Killing the “A ngel in the H ouse”
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
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 puericulture) 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 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 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 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 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 Mere Educatrice (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 fur 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 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?