanor F. Rathbone, C. Maude Royden, Mary Stocks, Elinor Burns, and Emily Burns, Equal Pay and the Family: A Proposal for the National Endowment of Motherhood (London: Herald Book Society, 1918), 13. For an excellent and thorough discussion of the wartime debate on the “endowment of motherhood,” see Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79–135. 70. Women’s Cooperative Guild (WCG), comp., Maternity: Letters from Working Women (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1915), 2–3. 71. WCG, comp., Maternity, 2. 72. WCG, comp., Maternity, 3. 73. WCG, comp., Maternity, 6. 74. WCG, comp., Maternity, 53. 75. WCG, comp., Maternity, 78. 76. WCG, comp., Maternity, 16. See the interpretation of Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 113. 77. WCG, comp., Maternity, 15. 78. WCG, comp., Maternity, 100.

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79. J.M. Winter, “The Impact of the First World War on Civilian Health in Britain,” The Economic History Review 30 (August 1977): 487–507 (quotation 498). 80. Fürth, “Die Frauen und die Bevölkerungs- und Schutzmittelfrage,” 32. 81. Hugo Sellheim, Was tut die Frau fürs Vaterland? Nach Kriegsvorträgen an der Universität Tübingen und im Deutschen Frauenverein vom Roten Kreuz für die Kolonien in Stuttgart (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke,1915), 14. 82. Jacques Amédée Doléris and Jean Bouscatel, Néomalthusianisme, maternité, et féminisme: éducation sexuelle (Paris: Masson et Cie., 1918), 22; see also Thébaud, Les Femmes au temps de la guerre, 282. 83. Françoise Thébaud, Les femmes au temps de la guerre, 266–267; Daniel, The War From Within, 155–156. 84. Davis, Home Fires Burning, 41. 85. WCG, comp., Maternity, 14. 86. Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Warwick (The Countess of Warwick), A Woman and the War (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916), 146. 87. Notification of Births Extension Act, 1915, reprinted in The Mothers: Controversies of Motherhood, ed. Roberts, 200–208; Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, 102. 88. National Council of Public Morals and National Birth-Rate Commission, The Declining Birth-Rate: Being the Report of and the Chief Evidence taken before the National Birth Rate Commission (London: Chapman and Hall, 1916), 270–271. 89. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (2nd ed.) (London and New York: Longman, 1989), 187–189. 90. WCG, comp., Maternity, 48, 91. 91. WCG, comp., Maternity, 46. 92. Helena Swanwick, The War in Its Effect upon Women and Women and War [1915] (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 24. 93. Thébaud, Les femmes au temps de la guerre, 278; Cova, Maternité et droits des Femmes, 202–207. 94. Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 202–213; Karen M. Offen, “Exploring the Sexual Politics of Republican Nationalism,” in Robert Tombs, ed., Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism to the Great War, 1889–1918 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 195–210. 95. Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, “Le devoir particulier des femmes,” La Française, May 12, 1916. 96. Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, “De l’interêt du vote des femmes au point de vue de la famille,” Pour la Vie, February 1919. 97. Offen, “Exploring the Sexual Politics of Republican Nationalism,” 205, 206; see also Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France, 1918–1945 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), 217–222; and Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 202–213. 98. For example, in Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer, 156–164. 99. Gertrud Bäumer, “Der seelische Hintergrund der Bevölkerungsfrage,” Die Frau 23 (1916/17): 129–133 (quotations 131, 132). 100. Helene Lange, “Zur Wiederaufnahume der Bevölkerungspolitik,” Die Frau 23 (1916/17): 100–102 (quotation 100). 101. Usborne, “Pregnancy is the woman’s active service.” 102. Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, Schriften des Bundes über sozialpolitische, sozialfürsorgerische, und Bevölkerungsfragen, “Richtlinien zur Bevölkerungspolitik,” LAB, B-Rep. 235, BDF, Fiche 3400–03.

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103. “Gegen die bevölkerungspolitischen Ausnahmegesetze!” Die Gleichheit, September 27, 1918. 104. Gertrud Bäumer, “Gewaltsame Bevölkerungspolitik,” Die Frauenfrage, October 1, 1918. 105. For a general account of German wartime policies see Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1992), 16–30. 106. J.M. Winter, “Britain’s ‘Lost Generation’ of the First World War,” Population Studies 31 (November 1977): 449–466. 107. The Declining Birth-Rate, 475; Richard A. Soloway, “Eugenics and pronatalism in wartime Britain,” in Wall and Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War, 369–388. 108. Stopes, The Race, Act II. 109. Helene Granitsch, “Die Erhaltung und Mehrung der Volkskraft,” Der Bund (January 1916). 110. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London: Routledge, 1987), 199–200; Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 82–98. 111. Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 67; Ghenia Avril de Sainte-Croix, L’Éducation sexuelle (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1918). 112. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 293–295; see also BAL R/86, 3272, “Gesundheitszeugnisse für Ehebewerber,” and Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review 23 (October 2000): 477–506. 113. Quoted in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, l’enfant de l’ennemi, 1914–1918: Viol, avortement, infanticide pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Aubier, 1995), 99–100. This is the most authoritative work on this controversy. See also excellent discussion in Grayzel, Women’s Identies, 50–86. 114. Maurice Barrès, L’Echo de Paris, February 10, 1915. 115. “Que fera-t-on des petits indésirés?” La Française, February 6,1915. 116. Vérone quoted by Audion-Rouzeau, L’Enfant de l’ennemi, 140; Camille Béllillon, letter to La Croix de l’Aveyron, March 3, 1915. This letter and other materials on this issue are in the BHP, Collection Bouglé, Fonds Arria Ly, Boîte 7, Dossier 7, “L’Enfant du barbare.” 117. “Que fera-t-on des petits indésirés?” editorial, La Française, February 20, 1915. 118. Jane Misme, “L’intégrité féminine,” La Française, April 17, 1915. 119. Jane Misme, “Pour les indesirés,” La Française, April 10, 1915. 120. Marcelle Capy, “L’opinion de nos lecteurs,” La Bataille Syndicaliste, February 20, 1915. 121. Mme. Jean Nabert, “L’Intrus,” La Paix par le Droit 25 (1915): 580–586, in Fonds Arria Ly, Dossier 7. 122. Madeleine Vernet, L’enfant ennemi (Épone: Édition de l’Avenir Social, 1915), 7; for other materials on or by Vernet see BMD, Dossier Madeleine Vernet. 123. Audoin-Rouzeau, L’Enfant de l’ennemi, 195. 124. Maude Royden, “Modern Love,” in Victor Gollancz, ed., The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917), 36–63 (quotation 53).

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125. Aletta Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace, ed. Harriet Feinberg, trans. Annie Wright (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 82. 126. Catherine Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 1–16. 127. Helena Swanwick, Women and War (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1915), 2. 128. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 13–44; on Stöcker see Christl Wickert, Helene Stöcker 1869–1943: Frauenrechtlerin, Sexualreformerin, und Pazifistin: Eine Biographie (Bonn: Dietz, 1991), 95–104. On the Hague Congress see also Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, Vol. 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 265–273. 129. “L’Affaire Hélène Brion au Conseil de Guerre,” Revue des Causes Célèbres, May 2, 1918, 152–154, excerpted and trans. in Bell and Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom, Vol. 2, 273–275 (quotation 274); see also Grayzel, Women’s Identities, 182. 130. Madeleine Vernet, “Aux Femmes! Aux Mères!,” La Mère Éducatrice, Revue Mensuelle d’Éducation (October 1917). 131. Action des Femmes, Statuts, in BMD, Dossier Action des Femmes; Bard, Filles de Marianne, 116–120; Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes, 189–193. 132. Anne Léal, Le triomphe du panmasculinisme: conférence fait à l’Action des Femmes (Paris: Imprimerie Pigalle, 1917). 133. Flyer, L’Action des Femmes, 1917, in BMD, Dossier Action des Femmes. 134. Bard, Filles de Marianne, 119–120. 135. Conseil National des Femmes Françaises, “Manifeste adressé au congrès féminin à La Haye,” La Française, April 24, 1915. 136. Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in fin-de-siecle Vienna (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 124–126. 137. Gertrud Bäumer, “German Women and the Hague Congress,” Jus Suffragii, June 1, 1915. 138. Dr. Hanna Hellermann, “Die innere Stellungnahme der Frauen zum Krieg,” Die Frau 24 (1917/18): 577–582 (quotations 579, 580). 139. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 89. 140. Ellen Key, War, Peace, and the Future: A Consideration of Nationalism and Internationalism and the Relation of Women to War, trans. Hildegard Norberg (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 99–100. 141. Rebecca West, “Woman Worship,” in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, ed. Jane Marcus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 338–340 (quotation 340). 142. “Mother’s Day, 1918,” in BMD, dossier Fête des Mères. 143. Thébaud, Les Femmes au temps de la guerre, 279–280. 144. Belzer, “Femininity under Fire,” 42. 145. Henri Barbusse, Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, trans. Fitzwater Wray (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1917), 313; see also Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” in Margaret Randolph Higgonet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 197–226. 146. Barbusse, Under Fire, 284.

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147. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front [1928], trans. A.W. Wheen (New York: Fawcett, 1975), 161. 148. Siegfried Sassoon, “Glory of Women,” in Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, copyright 1918, 1920 by E.P. Dutton; Copyright 1936, 1946, 1947 by Siegfried Sassoon. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. 149. Warwick, A Woman and the War, 133. 150. Siegfried Sassoon, “The Hero,” in Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, copyright 1918, 1920 by E.P. Dutton; Copyright 1936, 1946, 1947, 1948 by Siegfried Sassoon. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of the Penguin Group USA, Inc. 151. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 193. 152. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 103. 153. J.M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15–29. 154. Brittain, Testament of Youth, 252. 155. Winter, Sites of Memory, 54–77. 156. Käthe Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 156–157; excerpted in Marilyn ShevinCoetzee and Frans Coetzee, eds., World War I and European Society: A Sourcebook (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1995), 331. 157. Daniel, The War from Within, 148–149. 158. Gaston Variot, Comment sauvegarder les bébés: Enseignement de l’hygiène infantile donné a l’institut de puériculture à la Goutte de Lait de Belleville (Paris: Librarie Octave Doin, 1922), 16 159. Variot, Comment sauvegarder les bébés, 19; for statistics on killed and wounded see Jeremy D. Popkin, A History of Modern France (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 240. 160. Soloway, “Eugenics and Pronatalism in Wartime Britain”; see also Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 153–170. 161. Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier [1918], in Rebecca West, a Celebration, ed. Samuel Hynes (London: Macmillan, 1977), 3–68. 162. Ernst Toller, Hinkemann: Eine Tragödie [1922] (Potsdam: G. Kiepenhauer, 1925). 163. D.H. Lawrence, The Fox [1923] in Charles Neider, ed., Short Novels of the Masters (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 580–643. 164. Sieder, “Behind the Lines.” 165. Jane Misme, “Les Français seront-ils polygames?” La Française, January 23, 1916. 166. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, “Demobilmachung,” Die Frau 25 (1918/19): 185–189 (quotation 186). 167. Swanwick, The War in Its Effect Upon Women [1916] (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 8. 168. Jane Misme, “La Puériculture pour toutes,” La Française, October 12, 1918. 169. Baronchelli, La donna della nuova Italia, 201–202. 170. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 26–40. 171. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tirésias [1916] (Paris: Éditions du Bélier, 1946), Act I, Scene 8 (translation ATA). See also Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart.”

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30. Anne-Marie Sohn, “Between the Wars.” 31. Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, 119; Janneke Plantenga, “Double Lives: Labour Market Participation, Citizenship and Gender,” in Jet Bussemaker and Marie Christine Bernadette Voet, eds., Gender, Participation and Citizenship in the Netherlands (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 51–64. 32. Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 186–205. 33. Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 129–132. 34. Madeleine Vernet, “Mère et Citoyenne,” La Mere Éducatrice, July, 1918. 35. Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, “Programm des Bundes deutscher Frauenvereine,” 1920, rpt., in Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894–1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Rupprecht, 1983), 296–298. 36. M. Pollak, “Politik, die die Frauen verstehen; Politik, die die Frauen machen,” Arbeiter- Zeitung, August 14, 1927, quoted in Birgitta Baader-Zar, “Women in Austrian Politics: Goals and Visions,” in David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, eds., Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996), 59–90 (quotation 74). 37. Cf. Kent, Making Peace; Roberts, Civilization without Sexes. 38. Cova, Au Service de l’Église, 65. 39. David Bradley, Family Law and Political Culture: Scandinavian Laws in Comparative Perspective (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1996), 1–29. 40. Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, 82–98 and passim. 41. Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, “The Project ‘The Nordic Marriage Model in a Comparative Perspective’ and its Main Results,” in Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, eds., The Nordic Model of Marriage and the Welfare State (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2001), 13–34. 42. Søland, Becoming Modern, 111–144. 43. Melby et al., “The Nordic Model of Marriage,” 16. 44. WL, National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, Status of Wives and Mothers Sub-Committee, “Guardianship of Infants Bill” and “Maintenance Orders”; see also Harold L. Smith, “British Feminism in the 1920s,” in Harold L. Smith, ed., British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 47–65. 45. Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 108–109; Bradley, Family Law and Political Culture, 37–66. 46. Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung, 160. 47. “Die deutsche Reichsverfassung von 1919,” Article 119, 120. 48. Camilla Jellinek, ed., Frauen unter deutschem Recht (Mannheim, Berlin, and Leipzig: J. Bensheimer, 1928), 39–46. 49. Yvonne Netter, Code pratique de la femme et de l’enfant (Paris: Hachette, 1930), 37, 66; Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Civil Rights in France, 1918–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 171–181. 50. Conseil national des femmes françaises, “Que démandent les féministes?” La Française, November 15, 1919; Marcelle Kraemer-Bach, “La puissance paternelle,” La Française, March 19, 1927; see also Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 364–365. 51. Madeleine Vernet, “Le mensonge social et la maternité,” La Mère Éducatrice, September 1919.

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52. Union féminine civique et sociale, La Mère au foyer: Ouvrière de progrès humain. documents d’études, extraits du Congrès International de juin 1937 (Paris: UFCS, 1937), 15. 53. Fernand Boverat, La Crise des naissances: Ses Conséquences tragiques et ses remèdes (Paris: Éditions de l’Alliance Nationale, 1932), 32; Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic, 179.On the work of this organization see Cheryl A. Koos, “Gender, Anti-Individualism, and Nationalism: The Alliance Nationale and the Pronatalist Backlash against the Femme Moderne, 1933–1940,” French Historical Studies 19 (Spring 1996): 699–723. Cf. also Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 177–179. 54. Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic; “Le congrès du Conseil International des Femmes,” La Française, May 18, 1929; Cova, Maternité, 329–345. 55. Editorial, “Tâche familiale, fonction sociale et profession,” La femme dans la vie sociale, April, 1938. 56. Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 364–365; Cova, Maternité, 360–362. 57. For example, Huss, “Pronatalism in the Inter-War Period in France,” and Koos, “Gender, Anti-Individualism, and Nationalism” do not mention the unmarried mother. 58. See above, pp. 59–60. 59. Yvonne Hirdman, Women—From Possibility to Problem: Gender Conflict in the Welfare State: The Swedish Model, trans. Steven Hartman and Sara Riegler Hartman (Stockholm: Arbetslivcentrum, 1994), 14. 60. Simon Szreter, “Falling Fertilities and Changing Sexualities in Europe since c. 1850: A Comparative Survey of National Demographic Patterns,” in Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert Hekma, eds., Sexual Cultures in Europe: Themes in Sexuality (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 159–194. 61. Bradley, Family Law and Political Culture, 40–41. 62. Verhandlungen der verfassungsgebenden deutschen Nationalversammlung 328 (July 16, 1919): 1600, 1606; see also the summary of this debate in GrevenAschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung, 170. 63. Verhandlungen 328 (July 16, 1919): 1601. 64. Verhandlungen 328 (July 30, 1919): 2129. 65. Verhandlungen 328 (July 30, 1919): 2131–2132. 66. See the statements of Anna von Gierke, Verhandlungen 328 (July 16, 1919): 1602 and of Agnes Neuhaus, 1601. 67. “Die deutsche Reichsverfassung von 1919,” Article 121. 68. Jellinek, ed., Frauen unter deutschem Recht, 46–50. 69. See Christl Wickert, Helene Stöcker, 1869–1934: Frauenrechtlerin, Sexualreformerin, und Pazifistin: Eine Biographie (Bonn: Dietz, 1991), 105–116; Dr. Rosenthal “Die Reform der Rechtstellung des unehelichen Kindes,” Die neue Generation (1919): 127–133; C.J. Klumker, “Der neue Gesetzentwurf über die Rechtsstellung der unehelichen Kinder,” Die Neue Generation (1929): 1–6. 70. Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), 39–43. 71. Gisela Bock, “Nazi Gender Policies and Women’s History,” in Duby, Perrot, and Thébaud, eds., A History of Women in the West, Vol. 5, 14–176; see also Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 38–43. 72. Laura Gellott and Michael Phayer, “Dissenting Voices: Catholic Women in Opposition to Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 22 (January 1987): 91–114.

