Abstract
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
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Notes
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.
Vera Brittain, Honourable Estate: A Novel of Transition (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 516–517.
Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford, 1995), 15.
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.
John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1965), 409.
Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), 142–144.
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: Bergbahn Books, 1998), 56–94.
Susanna Woodtli, Gleichberechtigung: Der Kampf um die politischen Rechte der Frau in der Schweiz (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1975), 138–148.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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A.M. Carr-Saunders, World Population: Past Growth and Present Trends (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 241–242; Jones, “Marie Stopes in Ireland.”
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see also Robert Talmy, Histoire du mouvement familial en France, 1896–1939 (Aubenas: Union nationale des Caisses d’Allocations Familiales, 1962), 186–237.
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Nationale Vrouwenraad, Het Bevolkingsvraagstuk, Rapport van de commissie tot bestudeering van het bevolkingsvraagstuk (Leiden: S.C. van Doesburgh, 1927).
Marie Carmichael Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those who are Creating the Future (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1921), 191.
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.
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Alice Rühle-Gerstel, Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart: Eine Psychologische Bilanz (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1932), 345.
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Maude Royden, “Modern Love,” in Victor Gollancz, ed., The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917), 36–63.
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Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938] (London and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 102.
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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.
Margarita Nelken, La Condicién Social de la Mujer in Espana: Su Estado Actual, Su Posible Desarollo (Barcelona: Editorial Minerva, 1922), 122–123. On Nelken’s life and work
see Josebe Martinez-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.
Felix Marti Ibanez 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.
Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 115–142.
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see also B. Bakker-Nort, Beroepsarbeid dergehuwde vrouw (Utrecht: A. W. Bruna, 1921).
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William H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 146–169.
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see also Louise Hervieu, Sangs: un roman (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1936).
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).
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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).
Alice Salomon, “Ausgangspunkt und Ziel der Familienforschung der deutschen Frauenakademie,” Zeitschrift für Wohlfahrtspflege (August 1930): 283–290 (quotation 290).
Marie Carmichael Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties [1918] (London: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 132.
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.
W. Wijnaendts Francken-Dyserinck, Kameradschaftsehe (Baarn: HollandiaDruckerij, 1930), 41.
Gertrud Bäumer, “Zur Frage der ‘Jugendehe,’ ” in Gertrud Bäumer, Die Frau im neuen Lebensraum (Berlin: Herbig, 1931), 168–177.
Marianne Pollak, “Der Bankerott der Ehe: Ein Buch über die sexuelle Revolution,” Die Frau (Wien), May 5, 1930.
Dora Russell, In Defence of Children (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932), 9; Russell, Hypatia 47.
Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage [1926] (Old Saybrook, CT: Applewood, 1993), 199.
Dora Russell, The Right to be Happy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1927), 200.
J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1924), 63–65; Charles, The Twilight of Parenthood 192.
George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch [1921] (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1949), Part I, Act I, 79.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [1932] (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 26.
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Allen, A.T. (2005). “Conscious Motherhood”: Birth Control, Eugenics, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Interwar Era. In: Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981431_8
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