The resistance to eugenic and natalist legislation eroded the conception of motherhood as a public service and made way for a more individualistic view of reproduction. Birth control literature affirmed parental desire as the most important reason for childbearing. The first right of all babies, stated Marie Stopes, was “to be loved before birth as well as after birth.”126 But those who made this argument realized that its effect was highly ambiguous, for it could be—and clearly often was—used to justify decisions both for and against childbearing. If every child had a right to be wanted, then those who did not want children were justified in not producing them.
This individualistic view of parenthood as an option rather than a duty was often included among the symptoms of a more general “crisis of the family.” As we have seen from the previous chapter, policy-makers of the interwar era, who regarded the preservation of marital and familial stability as essential to social order, often feared that these bonds could not withstand the pressures of modern life. The German social theorist Alice Salomon argued that the family, no longer supported by its traditional pillars—paternal authority and economic interdependence—was held together only by emotional ties. And even these ties were threatened: “the independence of its individual members” she predicted, might well be gained through the “disintegration of the family.”127
Likewise Alva Myrdal, whose influential book on population policy began with a chapter entitled “The Maladjusted Family,” insisted anxiously that the modern family existed only to fulfill the emotional needs of its members, as an “opportunity for supreme intimacy.”128 Therefore, Myrdal and other progressive reformers advised governments to avoid coercion and to respect the individual’s claim to private happiness. Forcing parents to bear children was counterproductive, for it destroyed their pleasure in parenthood. “Children should be born as a matter of joy; whatever kills that joy misses its effect.”129
Some birth control literature even argued that marital happiness was more important to social order than population growth. Although Marie Stopes regarded reproduction as the ultimate purpose of sexual love—“Every lover desires a child,” began the first chapter of her popular advice-book, Radiant Motherhood—she advised couples to delay the first pregnancy for at least two years in order to allow time for the full development of their sexual relationship.130 Young marriages, she warned, were often permanently disrupted by the “inevitable dislocation and readjustment” caused by pregnancy and parenthood.131 And she insisted that state policies that forced such couples to bear unwanted children could lead only to social unrest. The “real root of revolution,” she wrote, lay in “the secret revolt and bitterness which permeates every fibre of the unwillingly pregnant and suffering mothers.” The unwilling mother’s children might well become “bitter, soured and profoundly unhappy” adults who would avenge their own wrongful births through revolutionary activity.132
If the happiness of families took priority over population growth, then could the avoidance of childbearing actually be socially desirable? As we have already seen, those who were afflicted with hereditary diseases were urged, even sometimes compelled, to refrain from reproduction. But voluntary sterility, at least on a temporary basis, could also be recommended even for the young and healthy. One of the period’s most contentious debates raged around the proposal made by the American judge Ben Lindsay for the legal and social acceptance of the so-called “trial marriage”—a union of young people who were not ready for a lifetime commitment. The partners would agree that the relationship would be childless and could be terminated without legal formalities if it did not prove satisfying.133
Lindsay and his many European supporters, who included Alva Myrdal, Dora Russell, Helene Stocker, and the Dutch activist Wilmoet Wijnaendts- Francken-Dyserinck, believed that trial marriages would assuage the sexual frustration which fashionable Freudian doctrines of human nature identified as a major cause of social instability and crime—according to Russell, even of “nervous disorders bordering upon insanity.”134 “Comradely marriage,” wrote Francken-Dyserinck, would “bring the sex drive, which for so long has been scorned, cursed, and repressed into constructive channels.”135 Moderates such as Gertrud Baumer found this emphasis on sexual satisfaction as an end in itself highly dubious, for it required the woman at least temporarily to give up her “right to motherhood.”136 But more radical thinkers dismissed this association of female sexuality with motherhood as an old-fashioned stereotype: among human beings as well as animals sexuality was the basic drive, and parenthood merely its accidental by-product.137 The Austrian socialist Marianne Pollak praised the modern girl, who refused to be the “old maid, condemned to a nun’s life” and had become the “self-conscious bachelor girl, who grows up early.” To the vanguard of the “sexual revolution,” marriage was no longer simply a “baby factory” (Kinderzeugungsanstalt).138
But the fact that marital happiness was now deemed to be a sufficient end in itself raised serious questions about reproduction. For why should the blissful partners ever encumber themselves with the offspring, that might destroy the precarious equilibrium of their relationship? “Why do we have them?” asked Dora Russell in some perplexity.139 In the consumer society of the interwar years, many identified personal narcissism as the motive for the acquisition of children as well as other valuable possessions. According to Marie Stopes, the couple who decided to bear a child was overcome by a “mutual longing… to initiate the chain of lives which shall repeat throughout the ages the bodily, mental and spiritual beauties of each other, which each holds so dear. . . Lovers who are parents give each other the supremest material gift in the world, a material embodiment of celestial dreams.”140 Margaret Sanger, widely read in Europe, likewise pictured motherhood as the completion of the mother’s “completely rounded self-development.”141 And Dora Russell compared the personal fulfillment to be gained from child-rearing to recreation: “there is no activity so delightful. . . as mutual cooperation between men and women over the care and education of babies and young children.”142