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73. National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, Sixth Annual Report (London: Carnegie House, 1924). 74. WL, NUSEC, Status of Wives and Mothers Sub-Committee. 75. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Vol. 2, From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948 (London: Routledge, 1973), 602–610. 76. Maria Vérone, La Situation juridique des enfants naturels: Rapport présenté au Comité Executif du Conseil International des Femmes au nom de la section de législation du Conseil national des femmes françaises, Copenhague Mai1924 (Paris: Éditions de la Ligue française pour le droit des femmes, 1924); Kraemer-Bach, “La puissance paternelle.” 77. Vernet, “Le mensonge social et la maternité.” 78. Madeleine Vernet, “L’amour libre,” La Mère Éducatrice, September 1920. 79. For example, Union féminine civique et sociale, La femme au service du pays (Paris: UFCS, n.d.); see also Cova, Au service de l’Église. 80. Anne Cova, “L’Assurance maternité dans la loi de 1928–1930,” Actes du 114e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes, Association pour l’étude de l’histoire de la sécurité sociale (Paris, n.p., 1990), 65–71. 81. Louis Lespine, La Femme en Espagne: Étude juridique, économique et de législation comparée (Toulouse: Clémence-Isaure, 1919), 55–80. 82. Geraldine M. Scanlon, La polemica feminista en la España contemporanea (1868–1974), trans. Rafael Mazarrasa (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1986), 138–139. 83. Danièle Bussy-Genevois, “The Women of Spain from the Republic to Franco,” in Duby, Perrot, and Thébaud, eds., History of Women in the West, Vol. 5, 177–193 (quotation 178); see also Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 320–329. 84. Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 20–26. 85. Bussy-Genevois, “The Women of Spain,” 187. 86. Mary Nash, “Pronatalism and Motherhood in Franco’s Spain,” in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 160–177; Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood, 27–45. 87. Union féminine civique et sociale, “La femme au service du pays,” 30. 88. Wilma Meikle, Towards a Sane Feminism (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1917), 127. 89. Camilla Jellinek “Vom Kochtopf und von der geistigen Arbeit,” Neue badische Zeitung, May 25, 1921, BAK, Nachlass Camilla Jellinek, Vol. 14. 90. “Du foyer au pièdestal,” La Française, June 9, 1923. 91. Editorial, “The Right to Marry,” The Woman’s Leader, August 7, 1925; see also Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 138–174. 92. Eleanor Rathbone, The Disinherited Family: A Plea for the Endowment of the Family (London: E. Arnold, 1924), 65. 93. Rathbone, The Disinherited Family, 209. 94. Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 294–298; Pamela Graves, “An Experiment in WomanCentered Socialism: Labour Women in Britain,” in Pamela Graves and Helmut Gruber, eds., Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe between the

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95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111.

112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117.

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Two World Wars (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 180–214; Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 138–223. Rathbone, The Disinherited Family, 239–240. Rathbone, The Disinherited Family, 305. Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 238–239; see also Offen, European Feminisms, 280–283. Elizabeth Abbott, “What is Equality?,” The Woman’s Leader, February 11, 1927. The Open Door International for the Economic Emancipation of the Woman Worker, Manifesto and Charter, Berlin, June 16, 1929. See also the discussion of these issues in Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 138–223, and Offen, European Feminisms, 353. On working-class households see Roberts, A Woman’s Place, 148–163; on working-class women’s responses to family endowment see Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 213–219. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 179–223. For an excellent summary of the French debates, see Karen Offen, “Body Politics: Women, Work and the Politics of Motherhood in France, 1920–1950,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 138–159. Conseil national des femmes françaises, “Que demandent les féministes?” Vernet, “Le mensonge social et la maternité”; Offen, “Body politics.” “Allocations familiales et travail féminin,” La Française, October 12, 1938; for a much fuller discussion of these issues, see Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 392–411; and Cova, Maternité, 325–392. Koos, “Gender, Anti-Individualism, and Nationalism.” M. Bunel, “Liberté, liberté chérie . . . dans le féminisme,” La Femme dans la vie sociale, November 1936; Union Féminine Civique et Sociale, La Femme au service du pays, 35; Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 313–329; Cova, Maternité, 331; Cova, Au Service de l’Église, 165–181. Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 314. “Une injustice,” La Française, January 14, 1939. Chambre des Députés, Journal officiel de la République Fançiase: lois et décrets, July 30, 1939; Cova, Maternité, 372–380. Reagin, A German Women’s Movement, 221–247; Marie Baum, “Referat Art. 110 der Verfassung des deutschen Reichs,” LAB, B-Rep. 235–0, Archiv des BDF, “Protokolle der 13. Generalversammlung des BDF,” Fiche 3050. Statement of Fräulein Fisch, “Protokolle der 13. Generalversammlung des BDF.” Statements of Else Lüders, Marianne Weber, Camilla Jellinek, “Protokolle der 13. Generalversammlung des BDF.” Henriette Fürth, “Zur Sozialisierung der öffentlichen Wohlfahrtspflege: Teil III,” Die Gleichheit (1919): 154–155; see also Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 1995), 182. LAB, B-Rep. 235–0, “Protokolle der 16. Generalversammlung des BDF” Fiche 3061. Gertrud Bäumer, Familienpolitik: Probleme, Ziele und Wege (Berlin: Verlag für Standesamtswesen, 1933), 50. “Die deutsche Reichsverfassung vom 11 August 1919,” Article 128. Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, “Frauenarbeit und Wirtschaftskrisis: Erklärung des BDF April 1931,” in LAB, B-Rep. 235-0, BDF, Petionen zu Wirtschaftsfragen, April 1931, Fiche 2848.

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118. On the postal and telegraph workers, see Ursula Nienhaus, Vater Staat und seine Gehilfinnen: Die Politik mit der Frauenarbeit bei der deutschen Post (1864–1945) (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1995), 127–174. 119. Johanna Gehmacher, Völkische Frauenbewegung: Deutschnationale und nationalsozialistische Geschlechterpolitik in Österreich (Wien: Döcker Verlag, 1998), 79–84. 120. “Berufsarbeit der verheirateten Frau,” Die Frau (Wien) 40 (June 1931): 1. 121. “Das Doppelverdienergesetz,” Die Österreicherin, December 1933. 122. Gellott and Phayer, “Dissenting Voices.” 123. C.P. Gunning and W. Wijnaendts Francken-Dyserinck, Het Gezinsloon (s’Gravenhage: Centrale van Vereeniginen van Personeel, 1921), 18. See also IIAV, Archief van het Comité van Actie tegen het Gezinsloon, Nederlandsche Unie voor Vrouwenbelangen, “Gezinsloon.” 124. Tjitske Akkerman, “Political Participation and Social Rights: The Triumph of the Breadwinner in the Netherlands,” in Bussemaker and Voet, eds., Gender, Participation, 38–50. 125. IIAV, Nederlandsche Unie voor Vrouwenbelangen, “Actiecomité inzake het Ontslag van de Gehuwde Ambtenaressen”; see also Janneke Plantenga, “Double Lives: Labour Market Participation, Citizenship and Gender,” in Bussemaker and Voet, eds., Gender, Participation and Citizenship, 51–64; and Francisca de Haan, Gender and the Politics of Office Work: The Netherlands, 1890–1940 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), 58–70. 126. Denise de Weerdt, En de Vrouwen? Vrouw, vrouwenbeweging en feminisme en Belgie 1830–1960 (Gent: Masreelfonds, 1980), 158–160. 127. Lars Trägårdh, “Crisis and the Politics of National Community: Germany and Sweden, 1933/1994,” in Nina Witoszek and Lars Trägårdh, eds., Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 75–109; Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen. 128. Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, 59–66. 129. Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, 67–139. A sensitive and insightful account of Myrdal’s life and work is Sondra R. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power: Alva Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929–1956,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (Fall 1992): 82–112; and Herman, “Feminists, Socialists, and the Genesis of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Frances Richardson Keller, ed., Views of Women’s Lives in Western Tradition: Frontiers of the Past and the Future (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 472–510. 130. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 145. 131. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 121; see also Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, 59–66; Ann-Sofie Ohlander, “The Invisible Child? The Struggle for a Social Democratic Family Policy in Sweden, 1900–1960s,” in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 60–72; Yvonne Hirdman, Women— From Possibility to Problem: Gender Conflict in the Welfare State: The Swedish Model, trans. Steven Hartman and Sara Riegler Hartman (Stockholm: Arbetslivcentrum, 1994), 17–19; and Ann-Sofie Kälvemark, More Children of Better Quality? Aspects of Swedish Population Policy in the 1930s (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1990). 132. Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, 219–221. 133. Ohlander, “The Invisible Child?,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 69; see also Myrdal, Family and State. 134. Chiara Saraceno, “Redefining Maternity and Paternity: Gender, Pronatalism and Social Policies in Fascist Italy,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 196–212.

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135. Bock, “Nazi Gender Policies,” 160–170; Bock, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte, 281–295. 136. Mary E. Daly, “Oh Kathleen ni Houlihan, Your Way’s a Thorny Way: The Condition of Women in 20th Century Ireland,” in Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, eds., Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 102–126. 137. Bunreact na hÉireann, # 41(2), quoted in Pauline Conroy Jackson, “Managing the Mothers: the Case of Ireland,” in Jane Lewis, ed., Women and Social Policies in Europe: Work, Family and the State (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993), 72–91 (quotation 75); see also Yvonne Scannell, “The Constitution and the Role of Women,” in Brian Farrell, ed., De Valera’s Constitution and Ours (Goldenbridge, Dublin: Gillard Macmillan, 1988), 123–136. 138. Schwegman and Withuis, “Moederschap: van springplank tot obstakel”; see also Jet Bussemaker, “Gender and the Separation of Spheres in Twentieth Century Dutch Society: Pillarisation, Welfare State Formation, and Individualisation,” in Bussemaker and Voet, eds., Gender, Participation, 25–50; and Ulla Jansz, “Gender and Democratic Socialism in the Netherlands,” in Gruber and Graves, eds., Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women, 215–237. 139. Vera Brittain, Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 173. 140. Yvonne Netter, Le Travail de la femme mariée: Son activité professionelle (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1923), 27. 141. Adele Schreiber, “Weibliche Beamtinnen und Sozialdemokratie,” Münchener Post, July 21, 1925. 142. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 424. For an excellent international and comparative discussion of the issues surrounding motherhood and family allowances in the interwar era see Gisela Bock, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), 248–259.



“C M”: B C, E,   P  H   I E

1. The description of and quotation from Vautel’s novel (which was not available to me in the original) is taken from Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 131. 2. Vera Brittain, Honourable Estate: A Novel of Transition (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 516–517. 3. Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford, 1995), 15. 4. Enid Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood (New York: W.W. Norton, 1934), 89; D.V. Glass, “Family Planning Programmes and Action in Western Europe,” Population Studies 19 (March 1966): 221–238. 5. John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1965), 409. 6. Cf. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 17. 7. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 37–51. 8. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), 142–144. 9. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 14–45.

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10. Karl Kautsky, “Eheberatung,” Die Frau (Wien) (October 1): 1921, 9–12; Helmut Gruber, “The ‘New Woman’: Realities and Illusions of Gender Equality in Red Vienna,” in Helmut Gruber, ed., Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 56–94. 11. Grossmann, Reforming Sex, 35. 12. Susanna Woodtli, Gleichberechtigung: Der Kampf um die politischen Rechte der Frau in der Schweiz (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1975), 138–148. 13. Usborne, The Politics of the Body, 156–201. 14. Atina Grossmann, “Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign Against Paragraph 218,” in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 66–86; “Gegen den 144,” Die Frau (Wien) (February 1933): 2–3. 15. Marie Carmichael Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future [1920] in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, eds., The Mothers: Controversies of Motherhood (London: Routledge Thoemmes, 1994), 169; see also Lesley A. Hall, “Malthusian Mutations: The Changing Politics and Moral Meanings of Birth Control in Britain,” in Brian Dolan, ed., Malthus, Medicine, and Morality: “Malthusianism” after 1798 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 141–163. 16. Richard A. Soloway, “The Galton Lecture 1996: Marie Stopes, Eugenics, and the Birth Control Movement,” in Robert A. Peel, ed., Marie Stopes and the English Birth Control Movement: Proceedings of a Conference organized by the Galton Institute, London, 1996 (London: Galton Institute, 1997), 49–76; Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 215–252. 17. Greta Jones, “Marie Stopes in Ireland: The Mother’s Clinic in Belfast, 1936–47,” Social History of Medicine 5/2 (April 1992): 255–277, partially reprinted in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquart, eds., The Irish Women’s History Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), 111–115. 18. Sheila Rowbotham, A New World for Women: Stella Browne, Socialist Feminist (London: Pluto Press, 1977), 43–59; Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–28 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 121–125; Hall, “Malthusian Mutations.” 19. Rowbotham, A New World, 22–42; Hall, “Malthusian Mutations.” 20. Doris H. Linder, Crusader for Sex Education: Elise Ottesen-Jensen (1886–1973) in Scandinavia and on the International Scene (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1996), 87–145. 21. Sondra R. Herman, “Feminists, Socialists, and the Genesis of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Frances Richardson Keller, ed., Views of Women’s Lives in Western Tradition: Frontiers of the Past and the Future (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 472–510. 22. Ida Blom, “Voluntary motherhood 1900–1930: Theories and Politics of a Norwegian Feminist in an International Perspective,” in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 21–39. 23. Glass, “Family Planning Programmes.” 24. Hugo Q. Röling, “L’Énigme de la contraception aux Pays-Bas,” in Francis Ronsin, Hervé Le Bras and Élisabeth Zucker-Rouvillois, eds., Démographie et Politique (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1997), 27–37.

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25. Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, 93–119. Part of the text of this law is reprinted in translation in Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, Vol. 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 309–310. 26. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 1930, quoted in Bell and Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom, Vol. 2, 310–312 (quotation 210). 27. BMD, Dossier Henriette Alquier; Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes en France, XIX–XX siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1997), 285–294. 28. Francis Ronsin, La Grève des ventres: propagande néo-malthusien et baisse de la natalité française, XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1980), 197–200. 29. A.M. Carr-Saunders, World Population: Past Growth and Present Trends (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 241–242; Jones, “Marie Stopes in Ireland.” 30. Mary Nash, “Pronatalism and Motherhood in Franco’s Spain,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 160–195; Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1995), 165–176. 31. Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet, La Femme et les médecins: Analyse historique (Paris: Hachette, 1983), 273. 32. Yvonne Knibiehler, L’Histoire des mères du moyen-âge à nos jours (Paris: Montalba, 1980), 321–322. 33. Karen Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: J.W. Dietz, 1990), 268. 34. Naomi Mitchison, “Some Comment on the Use of Contraceptives by Intelligent Persons,” in Norman Haire and World League for Sexual Reform, eds., Sexual Reform Congress, London, 8–14 ix, 1929: Proceedings of the Third Congress (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1930), 182–188 (quotation 188). 35. C. Brunschvicg, “Féminisme et natalité,” La Française, October 1, 1931. 36. Adele Schreiber, introduction to Margaret Sanger, Die neue Mutterschaft: Geburtenregelung als Kulturproblem (Dresden: Sibyllen-Verlag, 1927), 29. 37. Naomi Mitchison, “Some Comment,” in World League for Sexual Reform, 184. 38. Cheryl A. Koos, “Gender, Anti-Individualism, and Nationalism: the Alliance Nationale and the Pronatalist Backlash against the Femme Moderne, 1933–1940,” French Historical Studies 19 (Spring 1996): 699–723; Marie-Monique Huss, “Pronatalism in the Inter-War Period in France,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (January 1990): 39–68. 39. Auguste Isaac, “La natalité française,” Le Musée Social, May 5, 1923; see also Robert Talmy, Histoire du mouvement familial en France, 1896–1939 (Aubenas: Union nationale des Caisses d’Allocations Familiales, 1962), 186–237. 40. Nelly Roussel, editorial in La République Intégrale (December 1919). This and other articles may be found in BMD, Fonds Nelly Roussel, clippings file. 41. “The Real Meaning of the Words ‘Birth Control,’ ” Time and Tide (June 6, 1924). 42. Nationale Vrouwenraad, Het Bevolkingsvraagstuk, Rapport van de commissie tot bestudeering van het bevolkingsvraagstuk (Leiden: S.C. van Doesburgh, 1927). 43. “Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” quoted in Edward Fuller, The Right of the Child: A Chapter in Social History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1951), 72; “La Charte de l’Enfant,” La Voix des Femmes, January 15, 1925. 44. “La Charte de l’Enfant.” 45. Marie Carmichael Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those who are Creating the Future (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1921), 191.

