Abstract
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.
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Notes
Catherine Gasquoine Hartley, Woman’s Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-Fixing of Moral Standards (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1920), 17, 12, 18.
Dora Russell, The Right to be Happy (New York and London: Harper, 1927), 166, 169.
Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 141
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 14.
Victoria de Grazia, “How Mussolini Ruled Italian Women,” in Georges Duby, Michelle Perrot, and Françoise Thébaud, eds., History of Women in the West, Vol. 5, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1994), 120–148
Christine Bard, Les Filles de Marianne: histoire des féminismes 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 235–248.
Victor Gollancz, “Introductory,” in Victor Gollancz, ed., The Making of Women: Oxford Essays in Feminism (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1917), 11–35 (quotation 33).
Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1914–1959 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), 90–100
Mariolina Graziosi, “Gender Struggle and the Social Manipulation and Ideological Use of Gender Identity in the Inter-War Years,” in Robin Pickering-Iazzi, ed., Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 26–51.
Henry Bordeaux, Le Mariage, hier et aujourd’hui (Paris: Flammarion, 1922), 55.
Grete Meisel-Hess, “Ehekrisen und ihre Folgen,” Die neue Generation (1920): 88–89.
Peter Jelavich, “Introduction,” in brochure accompanying Ute Lemper, Berlin Cabaret Songs (London: Fürstner Musikverlag, 1996), 5;Marcellus Schiffer, “Ich bin ein Vamp,” Lemper, Berlin Cabaret Songs 20–22 (translation ATA).
Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 186–205; Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 46–52.
Victor Margueritte, The Bachelor Girl, trans. Hugh Burnaby (New York: Knopf, 1923), 143.
Die deutsche Reichsverfassung vom 11 August 1919, in Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schraipler, eds., Ursachen und Folgen vom deutschen Zusammenbruch, 1918 und 1945, bis zur staatlichen Neuordnung Deutschlands in der Gegenwart: Eine Urkunden- und Dokumentensammlung, Vol. 3, Article 119 (Berlin: Dokumenten-Verlag, 1979), 464–492, #119.
Georges Clémenceau, speech to Senate, October 12, 1919, quoted in Marie-Monique Huss, “Pronatalism in the Inter-War Period in France,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (January 1990): 39–68 (quotation 41)
see also Anne Cova, Maternité et droits des femmes en France, XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos, 1995), 233.
Sweden, Minister of Social Affairs, “Mandate to the Population Commission,” quoted in Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (New York and London: Harper, 1941), 161.
Birgit Sack, “Katholische Frauenbewegung, katholische Jugendbewegung, und Politik in der Weimarer Republik: Standorte, Handlungsspielraeume, und Grenzen im Kontext des Generationenkonflikts,” in Frauen unter dem Patriarchat der Kirchen: Katholikinnen und Protestantinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Mit Beiträgen von Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, Thomas Mergel, Sylvia Paletschek, Relinde Meiwes, Ursula Baumann, Birgit Sack, Martin König, Antonia Leugers, Jochen-Christoph Kaiser (Stuttgart, Berlin, Köln: W. Kohlhammer, 1995), 120–138; Doris Kaufmann, Frauen zwischen Aufbruch und Reaktion: Protestantische Frauenbewegung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Zürich and Munich: Piper, 1988).
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), 120–153; Bard, Les Filles de Marianne, 235. On the UFCS see also Naomi Black, Social Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 161–240.
Marjan Schwegman and Jolande Withuis, “Moederschap: van Springplank tot obstakel: Vrouwen, natie en burgerschap in twintigste—eeuws Nederland,” in Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, eds., Geschiedenis van de Vrouw, Vol. 5 (Amsterdam: Agon, 1991), 5, 557–583.
Pius XI, “Casti Connubii,” December 31, 1930, quoted 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), 306–314 (quotation 314); see also Cova, Au service de l’Église 169–181.
Wilhelm Soldes, “Sozialisierung der Frau oder sozialistische Ehe,” Die Gleichheit, October 9, 1920.
Jay Winter, “War, Family, and Fertility in Twentieth Century Europe,” in John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, eds., The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850–1970: The Quiet Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 291–329
see also Karen Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: J.W. Dietz, 1990), 159–175.
Winter, “War, Family, and Fertility,” in Gillis, Tilly, and Levine, eds., The Quiet Revolution, 301.
Silke Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen Die Krise der Männer: Die Erwerbstätigkeit verheirateter Frauen in Deutschland und Schweden, 1919–1939 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2001), 114–115.
Else Ulich-Beil, Ich ging meinen Weg: Lebenserinnerungen (Berlin: F.A. Herbig, 1961), 98.
See e.g., Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 125–168; Anne-Marie Sohn, “Between the Wars in France and England,” in Duby, Perrot, and Thébaud, eds., History of Women in the West Vol. 5, 92–119.
