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 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 “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 state — supported 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 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 (Riksforbundet for 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.
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, Marie — Andree Lagroua Weill-Halle, met Evelyne 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-Halle, Sullerot, and a few of their friends founded an organization which they first termed “Maternite 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-Halle 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-Halle 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 Valabregue, 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 Genevieve Texier and Andree 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 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 Aries, 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-Halle, 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.