290

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46. “Henriette Alquier et Marie Guillot devant le tribunal correctionnel de Saumur,” L’Humanité, December 10, 1927. This and other articles may be found in BMD, Dossier Marie Guillot. Cf. also Jacgues Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 171–188. 47. “Report of the Work of the Labour Party in Women’s Interests at Home and Abroad, May to April, 1924,” The Labour Woman, July 1, 1925. 48. Elise Ottesen-Jensen, “Birth Control Work among the Poor in Sweden,” in Haire and World League for Sex Reform, eds., Sexual Reform Congress, 173–177 (quotation 174). 49. Schreiber, introduction to Sanger, Die neue Mutterschaft, 26. 50. Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree: My Quest for Liberty and Love, Vol. 1 (New York: G.W. Putnam, 1975), 170. 51. Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart: Eine Psychologische Bilanz (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1932), 345. 52. Editorial, “Natalité,” La Française, April 17, 1937. This and other clippings may be found BMD, Dossier Natalité. 53. Maude Royden, “Modern Love,” in Victor Gollancz, ed., The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917), 36–63. 54. Dora Russell, Hypatia: Women and Knowledge (New York: Dutton, 1925), 42. 55. Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, 224. 56. Gertrud Bäumer, “Rede zum sozialen Teil des Regierungsprogramms,” Die Frau 26 (April 7, 1919): 201–202. 57. Gertrud Bäumer, Familienpolitik: Probleme, Ziele und Wege (Berlin: Verlag für Standesamtswesen, 1933), 50. 58. Grossmann, “Abortion and Economic Crisis.” 59. Bertolt Brecht, “Herr Doktor,” in Brecht, Bertolt Brecht: Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 382. 60. Henriette Herzfelder, “Zum Muttertag,” Die Österreicherin (May 1928): 1–2. 61. Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 102. 62. Editorial, La Française, November 12, 1938; see BMD, Dossier fête des mères. 63. Cicely Hamilton, Modern Italy, as Seen by an Englishwoman (London: J.M. Dent, 1935), 76. 64. Winfred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilization [1935] (Chicago, IL: Cassandra Editions, 1978), 167, 168. 65. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938] (London and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 102. 66. Kerstin Hesselgren, quoted in Sondra R. Herman, “Feminists, Socialists, and the Genesis of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Frances Richardson Keller, ed., Views of Women’s Lives in Western Tradition: Frontiers of the Past and the Future (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 472–510 (quotation 489). 67. “Was in Nazimutterschulen gelehrt wird,” Die Frau (1934): 9. 68. Laura Gellott and Michael Phayer, “Dissenting Voices: Catholic Women in Opposition to Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 22 (January 1987): 91–114. 69. Silke Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen, Die Krise der Männer: Die Erwerbstätigkeit verheirateter Frauen in Deutschland und Schweden, 1919–1939 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2001), 59–66. 70. Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (New York and London: Harper, 1941), 110. 71. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 117.

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72. Sondra R. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power: Alva Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929–1956,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (Fall 1992): 82–112. 73. Ann-Sofie Ohlander, “The Invisible Child? The Struggle for a Social Democratic Family Policy in Sweden, 1900–1960s,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 60–72 (quotation 70); see also Anne-Lise Seip and Hilde Ibsen, “Family Welfare, Which Policy? Norway’s Road to Child Allowances,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies, 40–59. 74. Stella Browne, “Women and Birth Control,” in Eden Paul, ed., Population and Birth Control, a Symposium (New York: Critic and Guide Co., 1917), rpt. by Lesley Hall, www.lesleyahall.net. 75. Stella Browne, “The Right to Abortion,” in Rowbotham, ed., A New World for Women, 113, 114. 76. Felicia Gordon, The Integral Feminist: Madeleine Pelletier, 1874–1939: Feminism, Socialism and Medicine (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 213–235. 77. Madeleine Pelletier, “De l’avortement,” Haire and World League for Sexual Reform, Sexual Reform Congress, 233–235 (quotation 235). 78. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 237; on Stopes see also Soloway, “The Galton Lecture 1996.” 79. Juste Sicard de Plauzoles, “Prophylaxie de la dégénerescence par l’éducation sexuelle,” Cours Libre d’Hygiène Sociale (Paris: Sorbonne, 1930), 53. 80. “L’oeuvre accomplie par le Comité d’Éducation Féminine (1925–1935): Rapport présenté à l’assemblée générale du 14 mars 1935 de la Société Française de Prophylaxie Sanitaire et Morale par Mme. le Docteur Montreuil-Straus,” brochure in BMD, Dossier Germane Montreuil-Straus. 81. “L’oeuvre accomplie”; a postcard version of this poster is in BMD, Dossier Germaine Montreuil-Straus. 82. “L’oeuvre accomplie.” 83. “L’oeuvre accomplie.” On Montreuil-Straus see also Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 223–226; and Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 184–187. 84. Margarita Nelken, La Condición Social de la Mujer in España: Su Estado Actual, Su Posible Desarollo (Barcelona: Editorial Minerva, 1922), 122–123. On Nelken’s life and work see Josebe Martínez-Gutiérrez, “Margarita Nelken: Feminist and Political Praxis during the Spanish Civil War,” trans. H. Patsy Boyer, in Lisa Vollendorf, ed., Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2001), 278–292. 85. Felix Marti Ibañez quoted in Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 173; see also Temma Kaplan, “Other Scenarios: Women and Spanish Anarchism,” in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 400–421. 86. Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 115–142. 87. Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, “The Project ‘The Nordic Marriage Model in Comparative Perspective and Its Main Results’ ” in Kari Melby, Anu Pylkkänen, Bente Rosenbeck, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg, eds., The Nordic Model of Marriage and the Welfare State (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers, 2000), 13–26; and Marjatta Hietala, “Eugenics and the Reform of Marriage Law in Finland,” in Melby et al., eds., The Nordic Model, 159–182.

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88. Jan Noordman, Om de Kwaliteit van het nageslacht: Eugenetica in Nederland, 1900–1950 (Nijmegen: Sun, 1989), 98–99; see also B. Bakker-Nort, Beroepsarbeid der gehuwde vrouw (Utrecht: A. W. Bruna, 1921). 89. Herwerden, “Erfelijkheitsverschijnseln bij de mens,” quoted in C.A.B van Herwerden, Marianne van Herwerden, 16 Februari 1874–26 Januari 1934 (Rotterdam: W.L.&L. Brusse, 1948), 147. 90. Noordman, Om de Kwaliteit, 164. 91. William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 146–169. 92. Laure Biardeau, Le Certificat prénuptial: Étude de droit comparé et de législation (Paris: Le mouvement sanitaire: Librairie du Receuil Sirey, 1931), 22; see also BMD, Dossier Certificat Prénuptial. 93. Louise Hervieu, Le Crime (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1937), 56; see also Louise Hervieu, Sangs: un roman (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1936). 94. Brochure Association Louise Hervieu pour l’établissement du Carnet de Santé, déclarée le 31 janvier, 1938, in BMD, Dossier Louise Hervieu. 95. Hervieu, Le Crime, 60. 96. Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 172. 97. On the history of sterilization debates, see Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitk und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), 21–78; William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 171–191; Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996). 98. For a more thorough comparison see Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review 23 (October 2000): 477–506. 99. Angelika Ebbinghaus, “Helene Wessel und die Verwahrung,” in Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer und Täterinnen: Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus (Nördlingen: Franz Greno, 1987), 152–173; Edward Ross Dickinson, “Welfare, Democracy and Fascism: The Political Crisis in German Child Welfare, 1922–1933,” German Studies Review 22 (February 1999): 43–66. Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 1890–1933 (Bonn: Dietz, 1995), 23–35. 100. Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik, 264–327; see also Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain.” 101. LAB, B-Rep. 235, Archiv des BDF, Veranstaltungen des Bundes, Generalversammlung 1925: Maschinenschriftliche Stenogramme der 14. Generalversammlung von 4 bis 7 Okt. in Dresden, 164–178, Fiche no. 3032–3035. See the statement of Frau Dr. Schörp-Merkel, p. 118: “Es sollen nur wohlgeborene Kinder gezeugt werden. Ich finde immer, daß man dem sehr begeistert zustimmt. Wir müssen uns hier aber bescheiden und bekennen, daß die Wissenschaft noch nicht so weit ist, mit Sicherheit festzustellen, ob ein Kind wohlgeboren ist oder nicht. Gerade bei der Erblichkeit, z.B. bei Geisteskrankheiten ist das nicht möglich.” 102. Bäumer, Familienpolitik, 33; for other examples see Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain.” 103. Luise Scheffen-Doering, “Die Familie im Volksaufbau,” Die Frau 40 (1933): 530–535; quotations 530, 533. 104. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, 79–140.

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105. For background of British politics and natalism, see Pamela Graves, “An Experiment in Woman-Centered Socialism: Labour Women in Britain,” in Gruber and Graves, eds., Women and Socialism, 180–214; and Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 138–223. 106. John Macnicol, “Eugenics and the Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization between the Wars,” The Society for the Social History of Medicine (1989): 147–169; C.P. Blacker, “Voluntary Sterilization: The Last Sixty Years,” Eugenics Review 54 (1962): 9–23. 107. On the NUSEC endorsement, see WLHM, SA/Eug./D147: General: National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. The endorsements of NUSEC and of the Women’s Cooperative Guild are also quoted in Committee for Legalizing Eugenic Sterilization, Better Unborn (London: B. Standing, 1932), 16. See Lesley A. Hall, “Women, Feminism and Eugenics,” in Robert A. Peel, ed., Essays in the History of Eugenics: Proceedings of a Conference Organized by the Galton Institute, London 1997 (London: Galton Institute, 1997), 36–51; Diana Hopkinson, Family Inheritance: A Life of Eva Hubback (London and New York: Staples Press, 1954) does not discuss this aspect of Hubback’s activities. 108. Soloway, “The Galton Lecture 1996”; Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 233–252. 109. John Macnicol, “The Voluntary Sterilization Campaign in Britain,” in John C. Fout, ed., Forbidden History: The State, Society and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 317–334. 110. Report of the Seventeenth National Conference of Labour Women, May 19, 20, and 21, 1936 (London: Labour Party, 1926), 92; see also Macnicol, “Eugenics and the Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization,” 164. 111. “Sterilisation: Report of Departmental Committee,” The Shield (March 1934). 112. Bent Sigurd Hansen, “Something Rotten in the State of Denmark: Eugenics and the Ascent of the Welfare State,” in Broberg and Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State, 30–42. 113. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 213. 114. Marjatta Hietala, “From Race Hygiene to Sterilization: The Eugenics Movement in Finland,” in Roll-Hansen, ed., Eugenics and the Welfare State, 195–258; “Sterilization Act Enacted in Helsinki 13 June, 1935,” rpt., in Markku Mattila, Kansamme Parhaaksi:Rotuhygienia Suomessa vuoden 1935 sterliointilakiin asti (In Our Nation’s Best Interest: Eugenics in Finland until the Promulgation of the Sterilization Law of 1935) (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinenen Seura, 1999), 432 (see also the English-language summary of this work, 401–431). 115. Stella Browne, “Working Women who Think,” The New Generation, September 1922, displayed on www.lesleyahall.net 116. Dora Russell, “Marriage and Freedom,” Haire and World League for Sexual Reform, eds., Sexual Reform Congress, 25–36 (quotation 28). 117. Nationale Vrouwenrad, Het Bevolkingsvraagstuk. 118. Tilla Vulhopp, “Que penser du birth control?” La Femme Belge (September 1929): 406–413 (quotation 409). 119. Linder, Crusader for Sex Education, 117–118. 120. Herwerden, Marianne van Herwerden, 49; F. Schrijver, Dr. Maria Anna van Herwerden, s.i., 1934. 121. “La réforme sexuelle en Allemagne,” Problème Sexuel, no. 3 (July 1934): 36–37.

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122. Gertrud Bäumer, “Frauenbewegung und Mutterschaft,” Die Frau 41 (1933/34): 171–181 (quotation 177). 123. Kara Lenz-von Börries, “Zum Sterilisationsgesetz,” Die Frau 41 (1933/34): 354–357; see also Claudia Koonz, “Ethical Dilemmas and Nazi Eugenics: Single-Issue Dissent in Religious Contexts,” in Michael Geyer and Charles W. Boyer, eds., Resistance against the Third Reich (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 15–38. 124. An influential popularization of these discoveries was J.B.S. Haldane, Adventures of a Biologist (New York and London: Harper, 1940), especially 143–166; see also Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985), 193–211; and Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 125. Richard A. Soloway, “From Mainline to Reform Eugenics—Leonard Darwin and C.P. Blacker,” in Peel, ed., Essays in the History of Eugenics, 52–80. For a commentary on this trend, see Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 1–102 and passim. 126. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 191. 127. Alice Salomon, “Ausgangspunkt und Ziel der Familienforschung der deutschen Frauenakademie,” Zeitschrift für Wohlfahrtspflege (August 1930): 283–290 (quotation 290). 128. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 6. 129. Myrdal, Nation and Family, 380. 130. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 1. 131. Marie Carmichael Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties [1918] (London: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 132. 132. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 198, 194. 133. Judge Ben B. Lindsay, “Wisdom for Parents,” in V.F. Calverton and S.D. Schmalhausen, eds., Sex in Civilization (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1929), 180–199. 134. Russell, Hypatia, 59. 135. W. Wijnaendts Francken-Dyserinck, Kameradschaftsehe (Baarn: HollandiaDruckerij, 1930), 41. 136. Gertrud Bäumer, “Zur Frage der ‘Jugendehe,’ ” in Gertrud Bäumer, Die Frau im neuen Lebensraum (Berlin: Herbig, 1931), 168–177. 137. Wijnaendts Francken-Dyserinck, Kameradschaftsehe, 13–14; see also her papers, in IIAV, Wilmoet Wijnaendts Francken-Dyserinck. 138. Marianne Pollak, “Der Bankerott der Ehe: Ein Buch über die sexuelle Revolution,” Die Frau (Wien), May 5, 1930. 139. Dora Russell, In Defence of Children (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932), 9; Russell, Hypatia, 47. 140. Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 4. 141. Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage [1926] (Old Saybrook, CT: Applewood, 1993), 199. 142. Dora Russell, The Right to be Happy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1927), 200. 143. Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood, 197. 144. Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood, 77–107. 145. J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1924), 63–65; Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood, 192. 146. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch [1921] (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1949), Part I, Act I, 79.

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147. 148. 149. 150.

Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Part I, Act I, 86. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, Part V, 259–272. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [1932] (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 26. Stella Browne, “The Sexual Variety and Variability among Women [1915], rpt., Rowbotham, A New World, 90–105 (quotation 104). 151. Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilization, 131, 132. 152. Helene Stöcker, “Die Ehe als psychologisches Problem,” in Haire and World League for Sexual Reform, eds., Sexual Reform Congress, 95–104 (quotation 102). 153. Russell, Hypatia, 47.



“T R   H”: F  C-R   I Y

1. Ellen Key, “Mütterlichkeit,” in Adele Schreiber, ed., Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1912), 587–601 (quotation 592). 2. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 [1933] (New York and London: Penguin Group, 1994), 59; see also Jean E. Kennard, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1989), 1–23; Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women” [1931], in Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing, ed. Michèle Barrett (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 57–63 (quotation 59). 3. Dora Russell, The Right to be Happy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1927), 201. 4. Yvonne Knibiehler, L’Histoire des mères du moyen-âge à nos jours (Paris: Éditions Montalba, 1980), 283; Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 5. Dr. G. Variot, Comment sauvegarder les bébés: enseignement de l’hygiène infantile donné a l’institut de puèriculture à la Goutte de Lait de Belleville (Paris: Librarie Octave Dion, 1922), 279. 6. The most famous of these texts was Adolphe Pinard, La Puériculture (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1904), which was re-issued in multiple editions throughout the interwar period. 7. Knibiehler, Histoire des Mères, 311–318; Sigrid Stöckel, Säuglingsfürsorge zwischen sozialer Hygiene und Eugenik: Das Beispiel Berlin im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republil (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), 327–338; Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London and Montreal: Croom Helm, 1980), 89–133. 8. Linda Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany, NY: State University New York Press, 1984), 81–99; Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood, 92; Karen Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: J.W. Dietz, 1990), 118–132. 9. Françoise Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères donnaient la vie: La Maternité en France entre les deux guerres (Lyons: Presses universitaires de Lyons, 1986), 182; John Knodel, The Decline of Fertility in Germany, 1871–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 288.

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10. Steve Humphries and Pamela Gordon, A Labour of Love: The Experience of Parenthood in Britain, 1900–1950 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1993), 49–56; Knibiehler, L’Histoire des mères, 319–328; Stöckel, Säuglingsfürsorge, 293–365; Hagemann, Frauenalltag, 332–349. 11. T.H. Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, trans. Stella Browne (New York: Random House, 1930), 86. 12. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933], trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 112–135 (quotation 133). 13. Karen Horney, “The Flight from Womanhood,” in Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold Kelmam (New York: Norton, 1967), 54–83 (quotation 60). 14. Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilization [1935] (Chicago, IL: Cassandra Editions, 1978), 125; see also Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880–1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985), 165–185. 15. General accounts of child-rearing in this era are: John Somerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1982), 209–217; Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 89–155. 16. Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (New York: Knopf, 2003), 154–187. 17. John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner Watson, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (New York: Norton, 1928), 15; see also Somerville, The Rise and Fall of Childhood, 209–217. 18. F. Truby King, Feeding and Care of Baby (London and Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1937), 181, 222. 19. See e.g., Erich Stern, “Die Störungen des Seelenlebens,” in Adele Schreiber, ed., Das Reich des Kindes (Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1930), 272–315. 20. Hildegard Hetzer, Seelische Hygiene–Lebenstüchtige Kinder: Richtlinien für die Erziehung im Kleinkindalter (Lindau: Verlag Kleine Kinder, 1940), 42. 21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Jean Riviere (New York: J. Cape and H. Smith, 1930). On the impact of psychoanalysis in France, see Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 169–198. 22. Deborah Thom, “Wishes and Anxieties, Play, and Gestures: Child Guidance in Inter-war England,” in Roger Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 200–219; Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983), 42–79. 23. Alfred Adler, The Education of Children (New York: Greenburg Publisher, 1930), 239–250; Nelleke Bakker, “Health and the Medicalisation of Advice to Parents in the Netherlands, 1890–1950,” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland, eds., Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 127–148; Cathy Urwin and Elaine Sharland, “From Bodies to Minds in Childcare Literature: Advice to Parents in inter-war Britain,” in Cooter, ed., In the Name of the Child, 174–199; Thom, “Wishes and Anxieties.” 24. Adele Schreiber, “Wie ich wurde,” Fürs Haus, January 1927; more autobiographical statements are contained in BAK, Nachlass Adele Schreiber, Vol. 1.