On the German housewives organizations, see Renate Bridenthal, “ ,‘ Professional’ Housewives: Stepsisters of the Women’s Movement,” 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), 153–171
Nancy R. Reagin, A German Women’s Movement: Class and Gender in Hannover, 1880–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 221–248, and
Birgitte Soland, Becoming Modern: Tbung Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 90–100.
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.
Madeleine Vernet, “Mère et Citoyenne,” La Mere Éducatrice, July, 1918.
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.
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).
David Bradley, Family Law and Political Culture: Scandinavian Laws in Comparative Perspective (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1996), 1–29.
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.
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.
Camilla Jellinek, ed., Frauen unter deutschem Recht (Mannheim, Berlin, and Leipzig: J. Bensheimer, 1928), 39–46.
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.
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.
Madeleine Vernet, “Le mensonge social et la maternité,” La Mère Éducatrice, September 1919.
Fernand Boverat, La Crise des naissances: Ses Conséquences tragiques et ses remèdes (Paris: Editions 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.
Editorial, “Tâche familiale, fonction sociale et profession,” La femme dans la vie sociale, April, 1938.
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.
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.
See the statements of Anna von Gierke, Verhandlungen 328 (July 16, 1919): 1602 and of Agnes Neuhaus, 1601.
See Christi Wickert, Helene Stocker, 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.
Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), 39–43.
Laura Gellott and Michael Phayer, “Dissenting Voices: Catholic Women in Opposition to Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History 22 (January 1987): 91–114.
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.
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 femmesfrançaises, Copenhague Mai1924 (Paris: Éditions de la Ligue française pour le droit des femmes, 1924); Kraemer-Bach, “La puissance paternelle.”
Madeleine Vernet, “L’amour libre,” La Mère Éducatrice, September 1920.
Anne Cova, “L’Assurance maternité dans la loi de 1928–1930,” Actes du I14e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes, Association pour l’étude de l’histoire de la sécurité sociale (Paris, n.p., 1990), 65–71.
Louis Lespine, La Femme en Espagne: Etude juridique, économique et de législation comparée (Toulouse: Clémence-Isaure, 1919), 55–80.
Geraldine M. Scanlon, La polemica feminista en la Espana contemporanea (1868–1974), trans. Rafael Mazarrasa (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1986), 138–139.
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.
Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 20–26.
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-I950s (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 160–177; Morcillo, True Catholic Womanhood 27–45.
Wilma Meikle, Towards a Sane Feminism (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1917), 127.
Camilla Jellinek “Vom Kochtopf und von der geistigen Arbeit,” Neue badische Zeitung, May 25, 1921, BAK, Nachlass Camilla Jellinek, Vol. 14.
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.
Eleanor Rathbone, The Disinherited Family: A Plea for the Endowment of the Family (London: E. Arnold, 1924), 65.
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 Woman-Centered Socialism: Labour Women in Britain,” in Pamela Graves and Helmut Gruber, eds., Women and Socialism, Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 180–214; Pedersen, Family, Dependence 138–223.
Elizabeth Abbott, “What is Equality?,” The Woman’s Leader, February 11, 1927.
Chambre des Députés, Journal officiel de la République Fançiase: lois et décrets, July 30, 1939; Cova, Maternité 372–380.
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 (Born: Dietz Verlag, 1995), 182.
Gertrud Bäumer, Familienpolitik: Probleme, Ziele und Wege (Berlin: Verlag für Standesamtswesen, 1933), 50.
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.
Johanna Gehmacher, Völkische Frauenbewegung: Deutschnationale und nationalsozialistische Geschlechterpolitik in Österreich (Wien: Döcker Verlag, 1998), 79–84.
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.
Denise de Weerdt, En de Vrouwen? Vrouw, vrouwenbeweging en féminisme en Belgic 1830–1960 (Gent: Masreelfonds, 1980), 158–160.
Lars Trägärdh, “Crisis and the Politics of National Community: Germany and Sweden, 1933/1994,” in Nina Witoszek and Lars Trägärdh, eds., Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 75–109; Neunsinger, Die Arbeit der Frauen.
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.
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).
Chiara Saracen, “Redefining Maternity and Paternity: Gender, Pronatalism and Social Policies in Fascist Italy,” in Bock and Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies ,196–212.
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.
Bunreact na hEireann, # 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.
Vera Brittain, Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 173.
Yvonne Netter, Le Travail de la femme mariée: Son activité professionelle (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1923), 27.
Adele Schreiber, “Weibliche Beamtinnen und Sozialdemokratie,” Münchener Post, July 21, 1925.
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.
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© 2005 Ann Taylor Allen
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Allen, A.T. (2005). The Double Burden: Marriage, Motherhood, and Employment in the Interwar Years. In: Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981431_7
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