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, Hera Mirtel, imagined this fortunate “Herland” in a utopian novel of 1920 entitled From the Fatherland to the Motherland (De la Patrie a 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.
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 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 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 Wagner 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 Wagner 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 (Vackerklocka), 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