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25. “Vernet, Madeleine,” in Jean Maitron, ed., Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, Vol. 15 (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1977); Madeleine Vernet, “Mère et Citoyenne,” La Mère Éducatrice, August, 1918. 26. Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree: My Quest for Liberty and Love, Vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1975), 13. 27. Madeleine Vernet, L’Avenir social (Paris: l’Émancipatrice, 1906). 28. Schreiber, “Wie ich wurde” and other autobiographical materials in BAK, Nachlass Adele Schreiber, Vol. 1. 29. Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, Vol. 1, 200. 30. Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, Vol. 1, 147–161. 31. Schreiber, “Wie ich wurde.” 32. Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies, 147–193. 33. Interview with Dora Russell, in Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement this Century (London and Boston: Pandora, 1983), 94, 102. 34. Héra Mirtel, De la patrie a la matrie, ou du bagne à l’Éden (Paris: Édition de la Matrie, 1920), 45, 39. 35. Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting, The Dominant Sex: A Study in the Sociology of Sex Differentiation, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: George H. Doran, 1923), xiii, 268. Original edition: Mathilde and Matthias Vaerting, Die weibliche Eigenart im Männerstaat und die männliche Eigenart im Frauenstaat (Karlsruhe: G. Braunsche Hofbuchdruckerei, 1921). 36. Theresa Wobbe, “Mathilde Vaerting (1884–1977),” in Barbara Hahn, ed., Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften: von Lou-Andreas Salomé bis Hannah Arendt (Munich: Beck, 1994), 125–135 (quotation 128). 37. Robert Briffault, The Mothers [1927], abridged and with an introduction by Gordon Rattray Taylor (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 42; see also Huntington Cairns, “Robert Briffault and the Rehabilitation of the Matriarchal Theory,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., An Introduction to the History of Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 668–676. I thank Karen Offen for directing me to this article. 38. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Father in Primitive Psychology (New York: Norton, 1927), 57–85. See also Ann Taylor Allen, “Patriarchy and its Discontents: The Debate on the Origins of the Family in the German-Speaking World, 1860–1930,” in David Lindenfeld and Suzanne Marchand, eds., German Culture at the Fin-deSiècle (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 2004), 81–101. 39. Malinowski, The Father in Primitive Psychology, 16. 40. Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski, Marriage, Past and Present: A Debate between Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. M.F. Ashley Montagu (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1956), 51. 41. Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, Vol. 1, 248. 42. Donald Meyer, Sex and Power, The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden and Italy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 194–197; Sondra R. Herman, “Feminists, Socialists, and the Genesis of the Swedish Welfare State,” in Frances Richardson Keller, ed., Views of Women’s Lives in Western Tradition: Frontiers of the Past and the Future (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 472–510; Helena Forsås-Scott, “The Revolution That Never Was: The Example of Elin Wägner,” The European Legacy 1 (1996): 914–919; Elin Wägner, Väckarklocka, Stockholm (Bonniers), 1941. I am obliged to Sondra Herman for providing a translation of this book. 43. Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilization, 117.

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44. Wilma Meikle, Towards a Sane Feminism (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co, 1917), 139. 45. Vera Brittain, Honourable Estate (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 45; Kennard, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, 181–182. 46. Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay” [1922], in Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories, ed. Lorna Sage (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1997), 5–37 (quotation 19). 47. Ghenia Avril de Sainte-Croix, L’Éducation sexuelle, préface de M. le Professeur Pinard (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1918), 31. 48. Adele Schreiber, “Elternhaus und Erziehung,” in Schreiber, ed., Das Reich des Kindes, 103–132 (quotation 113). 49. Rebecca West, The Judge (New York: Doran Company, 1922), 324–325; excerpted in Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, Vol. 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 343–355. 50. Horney, “The Flight from Womanhood,” 70; see also Edith Kurzweil, The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 152–172. 51. Madeleine Pelletier, “Haines familiales,” La Voix des Femmes, December 23, 1926. 52. Russell, The Right to be Happy, 212. 53. Schreiber, “Elternhaus und Erziehung,” 111. 54. Alva Myrdal, “Barnet i kollektivhuset” [1932], quoted in Sondra R. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power: Alva Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929–1956,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (Fall 1992): 82–112 (quotation 86). 55. Sissela Bok, Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1991), 177. 56. Laure Lallemand, “La Suggestion des enfants,” La Mère Éducatrice (July 1921). 57. Dora Russell, In Defence of Children (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932), 138. 58. Stern, “Die Störungen des Seelenlebens,” 299. 59. “Aux Mères,” La Mère Éducatrice, October 25, 1925. 60. Schreiber, Jahreskalender, July 9, 1933. 61. Germaine Montreuil-Straus, Maman, dis-moi, Images d’Andrée Karpeles, Édité par le Comité d’éducation féminine de la société française de prophylaxie sanitaire et morale, Paris, n.d. A copy is in BMD, dossier Germaine MontreuilStraus. 62. Elise Ottesen-Jensen, Människor i nöd [1932], quoted in Doris H. Linder, Crusader for Sex Education: Elise Ottesen-Jensen (1886–1973) in Scandinavia and on the International Scene (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 96. 63. Linder, Crusader for Sex Education, 151–154. 64. Marie Stopes, Mother, How was I Born? (London: Putnam, 1922), 16, 22. 65. Schreiber, “Elternhaus und Erziehung,” 127. 66. Jan Myrdal, Childhood, trans. Christine Swanson (Chicago, IL: Lake View Press, 1991), 57. 67. Sissela Bok, Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1991), 173–189; see also the discussion of these memoirs in Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power”; and Ann-Sofie Ohlander, “Comment: Alva Myrdal: A Life of Duty,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (Fall 1992): 120–124. 68. “Le Travail de la mère et ses conséquences au point de vue familial,” La femme dans la vie sociale, March 1, 1937.

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69. Anne Cova, Au service de l’Église, de la patrie, et de la famille: Femmes catholiques et maternité sous la III. République (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 143. 70. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power.” 71. Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, Vol. 1, 95. 72. Madeleine Vernet, “L’évolution de la famille,” La Mère Éducatrice (May–June 1928). 73. Russell, The Right to be Happy, 1927, 205. 74. Gertrud Bäumer, “Perseus,” Die Frau (May 28, 1921): 225–235 (quotation 234). 75. Maude Royden, “Modern Love,” in Victor Gollancz, ed., The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1918), 36–63 (quotation 52). 76. Marguerite Martin, “Maman, infirmière, ou institutrice?” La Voix des Femmes, March 1, 1922. 77. Schreiber, “Elternhaus und Erziehung,” 115. 78. Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography [1976] (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 267–340. 79. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood [1936], trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 16, 193. 80. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power”; Bok, Alva Myrdal, 121–122. 81. Anna Freud, “Foreword,” in Kramer, Maria Montessori, 7. 82. Kramer, Maria Montessori, 285–293. 83. “Personalities and Powers: Dr Maria Montessori,” Time and Tide, September 4, 1925. 84. Ann Taylor Allen, “Children between Public and Private Worlds: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany, 1840–present,” in Roberta Wollons, ed., Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 16–41. 85. Kevin J. Brehony, “The Kindergarten in England, 1851–1918,” in Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures, 59–86 (quotation 80). 86. “L’École maternelle,” La Française, January 17, 1920; July 24, 1920. 87. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power”; Ann-Katrin Hatje, “Political and Gender Perspectives on Alva Myrdal’s Social Engineering: The Example of Pedagogic Childcare in the 1930s and 1940s,” paper presented at the international conference, “Alva Myrdal’s Questions to our Time,” Uppsala, March 6–8, 2002. 88. Madeleine Vernet, “La Femme d’aujourd’hui peut-elle rester gardienne du foyer?” La Mère Éducatrice (January–February 1928). 89. Madeleine Vernet, ed., “La mère et le foyer,” La Mère Éducatrice, February 1926. 90. Claude Noel, in “La mère et le foyer,” La Mère Éducatrice, February 1926. 91. Schreiber, “Elternhaus und Erziehung,” 104. 92. Blanche Doupeux, in “La mère et le foyer,” La Mère Éducatrice, February 1926. 93. Doctoresse Houdré Boursin, Ma doctoresse: Guide pratique d’hygiène et de médecine de la femme moderne (Strasbourg: Éditorial Argentor, 1928), 95. 94. Dora Russell, Hypatia, or Women and Knowledge (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1925), 68–69. 95. Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilization, 145. 96. Vera Brittain, Testament of Experience: An Autobiographical Story of the Years 1926–1930 (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 37, 63, 87; see also Kennard, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby; Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 50–51.

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

F M  S R: T P E, –

1. Karen Offen, European Feminisms: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 359–377; Christine Bard, Les filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 383–433. 2. Bard, Les filles de Marianne, 439–448; Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1959 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), 264–285. 3. Victoria de Grazia, “How Mussolini Ruled Italian Women,” in Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot, and Françoise Thébaud, eds., A History of Women in the West, Vol. 5; Françoise Thébaud, ed., Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Belknap, 1994), 120–148. 4. Gisela Bock, “Nazi Gender Policies and Women’s History,” in Duby, Perrot, and Thébaud, eds., History of Women in the West, Vol. 5, 149–177; Gisela Bock, “Antinatalism, Maternity, and Paternity in National Socialist Racism,” in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880–1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 233–255.

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5. Irmgard Weyrather, Muttertag und Mutterkreuz: Der Kult um die “deutsche Mutter” im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993). 6. Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1944 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 115–136. 7. Original version of the speech: Heinrich Himmler, “Der Sieg der Frauen,” Das Schwarze Korps, January 4, 1940. 8. BAK, Briefe von Frauenfürerinnen und Dichterinnen an Dorothee van Velsen, 1911–1953: Velsen-Bäumer, March 31, 1940; Bäumer-van Velsen, April 4, 1940; Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer: Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2000), 314–336. 9. See e.g., Elizabeth D. Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 75–107; Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 8–37; Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944–68 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 64–67; Miriam Mafai, L’apprendistato della politica: Le donne italiane nel dopoguerra (Rome: Editori riunite, 1979), 118–142. 10. Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 413–426; Wiebke Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat: Schweden und die Bundesrepublik im Vergleich, 1945–2000 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2002), 29–64. 11. Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives, 96–127. 12. D.V. Glass, “Fertility Trends in Europe since the Second World War,” Population Studies 22 (March 1968): 103–146; Yvonne Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle: Femmes, maternité, citoyenneté depuis 1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1997), 21–57. 13. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 65. 14. Helmut Schelsky, Wandlungen der deutschen Familie in der Gegenwart: Darstellung und Deutung einer empirisch-soziologischen Tatbestandsaufnahme (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1967), 18–19; see also Moeller, The Protection of Motherhood, 109–141; and Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat, 65–85. 15. Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983), 159; C. Alison McIntosh, “Low Fertility and Liberal Democracy in Western Europe,” Population and Development Review 7 (June 1981): 181–207. 16. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 341–346; Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birth-Rate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 343–363. 17. Christina Hardyment, Perfect Parents: Baby-Care Advice Past and Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 214–220. 18. T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Brothers, 1950), 337–389; see also Riley, War in the Nursery, 42–79. 19. Janet Sayers, Mothers of Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein (New York: Norton, 1991), 168–174. 20. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health: A Report Prepared on Behalf of the World Health Organization to the United Nations Programme for the Welfare of Homeless Children (Geneva: WHO, 1952), 158, 11–12; on postwar child-rearing see also Hardyment, Perfect Parents, 223–293.

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21. Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Post-War Britain, 1945–1968 (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1980), 187. 22. Benjamin Spock, The Common-Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1945), 19. Some early European editions were: Baby-en kinderverzorging (Amsterdam: Contact, 1950); Comment soigner et éduquer son enfant (Verviers: Éditions Gérard, 1952); Il bambino: come si cura et come si alleva (Milano: Longanesi, 1954); Säuglings-und Kinderpflege (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1957); Tu hijo (Madrid: Daimon, 1968). On the influence of Spock in France see Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle, 73. 23. Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health, 28; Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, 312–313. 24. Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 228–239; Glass, “Fertility Trends in Europe.” 25. See data on various countries in Évelyne Sullerot, Women, Society and Change, trans. Margaret Scotford Archer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 48–49; Franca Bimbi, “Gender, ‘Gift Relationship,’ and Welfare-state Cultures in Italy,” in Jane Lewis, ed., Women and Social Policies in Europe: Work, Family and the State (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993), 138–169. 26. Eric D. Weitz, “The Heroic Man and the Ever-Changing Woman: Gender and Politics in European Communism, 1917–1950,” in Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 311–352; see also the discussion of communism and feminism in Offen, European Feminisms, 380–393. 27. Mafai, L’apprendistato, 118–142; Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 57–59; Offen, European Feminisms, 382–383. 28. Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, 165–169. 29. Offen, European Feminisms, 393. 30. Mattei Dogan and Jacques Narbonne, Les Françaises face à la politique: Comportement politique et condition sociale (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955), 48. 31. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 38–108. 32. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 67. 33. Denkschrift des deutsche Frauenrings zum Kabinetttsentwurf eines Gesetzes über die Gleichberechtigung von Mann und Frau auf dem Gebiete des bürgerlichen Rechts und über die Wiederherstellung der Rechtseinheit auf dem Gebiete des Familienrechts (Berlin: Deutscher Frauenring, 1952), 16, 1. 34. Heineman, What Difference?, 141–159. 35. Heineman, What Difference?, 108–136. 36. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 204–207. 37. Sylvie Chaperon, Les Années Beauvoir, 1945–1970 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 364–365; Denise de Weerdt, En de Vrouwen? Vrouw, vrouwenbeweging en feminisme in Belgie, 1830–1960 (Gent: Masreelfonds, 1980), 169–179; Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna, 81. 38. Leontine Young, Out of Wedlock: A Study of the Problems of the Unmarried Mother and her Child (New York: McGraw Hill, 1954), 21–130, 169–242. On Young’s influence in Britain, see Martine Spensky, “Producers of Legitimacy: Homes for Unmarried Mothers in the 1950s,” in Carole Smart, ed., Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood, and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 100–118. 39. Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health, 100.

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90. See Évelyne Sullerot, Histoire et sociologie du travail féminin (Paris: Editions Gonthier, 1968), 340–353; Pfeil, Berufstätigkeit, 83, 149; Klein, Britain’s Married Women Workers, 26–83; Jephcott, Married Women Working, 100. 91. Judith Hubback, Wives who Went to College (London: Heinemann, 1957), 53, 64. 92. Sondra R. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power: Alva Myrdal and Swedish Reform, 1929–1956,” Journal of Women’s History 4 (Fall 1992): 82–112. Viola Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology [1946] (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972). 93. Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, xi. 94. Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, 128; cf. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power.” 95. Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, 128, 39. 96. Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, 189–192. 97. Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, 189–192, xiii. 98. Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart MacKinnon Evans (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 253–304; Merith Niehuss, Familie, Frau und Gesellschaft: Studien zur Strukturgeschichte der Familie in Westdeutschland, 1945–1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001), 214–288. 99. For example: Edith Hinze, “Arbeit und Beruf in der Sicht erwerbstätiger Mütter,” Zentralblatt für Arbeitswissenschaft 16 (August/September 1962): 132–135. 100. Schellekens-Ligthart, quoted in Morée, Mijn kinderen hebben er niets van gemerkt, 71. 101. Herman, “Dialogue: Children, Feminism, and Power.” 102. Eva Moberg, “Kvinnans villkorliga frigivning,” quoted by Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat, 87. 103. Alva Myrdal, “Foreword,” in Edmund Dahlström, ed., The Changing Roles of Men and Women, trans. Gunilla and Steven Anderman (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962), 9–15 (quotation 9). 104. Edmund Dahlström, “Analysis of the Debate on Sex Roles,” in Dahlström, ed., The Changing Roles, 170–205. 105. I am much indebted to Wiebke Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat, for her thorough discussion of this history, 86–146. 106. Pfeil, Die Berufstätigkeit, 50–55. 107. Sullerot, Histoire et sociologie, 357. 108. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 680. 109. Pfeil, Die Berufstätigkeit, 25. 110. Hubback, Wives who Went to College, 87. 111. Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health, 67. 112. Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, 19. 113. Donald Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 26–27, quoted by Yvonne Schütze, Die Gute Mutter: Zur Geschichte des normativen Musters “Mutterliebe” (Bielefeld: Kleine Verlag, 1986), 91; on postwar child-rearing theory see Schütze, Die Gute Mutter, 86–103. 114. Nancy Pottishman Weiss, “Mother, the Invention of Necessity: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care,” American Quarterly 29 (Winter 1977): 519–546. 115. Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Vol. 2 (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1945), 282; see also Sayers, Mothers of Psychoanalysis, 67–75.