But if the parents’ only reason for having children was to gratify their desires, then why should they choose this form of gratification over the others that were now so lavishly available? Enid Charles, a British demographer and feminist, took account of the profound change in the valuation of children over the past century. Children were no longer an economic asset, but a liability—in fact, even more costly than the most luxurious of consumer goods. “Industrialism proffers a number of alternative and often more attractive ways of spending money,” she noted ironically. “Statistics clearly show that the choice between a Ford and a baby is generally made in favor of the Ford.”143 If they did not think of new ways to encourage reproduction, Charles predicted that all Western societies would see a “twilight of parenthood.”144
One solution to this problem—already envisaged during World War I— was the development of technologies that would remove reproduction from the vagaries of individual choice and make it completely rational. Charles referred her readers to the British geneticist J. B.S. Haldane, who seriously predicted in 1924 that “ectogenesis”—the production of children outside the womb—could be perfected by 1951.145 The era’s futuristic fantasies imagined societies in which women were liberated from the onerous duty of childbearing. In 1922, George Bernard Shaw’s play, Back to Methuselah, opened in an idyllic Garden of Eden where Eve was informed about human reproduction by the snake. “Life must not cease,” declared the snake. “It is silly to say that you do not care. You do care.”146 But Eve, the first reluctant mother, responded with “an expression of overwhelming repugnance.”147 The play concluded in the year AD 31,920, when the human race had evolved to the point that the young were born as fully developed adults from giant eggs, and child-rearing and the family had become extinct.148 But the much younger Aldous Huxley, more in tune with the pessimistic spirit of the age, set his novel Brave New World in a sinister, neon-lit totalitarian state, where children were produced in factories according to eugenic guidelines and reared collectively. The past, when “humans used to be viviparous,” was regarded with horror, and the name of “mother” was an insult.149 And the result was a culture of mindless conformity, where the capacity for love and joy was lost in empty pleasure, wasteful consumption, and easy sensual gratification. For Huxley, the end of motherhood meant the end of civilization.
While affirming reproductive choice, feminists and others were thus deeply apprehensive about its consequences. Only a handful actually saw childlessness as a positive option. “I have no experience of maternity, nor of the desire for maternity, which is generally attributed to women,” wrote Stella Browne in 1915. “. . .As it is, many women have no maternal longings at all, and they should never become mothers.”150 Winifred Holtby complained that the “legend of the frustrated spinster” reinforced the stereotyped notion that women were incomplete without children and branded women who decided against marriage and motherhood with the stigma of abnormality. “Puritan morality,” Holtby concluded, “taught unmarried women that the loss of virginity doomed them to the torments of Hell in the next world; twentieth-century morality teaches them that the retention of virginity dooms them to the horror of insanity in this one.”151 But by separating sexuality and reproduction, the birth control movement in fact paved the way for the acceptance of childlessness, within or outside heterosexual relationships. Helene Stocker, herself childless, extolled the value of sexual love as an end in itself. “Every genuine love is fruitful,” she wrote, “chiefly because it enhances the vitality and happiness of the individual person.”152
Let us return to our original question—how to be both a mother and a free individual? Prewar feminists had envisaged control over fertility as an important means to the resolution of this dilemma. Surely, they believed, reproductive freedom would enable women to combine the joys of motherhood with those of self-realization through professional work, love, and creativity. In the interwar era this prospect, still remote for most women, became imaginable. But the result was not the resolution but the sharpening of the maternal dilemma. For a conflict that was originally conceptualized chiefly as political—pitting the individual woman against the forces of church, state, and patriarchy—now took on an additional, psychological dimension. “Women want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them,” wrote Dora Russell.153 But what would those reasons be? If the main reason for childbearing was now personal gratification rather than necessity or duty, then how to weigh this form of gratification against others? If raised standards of child-rearing made children expensive, then how to decide between this and other expenditures? How to predict whether the outcome would justify the investment? Analyses of the “woman question” now shifted their emphasis from patriarchal oppression to psychological conflicts. And what would be the effect of such conflicted mothers on their children? This will be the theme of the next chapter.
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