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N    Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, Vol. 2, v. Deutsch, The Psychology of Women, 330. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 682. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 484; see also Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 148–178. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter [1959], trans. James Kirkup (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 140–141. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 521, 524. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 513. Beauvoir, The Second Sex; cf. Alison S. Fell, Liberty, Equality, Maternity in Beauvoir, Leduc, and Ernaux (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 78–115; Yolanda Astarita Patterson, “Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood,” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 87–105. Chaperon, Les Années Beauvoir, 169–201. See e.g., Elizabeth Fallaize, ed., Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); and Moi, What is a Woman?, 59–84. Von Roten, Frauen im Laufgitter, 5. Von Roten, Frauen im Laufgitter, 365. Von Roten, Frauen im Laufgitter, 399. Joris, “Die Fünfzigerjahre.” Interview with Ann Oakley, in Penny Forster and Imogen Sutton, eds., Daughters of de Beauvoir (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 67–76 (quotation 69). Interview with Joyce Goodfellow, in Forster and Sutton, eds., Daughters of de Beauvoir, 103–109 (quotation 109). Oakley, in Foster and Sutton, eds., Daughters of de Beauvoir, 68. Sullerot, La Vie des femmes, 99. Interview with Val Charlton, in Michelene Wandor, Once a Feminist: Stories of a Generation (London: Virago, 1990), 161–162. Anneke Ribberink, “Leading Ladies and Cause Minders: The Silent Generation and the Second Feminist Movement,” paper presented at “Alva Myrdal’s Questions to Our Time,” Uppsala, March 7–8, 2002; Joke Smit-Lezingen, “Dit onbehagen bij de vrouw” [1967], in Joke Smit-Lezingen, Wat is er met de vrouwenbeweging gebeurd? (Amsterdam: Nigh & van Ditmar, 1989), 11–37. Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution” [1966], in Juliet Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 17–54 (quotation 33). Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 123. Jephcott, Married Women Working, 136–163; Pfeil, Die Berufstätigkeit von Müttern, 135. See e.g., A.J. Schellekens-Ligthart, Nadere verkenningen t.a.v. de problematiek van de buitenhuis werkende gehuwde vrouw (S’Gravenhage: Ned. Huishoudrad, 1961), 68–87. Von Roten, Frauen im Laufgitter, 403. Åse Grude Skard, “Maternal Deprivation: The Research and Its Implications,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 27 (August 1964): 333–343 (quotation 341). Michel and Texier, La Condition de la française, Vol. 1, 61. Cf. Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle, 203–205. Dahlström, “Analysis of the Debate on Sex Roles,” in Dahlström, ed., The Changing Roles, 170–205 (quotation 179).

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145. Per-Olaf Tiller, “Parental Role Division and the Child’s Personality Development,” in Dahlström, ed., The Changing Roles, 79–104 (quotations 88, 103); see also Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat, 86–146. 146. Kolbe, Elternschaft im Wohlfahrtsstaat, 91. 147. Catherine Valabrègue, La Condition masculine (Paris: Bibliothèque Payot, 1968), 155–175. 148. Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” 54. 149. Smit-Lezingen, “Dit onbehagen bij de vrouw,” 37. 150. Margaret Mead, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (New York: William Morrow, 1949), 381. 151. Pfeil, Die Berufstätigkeit, 429. 152. Klein, The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, 34. 153. Françoise d’Eaubonne, Le Complexe de Diane: Érotisme ou féminisme (Paris: René Julliard, 1951), 292. 154. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 31. 155. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 522. 156. Yolanda A. Patterson, Simone de Beauvoir and the Demystification of Motherhood (London: UMI Research Press, 1989), 338. Cf. Fell, Liberty, Equality, Maternity, 78–115. 157. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life [1960], trans. Peter Green (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1966), 66–67. 158. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Bantam, 1971), 248. 159. Kaplan, Contemporary Western European Feminism, 155. 160. Herrad Schenk, Die feministische Herausforderung: 150 Jahre Frauenbewegung in Deutschland (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992), 87. 161. “Maternité esclave,” quoted in Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle, 173. 162. Glass, “Fertility Trends in Europe.” 163. For data on the population of European countries, see U.S. Census Bureau, IDB Summary Demographic Data, www.census.gov 164. d’Eaubonne, Le Complexe de Diane, 292. 165. Rivolta Femminile, “Manifesto” [1970], in Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds., Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 37–40 (quotation 38).

C 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 14. 2. For example, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Feminism is Not the Story of my Life:” How Today’s Feminist Elite has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996). 3. Ellen Key,Über Liebe und Ehe, trans. Frances Maro (Berlin: Fischer, 1906), 222; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [1949], trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 513. 4. Cf. Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–250. 5. Carole Pateman, “Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship,” in Gisela Bock and Susan James, eds., Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, and Female Subjectivity (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 17–31 (quotation 29).

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6. Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Die Kinderfrage: Frauen zwischen Kinderwunsch und Unabhängigkeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1997), 173. 7. Barbara Helfferich, “Wise Women Shaping the European Union,” LOLApress: International Feminist Journal (April 30, 2000): 10–12 (quotation 10). 8. Peter McDonald and Rebecca Kippen, “Labor Supply Prospects in 16 Developed Countries,” Population and Development Review 27 (March 2001): 1–32 (chart in appendix). 9. European Commission, Directorate General for Employment, Industrial Relations, and Social Affairs, “European Union Progress Report: Implementation of the Medium-Term Social Action Programme, 1995–97,” Women’s International Network News, July 31, 1997. 10. Fran Hosken, “France: Toward Equality—Key Figures,” Women’s International Network News (July 31, 2000): 67–81. 11. Fran Hosken, “Women Setting New Priorities: A Study of Western European Women’s Views on Work, Family and Society,” Women’s International Network News (October 31, 1996): 70–72. 12. Hosken, “France: Toward Equality.” 13. Fran Hosken, “Women’s Status and Work in the European Community,” Women’s International Network News, October 31, 1990. 14. Economic and Social Committee, “Opinion on Equal Opportunities for women and men in the European Union—1996,” SOC/335, Brussels, July 9, 1997. 15. Economic and Social Committee, “Towards a Community Framework Strategy on Gender Equality” (2001–2005), SOC/036, Brussels, November 30, 2000. 16. Jane Lewis and Gertrude Aström, “Equality, Difference, and State Welfare: Labor Market and Family Policies in Sweden,” Feminist Studies 18 (Spring 1992): 59–88. 17. “European Union Progress Report”; Yvonne Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle: Femmes, maternité, citoyenneté depuis 1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1997), 335–344. 18. Yvonne Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle, 334. 19. The Economist, Pocket World in Figures (Vicenza: LEGO S.p.a., 2003), 22–23. 20. “Europe’s Population Implosion,” The Economist (July 17, 2003). 21. “Old Dogs, New Tricks?” The Economist (May 15, 2004). 22. “Europe’s Population Implosion.” 23. Pateman, “Equality, Difference, Subordination.” 24. Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle, 255. 25. Knibiehler, La Révolution maternelle, 258–265. 26. Beck-Gernsheim, Die Kinderfrage, 144. 27. Philippe Ariès, “Two Successive Motivations for the Declining Birth-Rate in the West,” Population and Development Review 6 (December 1980): 645–650 (quotation 650). 28. Roger Cooter, “In the Name of the Child Beyond,” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland, eds., Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 287–296.

B A  M C Women’s Library, London Records of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (X3/2) Guardianship of Infants Bill Eva Hubback Papers Annual Council Meeting, 1931 Status of Wives and Mothers Committee Equal Moral Standards Special Committee Legitimacy Act Papers of Theresa Billington-Greig Records of the Women’s Freedom League National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child

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Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris Fonds Jeanne Humbert Fonds Nelly Roussel Fonds Yvonne Netter Dossiers

Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris Collection Marie-Louise Bouglé Fonds Blanche Fournet-Kaindler Fonds Hubertine Auclert Fonds Camille Bélillon Fonds Céline Renooz Fonds Marthe Bray Fonds Arria Ly Fonds Marguerite Guépet

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Bundesarchiv Koblenz Nachlass Gertrud Bäumer Nachlass Camilla Jellinek Nachlass Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Nachlass Adele Schreiber Kl. Erw: Briefe von Frauenführerinnen und Dichterinnen an Dorothee van Velsen, 1911–53.

Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde R 86 Reichsgesundheitsamt R 101: Reichstag

Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Helene Stöcker Papers

C N  P France L’Action Almanach Féministe La Bataille Syndicaliste La Citoyenne Le Droit des Femmes L’Entente Eugénique Journal des Femmes La Femme Affranchie La Femme Chrétienne La Femme dans la Vie Sociale

B La Française La Fronde La Mère Éducatrice, Revue Mensuelle d’Éducation Pour la Vie Problème Sexuel La Voix des Femmes

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Netherlands Evolutie

Austria Die Arbeiterin Der Bund, Zentralblatt des Bundes österreichischer Frauenvereine Die Frau Neues Frauenleben Die Österreicherin Die Unzufriedene

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Abbott, Elizabeth, 151 Abolitionist Federation, 179 Abortion Law Reform Association, 165 abortion, 88, 92, 93, 100, 101, 102, 115, 123, 124, 125, 127, 139, 156, 163, 164, 165–6, 170, 172, 177–8, 195, 211, 212, 217, 218, 220, 235, 237 Abraham, Karl, 190 Action des Femmes, see Women’s Action Addams, Jane, 129 Adenauer, Konrad, 215 Adler, Alfred, 191, 198 adoption, 147, 215, 216 Adorno, Theodor, 212 Adult, The, 53 Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas, see Anti-Fascist Women’s Association Albrecht, Berthie, 166 alcoholism, 43, 86, 90, 105, 106, 115, 173, 205 Allen, Grant, 41, 52–3 Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation, see National Alliance Against Depopulation Alliance nationale des sociétes féminines, see League of Swiss Women’s Associations Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française, see National Alliance to Increase the French Population allowances, children, 153, 210, 211, 216, 219, 237; families, 153, 154, 155, 210, 211, 217; fathers, 210, 211; mothers, 210, 211, 216; wages, 211, 216 Alquier, Henriette, 166, 168–9 Amazons, 21, 22, 23, 26, 30, 34, 112 anarchists, 52, 101, 148, 166, 174

Anglican Church, 162 Anker-Møller, Katti, 165 Ann Veronica (H. G. Wells), 30, 64 anthropology, 23–4, 28, 29, 37–8, 188, 194, 231 Anti-Fascist Women’s Association (Spain), 148 anti-Semitism, 35–6, 180, 212 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 135 Ariane (periodical), 219 Ariès, Philippe, 10, 220 Asociación Nacional de Mujeres Españolas, see National Association of Spanish Women Association for Family Planning (France), 218 Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (Britain), 179 Association for the Protection of Women and Children (Switzerland), 52 Association for the Rights of Mothers and Children (Germany), 192 Association for Woman Suffrage (Netherlands), 128–9 Atkinson, Mabel, 12, 63, 82, 84 Auclert, Hubertine, 3, 5–6, 9, 11, 13, 27, 49, 81, 112 Augspurg, Anita, 82, 129 Austria, 34, 46, 50, 51, 52, 58–9, 71, 73, 74, 79, 80, 91, 103, 107, 114, 118–19, 129, 130, 134, 138, 139, 142, 146–7, 154, 155, 163, 164, 171–2, 183, 190, 191, 202, 209–10, 217 Austrian League for the Protection of Mothers, see League for the Protection of Mothers Aveling, Edward, 28 Aveling, Eleanor Marx, 28 Avril de Sainte-Croix, Ghenia, 197

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Babies’ Welcome and School for Mothers (Britain), 80 baby boom, 209, 216, 221, 232, 240 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 21–3, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 194, 195 Badinter, Elisabeth, 8, 9, 10 Bakker-Nort, Betsy, 175 Barbusse, Henri, 131–2 Baronchelli, Donna Paola, 134 Barrès, Maurice, 127 Barthélemy, Joséphine, 128 Basic Law (Germany), 215, 216 Bataille Syndicaliste, La (periodical), 127–8 Baum, Marie, 145–6 Bäumer, Gertrud, 79, 102, 113, 124–5, 130, 146, 153, 154, 170, 177, 178, 181, 182–3, 211 Beauvoir, Simone de, 197, 217–18, 226, 227–8, 229, 232, 235 Bebel, August, 24, 30, 31, 68 Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth, 237, 240 Belgian League for the Rights of Women, 45, 47, 55 Belgian Society for Sexual Enlightenment, 220 Belgische Vereniging voor sexuele Voorlichting, see Belgian Society for Sexual Enlightenment Belgium, 8, 9, 31–2, 44, 45, 47, 53, 55, 71, 73, 99–100, 116, 127, 128, 155, 166, 180, 210, 215, 216, 220, 237, 238, 239 Béllilon, Camille, 83, 127 Benetti-Brunelli, Valeria, 47 Bertillon, Jacques, 48, 81 Besant, Annie, 29, 98, 99 Besant, Walter, 30 Beschwitz, Olga von, 47, 57 Biardeau, Laure, 175 birth control, 10, 13, 16 birth-control movement, 218–19, 220, 222, 231 birthrates, decline in, 7, 9, 10–11, 15, 42, 48, 65, 79, 88, 90, 99–101, 103, 107, 115, 123, 125, 126, 139, 144, 156, 157, 162, 166, 170, 172, 176, 188–9, 232–3, 238–9, 240; increase in, 9, 10, 15, 42, 50, 88, 99, 153–4, 169, 204, 211, 212–13

birth-strike, 88, 107, 108, 123 Black, Dora, see Russell, Dora Blacker, Carlos, 180 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 29 Böhlau, Helene, 64 Bok, Sissela, 200, 207, 222 Bolsheviks, 140, 195, 201; see also communists Bonness, Elisabeth, see Bré, Ruth Bordeaux, Henry, 138–9 Bowlby, John, 212–13, 215–16, 226, 230, 231 Bradlaugh, William, 98, 99 Braun, Lily, 33–4, 43, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77 Bré, Ruth, 32, 33, 58 breast feeding, 14, 29, 74, 80, 82, 120, 188, 199, 207 Brecht, Bertolt, 170–1 Bridel, Louis, 100 Brieux, Eugène, 104 Briffault, Robert, 194, 195 Brion, Hélène, 129 Britain, see Great Britain British Family Planning Association, 217 Brittain, Vera, 118, 132–3, 158–9, 161, 187, 197, 204, 207 Browne, Stella, 98, 165, 173, 180, 184 Brunschvicg, Cécile, 124, 167 Budin, Pierre, 70 Bund der Kinderreichen, see League of Large Families Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF), see League of German Women’s Associations Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), see League of German Girls Bund für Mutterschutz (BfM), see League for the Protection of Mothers Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine (BÖFV), see League of Austrian Women’s Associations Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine, see League of Swiss Women’s Associations Bund, Der (periodical), 75, 113 Burlingame, Dorothy, 212 Burns, Elinor, 150 Butillard, Andrée, 144 Byrne, James, 46

I Caird, Mona, 24–5, 28–9, 49, 68, 75–6, 87 Calcar, Elise van, 93 Canada, 7, 59, 128 Capy, Marcelle, 127 Carnet de Santé, see “Health Booklet” Casa de Maternidad, see House of Mothers (Spain) Casa dei Bambini, see Children’s House (Italy) Castberg Law, 59 Casti Connubii, 140, 166, 176 Castro Osorio, Ana de, 48–9 Catholic Center Party (Germany), 145, 153 Catholic German Women’s League (Austria), 147, 155 Catholic Women’s League (Germany), 140 Catholic Women’s Organization (Austria), 147, 155 Catlin, George, 204 CDU, see Christian Democratic Union (Germany) Cederschiöld, Maria, 47 Center for Youth Welfare, 43 Chamber of Deputies (France), 117 Chambres syndicalistes des industries de l’aiguille, 71 Charles, Enid, 162, 183 Charlton, Val, 229 Chéliga, Marya, 105 Chew, Ada Nield, 76 Child Allowance Act (Netherlands), 155 child allowances, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157 Child Guidance Movement, 191 childbearing, 8, 14, 70, 71, 72, 74, 81, 83–4, 88, 89, 92, 103, 106, 107, 114–15, 122–3, 124, 125, 128, 162, 169–70, 223, 236; allowances for, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157; avoidance of, 182; choice, 233, 239; cultural influences, 227; diseases and, 182; economy, 239; education, 172; encouragement of, 237; feminists and, 153; increase in, 166–7; industrial process, 239; involuntary, 197; morality and, 170; motherhood, 233; mothers and, 121, 172; parents and, 181, 182; planning,

339

167; psychological forces, 239; refusal of, 239; religion and, 166; scientific theories and, 183–4; self-affirmation, 239; society and, 182, 239; state and, 154, 155, 172, 216; war and, 122–3; welfare state, 219; working mothers, 199, 207, 224 child-care centers, 116, 119, 133, 149, 151, 154, 201, 213, 224, 237, 238; fathers and, 148, 207; men and, 190, 238; mothers and, 148, 168, 188, 207; parents, 225; politics and, 201; restructuring of, 194; socialized, 201; standards of, 168; women and, 207, 208, 225 child-rearing, 1, 2, 10, 11, 15, 16, 31, 42, 46, 47, 49, 64, 67, 74, 76, 78, 82–3, 93, 101, 113, 115, 121, 122, 191, 226–7, 230, 236; democracy, 198; discipline, 212; economy, 185; extinction of, 184; families and, 156, 177, 193; fathers and, 195, 200, 205, 208; feminists and, 137–8, 191, 199, 200, 201, 203; full time, 224; gender relations and, 143,188; households, 202, 204; independence, 198; marriage, 207; maternal instinct and, 189; men and, 236, 237; mental health, 189; mothers and, 137–8, 183, 188, 195, 200, 203–4, 205, 236, 238–9; parents and, 205, 207, 211, 240; responsibility, 231; science of, 200, 236; society and, 199; state and, 156, 236; subsidies for, 152; values, 198; women and, 108, 141, 152, 183, 189, 204 Children’s House, 202–3 Christen-Vrouwen-Bond, see Christian Women’s League Christian Democratic Union (Germany), 212, 215 Christian Women’s League, 140 Christian Women’s Social Movement of Belgium, 180 Christlich-demokratische Union (CDU), see Christian Democratic Union (Germany) Civil Law Code (Germany, 1900), 43, 46, 47 Claeys, Emilie, 99 Clapperton, Jane Hume, 98–9

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Clemenceau, Georges, 139 Cole, Margaret, 206 Collins, Mary Gabrielle, 114 Comitato nationale per l’assistenza legale alle famiglie dei richiamati, see National Committee for Legal Assistance to the Families of Service Personne (Italy) Comitato nazionale femminile, see National Women’s Committee (Italy) Comité d’Action Suffragiste, see Committee for Suffragist Action (France) Comité d’éducation féminine, see Committee on Women’s Education(France) Comité ter Bevordering van het Geneeskundig Onderzoek voor het Huwelijk, see Committee for a Medical Certificate for Marriage (Netherlands) Comité tot Verbetering van den Maatschappelijken en den Rechtstoestand der Vrouw in Nederland, see Committee for the Improvement of the Social and Legal Status of Women in the Netherlands Comité van Actie tegen Gezinsloon, see Committee of Action against the Family Wage (Netherlands) Committee for a Medical Certificate for Marriage (Netherlands), 175 Committee for Suffragist Action (France), 130 Committee for the Defense of the Freedom to Work for Women (Netherlands), 155 Committee for the Improvement of the Social and Legal Status of Women in the Netherlands, 45 Committee of Action against the Family Wage (Netherlands), 155 Committee on Marriage Counseling (Germany), 178 Committee on Population Policy (Germany), 178 Committee on the Dismissal of Married Women in the Civil Service (Netherlands), 155 Committee on Women’s Education (France), 174

Common Cause (periodical), 89, 118 Common-Sense Guild to Baby and Child Care (Benjamin Spock), 213 communists, 148, 152, 163, 166, 170, 176–7, 178, 213, 214, 217, 219–20, 230 Conseil national des femmes françaises, see National Council of French Women Consiglio nazionale delle donne italiane, see National Council of Italian Women contraceptives, see birth control Cosmic Circle, 36 Courtney, Kate, 150 Dahlström, Edmund, 225, 231 Daladier, Edouard, 153 Dalsace, Jean, 166 Danish Housewives’ Federation, 141 Danish Women’s National Council, 179 Darwin, Charles, 19, 21, 24, 26, 37, 38, 90, 189 Davies, Margaret Llewelyn, 116, 121–2, 123 Dawson, Oswald, 52 day care centers, 154, 172, 201, 210, 212, 224, 230, 236 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 12, 168 Denmark, 48–9, 51, 77, 105, 141, 143, 145, 165, 175, 179, 180, 220, 238 Deraismes, Maria, 47 Deutsch, Helene, 227, 228 Deutscher Frauenring, see German Women’s Circle Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnenverband, see German Women Citizens Association Deutsches Frauenwerk, see German Women’s Bureau Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund, see German Evangelical Women’s League divorce, 34, 44–5, 48, 75, 97, 115, 141, 143, 144, 148, 196, 215 Dogan, Mattei, 214 Dohm, Hedwig, 85 Doll’s House, A (Henrik Ibsen), 1 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 146–7 Doppelverdienergesetz, see Double Earner Law Double Earner Law, 154–5

I Drucker, Wilhelmine, 31, 39, 56, 58, 70, 75, 99, 194 Drysdale, Alice Vickery, 99 Drysdale, Charles, 98–9 Duensing, Frieda, 43 Dumas, Alexandre, 51 Durand, Marguerite, 27, 71 Durand-Wever, Anne-Marie, 178 Dutch National Council of Women, 168, 180 Dutch Reformed Church, 217 Dutch Society for Sexual Reform, 217 Eastman, Crystal, 207 Eaubonne, Françoise d’, 232, 233 École de la Pureté (Emma PiecynskaReichenbach), see School of Purity, The École des Mères, see School for Mothers (France) Écoles Maternelles, 203 education, 10, 25, 42, 47, 66, 119–20, 126, 202–3, 206, 209, 236, 237, 238, 240; childbearing, 172; children, 82, 101, 129, 152, 153, 168, 176, 183, 189, 192, 198, 199, 200; families and, 172; feminists, 199, 205, 207; households and, 94, 96; marriage and, 172; men, 239; Montessori method, 202–3; moral, 93–4, 129; motherhood and, 79–80, 95, 144, 178, 188, 189; parents and, 96, 156, 207; patriarchal, 203; religion and, 94; reproduction and, 95, 96, 199; sexual, 88, 92, 93, 94–5, 103, 164, 165, 174, 200, 217; society, 201; utopian, 202; women and, 83–4, 97, 100, 130, 138, 155, 158, 174–5, 192, 196, 197, 204, 223, 225 Edwards-Pilliet, Blanche, 70, 126 Éffort féminin français, see French Women’s Alliance Eisler, Hanns, 170–1 Ellis, Havelock, 95 Elmy, Ben, 93 Elmy, Elizabeth Wolstenholme, 12, 19, 42, 46, 48, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98 emancipation, 14, 32, 33, 35–6, 41, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 78, 79, 84, 101, 135,

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137, 139, 147, 161, 167, 176, 188, 206–7, 217, 226, 233 employment, 64, 65, 66, 67–8, 69, 73, 113–14, 119, 134, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157–8, 159, 200–1, 203–4, 205, 209, 210, 212–13, 216, 220–1, 223, 232, 233, 237, 238 endowment of motherhood, 63–4, 83 Engels, Friedrich, 23, 25, 28, 34, 36, 68 England, see Great Britain Englishwoman’s Review (periodical), 68 Entente, l’, (periodical), 39 Estates General of Feminism (France), 144, 152 Eugenics Education Society, see Eugenics Society Eugenics Society (Britain), 91, 105, 106, 133, 178, 179, 180 eugenics, 88, 90–2, 96, 97, 103, 105–7, 126, 133, 153, 157, 161–2, 164, 173, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 184, 210, 212, 219, 240 European Commission, 237 European Union, 7, 237, 238 European Women’s Lobby, 237 Evolutie (periodical), 31, 56, 75, 89, 99, 94 Fabian Society, 75, 81, 82, 98, 150–1 Fabian Women’s Group, 28, 68, 69–70, 78 Falange Española, see Spanish Falange families, 3, 5–6, 8, 16–17, 19–20, 24, 25, 171, 237; allowances for, 153, 154, 155, 157–8, 210, 211, 217; baby boom, 209; benefits to, 81, 178, 216; changes in, 189, 213; child-rearing and, 156, 177, 193; children and, 33, 49, 74, 84, 123. 140, 150–1, 156, 216; conflicts in, 138–9; crisis of, 138, 149, 181; decline of, 181, 184, 195; defense of, 201; domestic servants, 205; economy and, 10, 98, 122, 125, 151, 181, 192, 219; education, 172; egalitarian, 44; endowment, 150, 151; evolution of, 30–1; fatherheaded, 153, 155, 206, 214, 215; fatherless, 206, 214, 223; fathers

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families—continued and, 20, 35, 42, 44; female-headed and, 12, 22, 23, 25, 28, 33, 148; feminists and, 35, 39, 42, 43, 47, 53–4, 56, 64, 65, 66, 78–9, 83, 84, 100, 121, 133, 141–2, 143, 162, 177, 202, 214, 235; feminists, 202; full-time mothers, 201; health care and, 65–6, 108, heredity of, 176–7; history of, 20, 28–9, 193; households and, 147, 189, 197; industrialization and, 45; insurance and, 148, 150; legal system and, 42, 105–6, 149, 153, 175, 213; legitimate children of, 33, 34; life of, 7, 32, 45, 140, 142, 155, 188, 198, 231; limitation of, 162, 166; male-headed, 216, 219; marriage and, 33, 34, 144; maternalism and, 208; matriarchal, 30–1, 44; matrilineal clans and, 195; matrilineal, 33. 34, 128; men and, 122, 144, 149, 150, 195, 225, 239; military and, 121, 139; modernization of, 148, 182; morality and, 38, 64, 65, 140, 197; motherheaded, 13, 36–7, 43, 58, 130, 133, 193, 195, 215, 216; mothers and, 133, 138, 141–2, 167, 223, 225, 230; natalism and, 144, 166–7; nuclear, 16, 38, 147, 231; organizations and, 116, 140, 217; origins of, 39, 194–5; paternal authority and, 44–5, 48, 53–4, 90, 181, 205; patriarchal, 29, 33, 35, 36–7, 74, 84, 88, 133, 174–5, 195; planning by, 11, 102, 167, 172, 217, 240; politics and, 117, 124, 142, 155, 178, 181; poverty and, 12, 43, 81, 98, 168, 169, 217; primitive, 38, 39; privacy and, 83, 170, 210, 211–12, 219; proletarian, 168–9; reconstruction of, 139, 212–13; reforms and, 116, 143; religion and, 38, 140; responsibilities of, 205, 235; restructuring of, 44, 194; sexuality and, 22, 33, 140; single earner benefit, 216, 217; size of, 9, 13–14, 16, 78–9, 88, 89, 152, 157, 166, 167, 168, 172, 209, 216, 217, 235; social services and, 115, 116; society

and, 142, 159; stability of, 139, 181, 215; standard of living, 223; state and, 12, 65–6, 83, 84, 143, 151, 155, 178, 211–12, 214, 217; sterilization and, 177, 178; structure of, 3, 15, 25, 49, 153, 189; two-parent, 49, 51, 53–4, 58, 148, 188, 195, 296, 205, 215; utopianism and, 33, 35; wages of, 64, 65, 150, 155, 189; war and, 138, 139; welfare, 209, 219; will of the father, 46–7; women and, 138, 159, 174–5, 187, 222, 223–4; working-class households, 12, 150, 189, 203, 204, 206, 207, 238 Family Endowment Society (Britain), 150 fatherhood, civilization and, 194–5; culture and, 193; importance of, 195; nurturing, 195; recognition of, 193; replacement of, 231; responsibilities of, 195–6 fatherless families, 115, 214, 223, 231, 238 fathers, allowances and, 155, 158, 210; authoritarian, 195, 215; bereavement of, 132–3; child care, 207; child support and, 117; child-rearing and, 195, 200, 205, 208; children and, 19, 34, 42, 55–8, 96, 101, 104, 117, 118, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 152, 190, 191, 195, 199–200, 206; culture and, 195–6; economy and, 10, 144; employment and, 64, 65, 205; equality of, 143, 144; families and, 20, 28–9, 35, 42, 44, 206; feminists and, 205, 206; guardians and, 143, 144; marriage and, 83–4; military and, 117; parental power of, 44–5, 48, 83, 144, 148; reproduction and, 195–6, 199; responsibilities of, 55, 73, 94, 152; role of, 9, 13, 44, 188, 195, 199–200; sexual education and, 94–5; will of, 46–7 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 53 Feminism, New (Britain), 141, 142, 192–3, 208 Femme Affranchie, La (periodical), 101 Femme Belge, La (periodical), 180 Ferenczi, Sandor, 190

I Fickert, Auguste, 59 Finland, 48–9, 143, 145, 175, 180, 220 Fischer, Edmund, 77 Fogelstad School (Sweden), 196 Fourteen Points, 129 Française, La (periodical), 113, 114, 124, 127, 134, 142, 150, 152, 170, 171, 203 France, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29–30, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56–7, 60, 65, 68, 70–1, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 100, 101, 104, 105–6, 111, 112, 113, 114–15, 116, 117, 119, 122–3, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129–30, 131, 133, 134, 138–9, 140, 141, 144–5, 147, 148, 151–2, 153, 159, 161, 165–6, 168–9, 170, 171, 173–4, 176, 180–1, 188–9, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 228, 230, 231, 232–3, 238, 239 Franco, Francisco, 149 Frank, Louis, 31–2, 44, 47, 55, 73 Frau, Die (periodical), 79, 124–5, 130, 153, 154, 178, 211 Frauenreferat, see Women’s Bureau Fredrika Bremer Association (Sweden), 45, 157 Fredrika-Bremer-Förbundet, see Fredrika Bremer Association free love, 52–3, 55–6, 58, 140, 147, 192 Free Women (Spain), 148, 174 Free Women’s Association (Netherlands), 45, 56, 75 Freewoman, The (periodical), 83, 84, 98, 106 French Eugenics Society, 91 French Group for Feminist Studies, 49, 53–4, 55 French League for the Rights of Women, 45 French League for Woman Suffrage, 119 French Union for Woman Suffrage, 124 French Women’s Alliance, 113 French Women’s Catholic Action, 140 Freud, Anna, 202–3, 212

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Freud, Sigmund, 36, 37–8, 39, 182, 189, 190, 191, 197–8, 202–3, 206, 212, 227 Fronde, La (periodical), 19, 27, 71 Fürth, Henriette, 97, 116, 122, 153–4, 177 Galton, Francis, 90 Gaulle, Charles de, 211 Geddes, Patrick, 26 George, Stefan, 36 Gerhard, Adele, 84–5 German Committee for Birth Control, 163 German Democratic Party (DDP), 145–6, 170 German Evangelical Women’s League (DEF), 140 German National Assembly, 145 German National People’s Party (DNVP), 145 German Women Citizens Association, 211 German Women’s Bureau, 211 German Women’s Circle, 213, 215 Germany, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 23–4, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56–7, 59, 61–2, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79–80, 82, 83–5, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 101, 105, 108, 111, 113–14, 115, 116–17, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 150, 153, 155, 156, 157–8, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 188–9, 190–1, 192, 194, 198, 201, 203, 205, 209–10, 211, 212, 214–15, 216, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 232, 237, 239 Gerritsen, Aletta, see Jacobs, Aletta Gesell, Arnold, 189, 196 Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik∏ see Society for Population Policy (Germany) Gesellschaft für Rassehygiene, see Racial Hygiene Society (Germany) Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 26, 29–30, 68–9, 70, 75, 77, 98, 239

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Gleichheit, Die (periodical), 125, 140 Godet, Henri, 18 Godet, Mireille, 18 Gollancz, Victor, 138 Great Britain, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 24–5, 26, 28–9, 30, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52–3, 67, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119–20, 121, 123, 125–6, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140–1, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158–9, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183, 188–90, 191, 194, 196, 197, 200, 201, 203, 206, 207, 210, 212, 213–15, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232–3, 239 Grève des ventres, see birth-strike Gross, Otto, 36–7 Groupe français d’études féministes, see French Group for Feminist Studies Grundgesetz, see Basic Law (Germany) guardianship, 39, 42, 44–5, 46, 52, 56, 57, 59–60, 116, 143–4, 145, 146, 147, 149, 195, 216 Guardianship of Infants Act (1925: Britain), 143 Hainisch, Marianne, 34, 80, 90, 96, 130 Haldane, J. B. S., 183 Hamilton, Cicely, 25, 98, 108, 171 Happy Motherhood (France), 218 Harnack, Agnes von, 113 Hartley, Catherine Gasquoine, 38, 137 Haus der Kinder, see Children’s House “Health Booklet (France),” 176 health certificates for marriage, 105–6, 126, 175 Hellé, J., 28 Hellmann, Hanna, 130 Henderson, Arthur, 113 Herwerden, Maria Anna van, 175, 180 Herzfelder, Henriette, 107, 171 Hesselgren, Kerstin, 156–7, 165, 171, 196

Hetzer, Hildegard, 190 Himmler, Heinrich, 146, 211 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von, 20 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 163, 165 Hitler, Adolf, 178, 212 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 20, 22 Holland, see Netherlands Holtby, Winifred, 184, 189, 196, 204 Horney, Karen, 189, 197–8 House of Mothers, 166, 174 Hubback, Eva, 179 Hubback, Judith, 223, 226 Humanae Vitae (papal encyclical), 220 Hungary, 68, 71 Huxley, Aldous, 184 Ibsen, Henrik, 1, 13, 19 illegitimacy, 42, 50, 54, 55, 56, 59, 115, 116–17, 118, 146, 151, 155 Imperial School Conference (Germany, 1920), 203 Independent Labour Party (Britain), 120 Institut de puèriculture, see Institute of Child-Nurture Institute for Sexual Science (Germany), 163 Institute of Child-Nurture (France), 133, 188 International Abolitionist Federation, 95 International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, 115, 129 International Congress of Women (1910), 59 International Congress of Women (1915), 115 International Council of Women, 94 International Federation of Business Women, 223 International Feminist Conference (1896), 81, 105 International League for the Protection of Mothers and Social Reform, 91, 96 International Neo-Malthusian Congress, 102 International Planned Parenthood Federation, 217 International Women’s Conference (1896), 76

I International Women’s Congress (1904), 68–9 International Women’s Congress (1913), 106 Internationale Vereinigung für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, see International League for the Protection of Mothers and Social Reform Ireland, 6, 7, 8, 50, 138, 141, 158, 171, 211, 220 Irish Free State, 138, 158, 166 Isaac, Auguste, 168 Italy, 6, 21, 44, 46, 50, 51, 53, 56, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 83–4, 89, 113, 116, 128, 134, 146, 157–8, 162, 171, 202–3, 209–11, 213, 215, 219–20, 233, 237, 239 Jacobs, Aletta, 67, 68, 75, 99, 128–9, 165 Jebb, Eglantyne, 168 Jellinek, Camilla, 60, 102, 105, 146, 150 Jephcott, Pearl, 221–3 Jeunes Femmes, see Young Women Journal des Femmes (periodical), 87 Jung, Carl Gustav, 37, 39, 190 Katholische Frauenorganisation, see Catholic Women’s Organization(Austria) Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund, see Catholic German Women’s League (Austria) Katholischer Frauenbund, see Catholic Women’s League (Germany) Kempin, Emilie, 45, 46 Kergomard, Pauline, 79, 94–5, 203 Kerr, R. B., 53 Key, Ellen, 2, 15, 32, 33, 34, 49, 59, 66, 78–9, 82, 84, 90, 95, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 131, 141, 158, 173, 187, 196, 235, 239, 240 King, Frederick Truby, 190 Klages, Ludwig, 36 Klein, Melanie, 190–1, 199, 230 Klein, Viola, 220–1, 223–5, 231 Kol, Nellie van, 31, 55, 94, 96 Kollwitz, Käthe, 133

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Kool-Smit, Joke, 229–30, 231 Kraemer-Bach, Marcelle, 141, 147 Kvinnolistan, see Women’s List (Sweden) Labour Party, 82, 113, 140, 164, 169, 179, 213–14 Lafargue, Paul, 24 Lagroua Weill-Hallé, Marie-Andrée, 218–19, 220 Laguerre, Odette, 19, 42–3 Lambeth Conference (1930), 162 Lanchester, Edith, 52 Lange, Helene, 58, 79–80, 125 Lawrence, D. H., 134 League for Human Regeneration, 100–1 League for Life (France), 124 League for the Defense of Women’s Interests (Italy), 71 League for the Mother at Home (France), 152 League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests (Italy), 56 League for the Protection of Mothers (BfM), 32, 52, 55, 58, 59, 72, 91, 95–6, 101–2, 106, 116, 117, 126, 146, 157–8, 163, 192, 213 League for the Protection of Mothers and Family Hygiene (Germany), 163 League of Austrian Women’s Associations (BÖFV), 34–5, 58–9, 90, 96, 102, 112, 113, 130, 154–5, 171 League of French Women, 131 League of German Girls (BDM), 211 League of German Women’s Associations (BDF), 34, 45, 46, 49, 57–8, 73–4, 79, 87, 101–2, 105, 106, 113, 119, 124, 125, 142, 143–4, 146, 153, 154, 157–8, 163, 176–8, 211, 213 League of Large Families (Germany), 153 League of Nations, 12, 168, 171 League of Progressive Women’s Organizations (Germany), 33 League of Swiss Women’s Associations, 74, 95, 213, 222, 229 League to Combat Infant Mortality (France), 116

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Léal, Anne, 130 Lega per la promozione degli interessi femminili, see League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests (Italy) Lega per la tutela degli interessi feminili, see League for the Defense of Women’s Interests (Italy) Legal Committee of the Swedish National Council of Women, 47 Legitimacy Act (Britain, 1926), 147, 192 Legitimation League (Britain), 52 Legouvé, Ernest, 19 LeGrand Falco, Marcelle, 126 Lenin, Vladimir, 219 Lichnewska, Maria, 66, 96 Liga für Mutterschutz und Familienhygiene, see League for the Protection of Mothers and Family Hygiene (Germany) Liga Republicana das Mulheres Portuguesas, see Republican League of Portuguese Women Ligue belge du droit des femmes, see Belgian League for the Rights of Women Ligue contre la mortalité infantile, see League to Combat Infant Mortality (France) Ligue de la mère au foyer, see League for the Mother at Home (France) Ligue des femmes françaises, see League of French Women Ligue féminine d’action catholique française, see French Women’s Catholic Action Ligue française du droit des femmes, see French League for the Rights of Women Ligue pour la vie, see League for Life (France) Liljeström, Rita, 225 Lindsay, Ben, 182 Louise Hervieu Association, 176 Lüders, Marie-Elisabeth, 113, 119, 134 Maine, Sir Henry, 20–1 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 194–6 Mansfield, Katherine, 197 Man-Vrouw Maatschaappij, see Men’s and Women’s Society (Netherlands)

Margueritte, Victor, 139 Markelius, Sven, 202 Marriage Bars, 158, 221 Marriage Code (France), 144 marriage, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13–14, 15–16, 20–1, 24, 31–2, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42, 44, 55, 58, 59, 60–1, 67, 68, 83–4, 95, 97, 118, 123–4, 126, 153, 157, 158–9, 164, 195, 204, 209, 210; attitudes towards, 141; baby factory, 183; bourgeois, 24; child-rearing, 207; children and, 182; companionate, 16; comradely, 182; conflicts in, 138–9, 218; counseling, 163, 178; culture and, 139; economy and, 115, 210; education and, 172; egalitarian form of, 34, 68, 205; employment and, 137–8; encouragement of, 139; equality and, 143, 203; families and, 138–9, 144; feminists and, 55, 60, 97, 108, 134, 139, 141, 162, 175, 205, 235; free love and, 140, 147; gender equality in, 31–2; gender roles and, 141; health certificates and, 105–6, 126, 175; laws, 48, 105–6, 127, 143, 149; men and, 88–9, 106, 138–9, 140–1, 147–8; morality and, 92, 103, 140; motherhood and, 15, 41, 49–50, 55–6, 60–1, 72, 73, 74, 83–4, 137–8, 142, 143, 148, 159, 192–3; patriarchal, 116, 149; politics and, 142, 181; postponement of, 115;, professions and, 192–3; prohibition of, 175; reform of, 49, 149; religion and, 147–8, 166; reproduction and, 106, 162, 183; restructuring of, 194; rights of, 92, 137–8; science and, 103; secular, 148; separation and, 115; servitude, 147; sexuality and, 174; stability of, 144, 181; welfare state and, 219; women and, 41, 65, 68, 69, 88–9, 92–3, 104, 106, 108, 133, 134, 138–9, 140–1, 144, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 174, 184, 193, 200–1, 215, 221 Married Women (Maintenance) Act (Britain, 1922), 143 Marsden, Dora, 106 Marti Ibañez, Felix, 174

I Martial, Lydie, 94, 100 Martin, Marguerite, 202 Martin, Marie, 87 Marx, Karl, 23–4, 25, 230 Mason, Otis Tufton, 24 Maternal Aid Society (France), 71 maternal behavior, 9, 197, 198–9; biology, 218; care, 209, 213; clinics, 164; deprivation, 212, 215–16, 230; maternal dilemma, 1, 2, 17, 39, 41, 60, 64, 138, 141–2, 156, 159, 167, 184, 208, 209, 223–4, 227, 228, 231–2, 233, 235, 236–7, 238, 239, 241; employment, 64, 69–70, 216; function, 77; maternal indulgence, 189; instinct, 9, 188, 189; investment, 198; maternal love, 197, 206; nature, 14; nurture, 38, 206; obligations, 70, 225; responsibilities, 88, 188, 235; roles, 3, 15, 61–2, 72, 169, 200–1, 208, 210, 212, 213, 226, 227; salary, 82, 121; service, 81; maternal wisdom, 190; work, 238 maternalism, 2, 5, 8, 9, 13, 16, 92, 94, 96–7, 100, 102, 103, 111, 126–7, 141–2, 161, 239; decline, 208; families, 208; feminists, 208; society, 208 Maternité Heureuse, see Happy Motherhood (France) Maternity and Child Welfare Act (Britain), 120–1 maternity, 2, 4, 8, 42, 47, 53, 65–6, 73, 74, 79, 81, 127, 128, 151, 167, 228, 231; benefits, 120; budget, 81, 83; care, 173; commitments to, 66–7; coverage, 120; envy of, 189; feminine function, 228; feminists and, 74, 184; identity, 232; insurance and, 71–4, 119, 146, 165, 178; leave, 70–1, 72, 73, 74–5, 119, 154, 237; marriage and, 103; mothers and, 147; obligation of, 134; patriotism and, 81; pension, 82; rebellion against, 209; redefinition of, 84; social function, 100, 130; state coverage, 148; subsidy of, 72, 82–3; transcultural, 235; women and, 134, 137, 156, 174, 184, 204, 218, 220 matriarchy, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29–31, 33, 35–40, 44, 55, 56, 60, 194, 196; age,

347

194; communities, 205; paradise, 193, rule, 130; theories, 129–30, 196 Mayreder, Rosa, 34–5, 129 McLennan, John Ferguson, 23 McMillan, Margaret, 119–20 Mead, Margaret, 231, 232 Medal of the French Family, 171 Meikle, Wilma, 150, 197 Meisel-Hess, Grete, 34, 103, 139 Melvyn, Alice, 75 Men’s and Women’s Club (Britain), 28–9 Men’s and Women’s Society (Netherlands), 229–30 Mensing, Marie, 55 Mental Deficiency Act (Britain), 106, 177 Mère Éducatrice, La (periodical), 129, 192, 199, 207 Meyer-Huber, Iris, see von Roten, Iris Mill, John Stuart, 19, 30, 65 Minor, Margarete, 118 Mirtel, Héra, 193 Misme, Jane, 114, 127, 134 Mitchell, Juliet, 230, 231 Mitchison, Naomi, 167–8 Moberg, Eva, 225 Moll-Weiss, Augusta, 80 Montessori, Maria, 76–7, 89, 104, 202–3 Montreuil-Straus, Germaine, 174, 199 Morale Sociale (periodical), 100,103 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 23–4 mortality, 204; children and, 168–9, 240; decline in, 188–9; infant, 53, 80, 89, 114, 116, 117, 188 Mortimer, Penelope, 230 Mother’s Day, 210 mother-goddess, 22, 28, 29, 37 mother-headed families, 13, 28, 36–7, 43, 58, 60–1, 130, 133, 193, 195, 215, 216 mother-love, 9, 36, 39, 75, 78–9, 131, 133, 187, 188, 200, 208, 212, 219 mother-right, 22, 24, 30–1, 49 Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 56, 83–4 Mujeres Libres, see Free Women (Spain) Mulinen, Helene de, 95 Mussolini, Benito, 157–8, 210

348

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Mutual Society for the Protection of Women (Netherlands), 52, 72 Mutualité Maternelle, see Maternal Aid Society(France) Myrdal, Alva, 156–7, 159, 172, 179–80, 182, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205, 207, 220–2, 223–5, 230 Myrdal, Gunnar, 156, 172, 179–80, 202, 207, 222 Myrdal, Jan, 200 Nadig, Frieda, 215 Napoleonic Code, 10, 44, 46, 53, 55, 56, 57, 144, 148 Narbonne, Jacques, 214 natalism, 144, 151, 157, 172, 176, 210, 213–14 natalist organizations, 123, 124, 125, 126, 144, 149, 152, 153, 166–7, 172, 181, 210, 211–12, 239, 241 National Alliance Against Depopulation (France), 168 National Alliance to Increase the French Population, 81, 144 National Association of Spanish Women, 148 National Baby Week (Britain), 110 National Birth Council Association (Britain), 165 National Birth Rate Commission (Britain), 123 National Committee for Legal Assistance to the Families of Service Personnel (Italy), 117 National Committee for Women’s War Work (Britain), 113, 119 National Conference of Labour Women (Britain), 151 National Conference on War Service for Women (Germany), 113 National Congress for Women’s Civil Rights and Suffrage (France, 1908), 45, 48 National Congress of Italian Women (1914), 77 National Council for Equal Citizenship (Britain), 213

National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (Britain), 147 National Council of French Women, 54, 55, 130, 138, 140, 144, 147, 152, 213 National Council of Italian Women, 43, 56, 179 National Council of Women (Netherlands), 43, 56, 179 National Custodial Law (Germany), 177 National Exhibition of Women’s Work (Netherlands), 93–4 National League of German Housewives’ Associations, 146 National Socialist Party (Germany), 90–1, 92, 146, 157–8, 162, 164, 177–8, 180, 181, 210 National Socialist Women’s League (Germany), 157–8, 211 National Society for Sexual Education (Sweden), 165, 217 National Union for Woman Suffrage (France), 140 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC, Britain), 141, 143, 147, 150, 151, 165, 178, 179 National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies (NUWSS, Britain), 46, 89, 141 National Women’s Committee (Italy), 113, 116 National Women’s Service (Germany), 113, 124–5 Nationale Vrouwenraad, see National Council of Women (Netherlands) Nationaler Ausschuss für Frauenarbeit im Krieg, see National Committee on Women’s War Work (Germany) Nationaler Frauendienst, see National Women’s Service (Germany) Nationalsozialistisches Frauenwerk, see National Socialist Women’s Bureau Naumann, Friedrich, 65 Nederlandse Vereniging voor Sexuele Hervorming, see Dutch Society for Sexual Reform Negri, Ada, 50 Nelken, Margarita, 174 Neo-Malthusian League (Netherlands), 99, 100

I Neo-Malthusianism, 98, 99, 100–1, 108, 162, 166, 168–9 Neosophical Society, 26 Netherlands, 3, 6, 9, 11, 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 50, 51, 53, 55–6, 58, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 79, 89, 93–4, 99, 128, 134, 138, 140, 141, 153, 155, 165, 175, 180, 182, 188–9, 203, 211, 217, 220, 221, 222, 225, 229, 231–3 Netter, Yvonne, 141, 159 Newsholme, Arthur, 88 Nieuw-Malthusiaansche Bond, see Neo Malthusian League (Netherlands) Nilsson, Ada, 165, 172, 200 Norton, Caroline, 45 Norway, 11, 44, 48–9, 59–60, 71, 82, 92, 96, 102, 105, 107, 118, 143, 144–5, 165, 175, 180, 211, 220, 230 Norwegian National Women’s Council, 96, 102, 105 Oddo-Deflou, Jeanne, 27–8 Oedipus complex, 36–7, 38, 191 Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming, see Mutual Society for the Protection of Women (Netherlands) Open Door International, 151, 152 Ottesen-Jensen, Elise, 165, 169, 180, 199–200, 217 pacifism, 115, 128, 129–31, 133, 142, 192, 193, 199 Pankhurst, Christabel, 104, 107, 113 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 113, 118 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 118 Pappritz, Anna, 112 Pardo-Bazán, Emilia, 30 parent–child relationship, 9, 10–11, 16, 43, 131–2, 190, 191, 200 parenthood, 3, 16; choice, 237; cooperation in, 207; dangers of, 219; definition of, 83; egalitarianism and, 101, 231; encouragement, 172, 237; eugenics and, 90–1; full-time, 204; gratification of, 239; individualism, 181, 236; patriarchal families and, 84; as public function, 11–12; redefinition of, 240; rejection of, 232; responsibilities of, 173, 178, 187; self-fulfillment, 240; society and, 125,

349

179–80; state and, 156, 172; subsidies for, 155; twilight of, 183, 226, 233 parents, affection by, 10, 212; childbearing and, 88, 162, 182; childrearing and, 46, 101, 205, 207, 211, 212, 240; children and, 58, 76–7, 118, 123, 127, 146, 151, 173, 191, 195, 196–7, 199–200, 202, 205–6; discipline and, 115, 212; duties of, 56, 205–6; education and, 96, 156, 207; employment of, 153; equality of, 46, 47, 143, 144, 148, 215; father’s role and, 199–200; guardianship and, 143–4; independence, 204, 205–6; interference from, 199; modern society, 206–7; morality and, 96, 178; power of, 44–5; responsibility of, 31, 49, 59, 60, 83, 105, 152, 168, 174, 206–7; rights of, 31, 43, 48, 56, 137–8, 144, 148, 162, 215; role of, 45, 200, 207; sexual education by, 94–5, 190, 200; unmarried, 56, 59, 117, 145–6, 215–16; working-class, 204, 207 paternal authority, 43–4, 46, 47, 48, 53–4, 144, 181, 206; behavior, 83; discipline, 115; power, 10, 48, 144, 149; rights, 148; role, 195, 205; support, 60–1, 118, 145, 147 paternity, 22, 23, 25, 28–9, 34–5, 42, 50, 53, 56–8, 117, 133, 144–5, 147, 233 patriarchy, 209; democracy and, 215; destruction of, 36; Freud and, 37–40; marriage and, 116;, matriarchy and, 196; morality, 215; overthrow of, 196; reform of, 196; sexual slavery and, 34–5; violence and, 196; women and, 184 Pearson, Karl, 28 Pelletier, Madeleine, 28, 77, 79, 101, 112, 173, 198, 201 Pember Reeves, Maude, 80–1 Perkins-Gilman, Charlotte, 214 Pestalozzi-Froebel House, 62, 80 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline, 106 Petit, Gabrielle, 101 Pfeil, Elisabeth, 225, 226, 231–2

350

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Piecynska-Reichenbach, Emma, 95, 100, 103 Pinard, Adolphe, 70, 71, 80, 82, 91, 94, 119, 173, 175 Ploetz, Alfred, 91 Pognon, Maria, 54 Pollak, Marianne, 183 Popelin, Marie, 45, 47 Popp, Adelheid, 164 Population Commission (Sweden), 156, 157 population, crisis, 219, 238–9; decline in, 212; policies, 125, 149, 151–2, 153, 156, 157, 159, 170, 177, 178, 180, 182; trends, 7, 8, 13, 16, 32, 78 Portugal, 6, 44, 53, 56, 105, 162, 220 Posada, Adolfo, 47 pregnancy, 14, 16, 29, 51, 70, 71, 72, 74, 89, 97, 101, 114–15, 119, 121, 122, 123, 127, 167–9, 182, 195, 199, 207, 215 prehistory, 20, 21, 23–4, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 69, 194, 195, 236 Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 148 Primo de Rivera, Pilar, 148 privacy, 83, 170, 176, 210, 211–12, 214, 219 ProFamilia, 217 prostitution, 83, 90, 92, 105, 108, 115, 125, 126, 179, 197 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 64–5 psychological theories, 185, 187–9, 191, 194, 196–8, 198, 205–6, 208, 212, 213, 215, 223, 224, 226, 229, 236, 239 Racial Hygiene Society (Germany), 91, 126 racism, 91, 128, 146, 155, 157, 162, 164, 169, 170–2, 173, 180, 210–11 Raschke, Marie, 45 Rathbone, Eleanor, 121, 150–1, 210 Rechtsschutzverband für Frauen, see Women’s Legal Aid (Germany) Red Cross Society, 112, 116, 122, 192 Reed, Mary, 53 Reich Association for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene (Germany), 163

Reichstag, 74, 125, 153, 154, 167, 177, 192 Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine, see National League of German Housewives’ Associations Reichsverband für Geburtenregelung und Sexualhygiene, see Reich Association for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene (Germany) Reimer, Alva, see Myrdal, Alva religion, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 26, 28, 30, 34, 38, 58, 72, 76, 90, 94, 99–100, 103, 111, 124, 137–8, 140, 142, 144, 148, 152, 153, 163, 166, 172, 175, 176–7, 178, 179, 184, 201, 203, 214, 217, 219, 220, 228, 235, 241 Remarque, Erich Maria, 132 Renooz, Céline, 26–7, 28, 100, 129–30 Report on Infant Mortality, 89 reproduction, 1, 5–6, 7, 13, 16, 19, 25, 26, 28, 33, 61, 65–6, 69, 70, 87–9, 92–3, 102, 114, 115, 122, 124, 161, 167–8, 170, 173–4, 175–6, 177–8, 180–1, 182–3, 183–4, 195, 212, 219, 227, 228, 230, 237, 240, 241; children and, 95, 209; decisions and, 172–3; education, 95, 96, 199; employment and, 137–8; ethics and, 103; eugenics and, 90–2; fathers and, 195–6, 199; feminists and, 28, 90–2, 111, 137–8, 163; marriage and, 106, 162; men and, 97, 199, 219; military and, 112; morality and, 92, 162; poverty and, 98, 151; privilege, 107; public service and, 124–5; religion and, 103; rights and, 108, 109; science and, 103; self-determination, 90, 92; state and, 16, 124–5, 172–3, 210; technology and, 239–40 Republican League of Portuguese Women, 48, 56, 105 Reventlow, Franziska zu, 36 Riksförbundet för sexuell Upplysning, see National Society for Sexual Education (Sweden) Rivet, Gustave, 54 Rivolta Femminile, 233 Robin, Paul, 100

I Rochefort, Christiane, 216 Roehl, Elisabeth, 145 Roman Catholics, 94–5, 127, 131, 140, 144, 145, 146–7, 152, 153, 155, 166, 171–2, 175, 176, 180, 191, 201, 211–12, 216, 217, 219, 220 Roten, Iris von, 222, 228–9, 230 Roubiczek, Lili, 202–3 Roussel, Nelly, 1–2, 17, 18, 27, 44, 49, 53–4, 67, 81, 100–1, 104, 107, 129, 161, 166, 168, 214, 239 Rouzade, Léonie, 53–4, 81 Royal Commission on Venereal Disease (Britain), 126 Royden, Maude, 111, 118, 128, 150, 170, 201 Rühle-Gerstel, Alice, 169–70 Russell, Alys, 80 Russell, Bertrand, 192, 196, 205 Russell, Dora, 137, 164, 165, 169, 170, 180, 182, 183, 184–5, 188, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 204–5, 206, 207, 239 Russia, 29, 68, 140, 163, 194, 201 Rutgers, Johannes, 100, 165 Rutgers-Hoitsema, Marie, 70, 100 Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Family Association (Britain), 121 Saleeby, Caleb, 70, 126 Salomon, Alice, 75, 83, 181 Sanger, Margaret, 163, 183 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 217, 227, 232 Sassoon, Siegfried, 132 Saumoneau, Louise, 129 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 21 Scharlieb, Mary, 80, 123 Scheffen-Doering, Luise, 178 Schellekens-Ligthart, A. J., 222, 225 Schelsky, Helmut, 212, 214 Scheven, Katharina, 102, 105 Schiff, Paolina, 71, 73 Schirmacher, Käthe, 80, 82 Schlesinger, Therese, 164 Schmahl, Jeanne, 77 Schneider, Elisabeth, 84 School for Mothers (France), 80 School of Purity, The, 95

351

Schreiber, Adele, 50, 101, 106, 159, 167, 169, 177, 191, 192, 197, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207 Schreiner, Olive, 29, 67, 68, 69, 70, 98, 214 Schuler, Alfred, 36 Scotland, 23, 97, 194 Sección Femenina, see Women’s Section(Spain) Secombe, Wally, 92 Sée, Ida, 42–3 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (Britain, 1919), 138 Sex-Role Group (Sweden), 231 sexual behavior, 105; contract, 107; crisis, 103; education, 92, 93, 94–6, 97, 103, 126, 164, 174, 199, 200, 217, 237; enlightenment, 200; love, 33; morality, 163–4, 178, 207; orientation, 5, 33, 36; reform, 101, 165, 180–1; revolution, 183; slavery, 34–5 sexuality, 3, 22, 24–5, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35–6, 37, 38, 50, 52–3, 92–3, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 138, 140, 146, 163, 164, 165, 167, 172, 174, 182, 184, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197, 199, 209, 218, 220, 227, 233, 235 Shaw, George Bernard, 103–4, 183–4 Sicard de Plauzoles, Just, 82, 83, 173 Simon, Helene, 84–5 single mother, see unmarried mothers Six Point Group, 141, 151, 213 Skard, Åse Gruda, 230 Social Democratic Party (Germany), 33, 108, 120, 140, 145, 156, 163–4, 192, 200, 215 Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sweden), 156, 172 Social Pedagogical Institute (Sweden), 198 social services, 42–3, 78, 108, 113, 115, 116, 119, 169, 210, 213, 224, 225, 238 Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti, see Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sweden) socialism, 4, 5, 12, 20, 23–4, 28, 33, 43, 45, 56, 65, 68, 70, 73–4, 75, 76,

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77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 90, 91, 92, 98, 99, 101, 106, 108, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148–9, 150–1, 152, 153–4, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171–2, 176–7, 179, 183, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202–3, 205, 206, 215, 228, 230 Société Eugénique, see French Eugenics Society Société Néosophique, 26–7 Society for Birth Control and Racial Progress (Britain), 164 Society for Population Policy (Germany), 125, 126 Society for Sanitary and Moral Reform (France), 174 Soldiers and Sailors Dependents’ Fund (Britain), 116 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association (Britain), 117 Somerset, Lady Henry, 80 Soviet Union, see Russia Spain, 6, 7, 11, 30, 44, 47, 53, 148, 149, 166, 174, 220 Spanish Civil War, 148, 149 Spanish Falange, 148 Spanish Republic, 148, 166, 174 SPD, see Social Democratic Party (Germany) Spencer, Herbert, 24 Spock, Benjamin, 213, 226–7 St. Joan’s Society, 140 State, as parent, 12; childbearing and, 148, 149, 154, 155, 156, 172, 181; child-care and, 64; child-rearing and, 236; children and, 65–6, 108, 117–18, 122, 136, 150–1, 169, 174–5, 182, 201, 216, 239; families and, 12, 65–6, 83, 84, 143, 151, 155, 169, 178, 211–12, 214; feminists and, 16, 71, 107, 122, 137–8; health care and, 65; mothers and, 13, 71, 81, 83, 87, 92, 108, 136, 147, 169, 172; parents and, 156, 172; patriarchal, 88; reproduction and, 124–5, 170, 172–3, 210, 212; responsibilities of, 16, 83; sex education and, 93, 95–6, 97; support,

211, 215, 216, 217; women and, 66–7, 83, 107, 108, 124, 161, 170, 171, 174–5, 184, 195 Steenhoff, Frieda, 59, 96, 102 Steinmetz, S. R., 66 sterilization, 164, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180–1, 182, 210, 212 Stöcker, Helene, 13, 32–3, 34, 35, 39, 58, 67, 101–2, 103, 104, 108, 117, 129, 161, 163, 165, 182, 184, 201, 214 Stopes, Marie Carmichael, 97, 118, 126, 150, 164, 165, 168, 173, 179, 181, 182, 183, 200 Strauss, Paul, 54, 71, 79, 82, 119 Stritt, Marie, 46, 68, 87, 101–2 suffrage, 1–2, 11, 12, 14, 25, 27, 29–30, 46, 48–9, 52, 53, 81, 82, 90, 96, 98, 104, 106, 107–8, 111, 112–13, 119, 124, 128–30, 131, 134, 137, 140, 141, 144, 148, 158, 168, 170, 197, 209, 210, 214, 222, 228, 229 Sullerot, Évelyne, 218, 219, 220, 222, 225, 229 Swanwick, Helena, 124, 129, 134 Sweden, 2, 8, 9, 11, 32, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 59, 72–3, 78, 91, 96, 102, 112, 126, 128, 131, 134, 138, 139, 141, 143, 145, 153, 155–6, 157, 165, 166, 169, 171, 172, 175, 179, 180, 196, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 217, 220, 223, 224, 225, 231, 237, 238, 239 Swiney, Frances, 29, 31, 98 Switzerland, 6, 42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 56–7, 70, 71, 74, 95, 100, 129, 163, 222, 228 Tamm, Elisabeth, 156–7, 165, 196 Texier, Geneviève, 219, 230 Theweleit, Klaus, 132 Tille, Alexander, 67 Tiller, Per-Olaf, 231 Trobriand Islands, 194–5 Tugendreich, Gustav, 70 two roles of women, 220–1, 222, 225, 228, 232, 236, 239 two-parent families, 51, 53–4, 58, 147, 188, 195, 196, 205, 215

I Ulich-Beil, Else, 141, 215 unemployment, 77, 149, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 221, 238 Union des femmes françaises, see Union of French Women Union féminine civique et sociale, see Women’s Civic and Social Union (France) Union française pour le suffrage des femmes, see French Union for Woman Suffrage Union nationale pour le vote des femmes, see National Union for Woman Suffrage Union of French Women, 213, 219 Union of Italian Women, 213 Unione donne italiane, see Union of Italian Women United Nations, 222, 223 United States, 7, 23, 29–30, 46, 68, 96, 128, 129, 131, 163, 182, 189, 190, 196, 207, 213, 215, 222, 223, 231, 239–40 unmarried mothers, 15, 31, 41, 49–50, 54, 55, 56–7, 58, 59–60, 72, 73, 74, 104, 106, 116, 117, 118, 142, 144, 145, 146–8, 151, 192, 195, 205, 206, 210, 211, 215–16, 223, 237, 238 unmarried women, 65, 66, 68, 82, 84, 103, 149–63, 195, 219, 236 Vaerting, Mathilde, 193–4 Valabrègue, Catherine, 219, 231 Valette, Aline, 25, 53–4 Van de Velde, Theodoor Hendrik, 189 Van Velsen, Dorothee, 211 Variot, Gustave, 133, 188 venereal disease, 90, 92, 115, 125, 126, 174, 175–6 Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine, see League of Progressive Women’s Organizations (Germany) Verband für Kinder-und Frauenschutz, see Association for the Protection of Women and Children (Switzerland) Verein für Mutter-und Kindesrecht, see Association for the Rights of Mothers and Children (Germany)

353

Vermeersch, Jeanne, 219 Vernet, Madeleine, 128, 129, 142, 144, 147, 152, 191–2, 198–9, 201, 203, 206, 207 Vérone, Maria, 45, 127, 147 Viollette, Maurice, 54 Viviani, René, 54 Voix des Femmes, La (periodical), 168 Volunteer Aid Detachments, 112 voting rights, 124, 138, 148, 171, 175, 222 von Roten, Iris, 222, 228, 230 Vrije Vrouwen Vereniging, see Free Women’s Association Vrouw, De (periodical), 55–6, 99 Wägner, Elin, 196 Warwick, Evelyn Greville, 123 Watson, John, 189–90 Webb, Beatrice, 201 Weber, Helene, 211–12 Weber, Marianne, 34, 36, 48, 57 Weber, Max, 34 Wedekind, Frank, 93 Wegscheider-Ziegler, Hildegard, 69 Weimar Republic, 125, 126, 139, 143, 145, 146, 153, 154, 158, 163, 167, 188 Weininger, Otto, 35–6, 37 welfare state, 7, 8, 9, 43, 64, 74, 108, 209, 214, 216, 219, 225 welfare, children and, 81, 88, 111, 116, 128, 134, 145, 146, 151, 152, 153, 162, 164, 168, 172, 188, 192, 209; families, 209; feminists and, 105; legislation, 210; mothers and, 88, 116, 119, 134, 209; parents and, 162; society and, 105; women and, 176 Wells, H. G., 6, 12, 14, 30, 82, 83 West, Rebecca, 131, 133–4, 197 Westermarck, Edward, 24, 194–5 Wife and Mother in Legal History (Marianne Weber), 34 Wijnaendts-Francken Dyserinck, Wilmoet, 155, 182 Winnicott, Donald, 227 Witt-Schlumberger, Marguerite de, 94, 124 Woker, Gertrud, 46, 70

354

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Wolfring, Maria, 146, 147 Woman who Did, The (Grant Allen), 41, 52–3 Woman’s Cooperative Guild, 121 Women and Economics (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), 68–9 Women’s Action (France), 129–30 Women’s Bureau (Germany), 113 Women’s Civic and Social Union (France), 140, 144, 149, 152, 201, 210, 216 Women’s Cooperative Guild (Britain), 74, 92, 93, 116, 120, 123, 179, 213 Women’s Freedom League (Britain), 107–8 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 115, 129 Women’s Legal Aid (Germany), 60 Women’s List (Sweden), 157 Women’s Section (Spain), 148 Women’s Total Abstinence Union (Britain), 86 Woolf, Virginia, 171, 187, 206

Workers’ Birth Control Group (Britain), 164 World League for Sexual Reform, 165, 166 World War I, 15, 16, 35–6, 53, 60, 72, 79, 84, 90–1, 98, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 122, 125, 133, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151–2, 158, 161, 162, 165, 173, 175, 183, 184, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 199, 201, 202, 205, 209, 210, 236 World War II, 6, 9, 15, 16, 90–1, 151, 208, 209–10, 214, 222, 223, 240 Wuermeling, Franz-Josef, 215 Young Women, 219 Young, Leontine, 215 Zepler, Wally, 79 Zetkin, Clara, 77, 108, 205 Zietz, Luise, 145