The struggle to improve the legal status of the mother in and outside of marriage faced new obstacles in the interwar years. The process of reform that had begun in the prewar era produced some results, but its momentum was reduced in some countries and halted in others. We will first look at changes in the status of the mother in marriage and then at the very much more complex and acrimonious debate on the rights of the unmarried mother.
In the Scandinavian countries, a process of reform that had been initiated during the prewar era produced results in the 1920s.39 As the historian Silke
Neunsinger points out, these neutral nations were spared the gender conflict that arose elsewhere from the traumas of wartime and postwar readjustment.40 A Scandinavian Committee for Family Law produced its final report in 1918, and by 1929 its recommendations were incorporated into the marriage laws of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The new codes decreed the equality of husband and wife in almost all aspects of married life, including most aspects of child-rearing. In all countries except Finland, however, fathers maintained guardianship rights in respect to financial decisions. Equality of rights did not imply equality of function: these laws assumed that the household would normally be headed by a male breadwinner. Housewives were given the right to sufficient resources to meet household expenses, and were allowed to appeal to the courts against a husband who refused to provide for his family.41
As Birgitte Soland points out, Scandinavian conservatives displayed an openness to the reform of the family that was seldom shared by their counterparts in other European states. Their motive, she suspects, was to counteract what they viewed as the dangerous appeal of feminism by making family life more attractive.42 The goal of this legislation, as defined by a member of the Norwegian parliament in 1918, was to encourage “the founding of numerous homes for healthy people, where healthy children can be born.”43
In Britain, too, a campaign for the rights of married mothers that had begun in the nineteenth century produced results during this period. In 1920, NUSEC drafted a law that gave mothers and fathers equal rights of guardianship over children and an equal obligation to maintain them “according to their means.” The draft law made this obligation enforceable whether the partners were living together or apart. Another draft law strengthened the enforcement of maintenance obligations to divorced women and their children.44 The laws that were passed by Parliament—the Married Women (Maintenance) Act of 1922 and the Guardianship of Infants Act (1925)—conferred on mothers, married, separated, or divorced, an equal right to guardianship of children. But the law forced fathers to support their families financially only in case of separation or divorce. Unlike their Scandinavian counterparts, who thought of the family almost as an agency of the state, the British lawgivers were reluctant to allow the state to intervene in what they still regarded as the private sphere.45
In family law as in other areas, the hopes for progress held out in Germany by the constitution of the new Weimar Republic were frustrated by a rightward political trend. The National Assembly that debated and ratified the Weimar Constitution in 1919 was elected by both men and women, and about 10 percent of its delegates, representing the entire spectrum of political parties, were female.46 A clause in the Constitution stated that marriage “rested on the equal rights of both sexes,” and that “the nurture of offspring to physical, spiritual and social maturity is the highest duty and natural right of the parents, over whose work the state presides.”47 The League of German Women’s Organizations reaffirmed its prewar program that called for equal parental power and the intervention of a guardians’ court in cases of disagreement. In cases of divorce, the group further stipulated, the custodial parent should also have full parental rights. But these demands were never implemented through legislation. The law that gave precedence to the father’s wishes in case of parental disagreement remained in force, except for an amendment of 1921 that prevented him from changing the children’s religious affiliation without the mother’s consent. In cases of divorce, the care of the children was allotted to the innocent party, but the father remained the guardian in financial matters.48
Though the struggle for suffrage absorbed most of the energies of French feminist organizations, they also upheld the parental rights of mothers. Despite the emergency wartime decree that had given mothers power to make some decisions regarding their children, French law still upheld most forms of paternal authority.49 In 1919, a position paper of the National Council of French Women called for an end to all the legal disadvantages suffered by married women (many of whose decisions were still subject to their husbands’ approval) and demanded equal rights for both parents and the intervention of a court in case of disagreement.50 Parental equality also received the enthusiastic support of socialist feminists; “if the family is to become the harmonious environment that we hope for,” wrote the influential Madeleine Vernet, “it should not be based on an injustice.”51 But the large and vocal Catholic women’s groups that lauded the mother as “giver of life, educator, heart of the household, agent of human progress” upheld paternal authority.52 On this issue, the Catholic women followed the lead of male-dominated natalist organizations such as the National Alliance to Increase the French Population (Alliance nationale pour l’acroissement de la population fran^aise), which attributed declining birthrates to the Napoleonic Code’s system of partible inheritance (which forced fathers to divide their property among their children) and warned that further restrictions upon paternal rights might wholly destroy men’s incentive to found families.53
In 1929 a general meeting of all French feminist groups, the Estates General of Feminism, called for the abolition of paternal power.54 But Andree Butillard, head of the Women’s Civic and Social Union, supported her rightwing allies by insisting that the law should buttress the husband’s paternal and economic power by giving him the title “head of the family” (Chef de Famille).55 When a new Marriage Code—denounced by feminists as “truncated and mutilated”—was passed in 1938, it enacted some improvements in the status of wives but preserved paternal power, which was not fully abolished until the 1970s.56
Although historians have tended to regard natalism as the predominant goal of interwar family policies, these policies in fact placed a still higher priority on the stability of marriage. The victim of this emphasis on marriage was the unmarried mother.57 In the prewar era, natalist rhetoric had often justified efforts to reform the legal status of single mothers and their children, who were defined as valuable citizens who deserved protection. Among the most significant results were the French law of 1912, which for the first time permitted paternity suits, and the Norwegian law of 1916, which gave the children of unmarried parents, in cases where paternity could be established, most of the rights of “legitimate” children with respect to inheritance and family name, and allotted public assistance if paternal support could not be collected.58 But in the interwar years, these children were resented in all countries for the burden that they allegedly placed on overtaxed welfare funds.59 In an era when the sexually active single woman was pictured more as vamp than as victim, pathetic or heroic images of the unmarried mother lost their credibility.60 And concern for the survival of “illegitimate” children was often outweighed by a stronger desire to uphold marriage, which many feared would be undermined by any sign of sympathy for the single mother.
Sweden’s law of 1920 entitled “illegitimate” children to paternal support, but deprived them of inheritance rights unless the couple was engaged at the time of conception. The law placed all such children under the guardianship of a municipal officer who was responsible for assisting and guiding the mother. Similar measures were adopted by Finland in 1922. Only Denmark followed the example of Norway and passed a law in 1937 providing that “children born out of wedlock have the same legal position in relation to their parents as legitimate children, except where explicitly stated otherwise.”61 Though more tolerant of the unmarried mother than those of other states, the Scandinavian laws still showed a marked mistrust of her judgment by denying her full parental rights and placing both her and her child under public guardianship.
In the German National Assembly, the body that met in 1919 to write the constitution of the new Weimar Republic, the female delegates initiated a long and vehement debate on the status of the single mother. A diverse group that was distributed across the spectrum of political parties, including the radical Independent Socialists, the moderate Social Democrats, the liberal German Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the right-wing German National People’s Party agreed that a clause on the status of the unmarried mother and her child should supplement the constitution’s Article 119, which placed marriage and the family under the protection of the constitution.
But on the definition of that status they parted company. The Independent Socialists, influenced by the Norwegian example, demanded that the illegitimate child be granted “a right to the name of his/her father and legal equality with legitimate children.” Luise Zietz, an Independent delegate, noted that these mothers’ moral standards were often “much higher than those of many ‘legitimate’ wives.”62 Elisabeth Roehl, who represented the Social Democratic Party, advocated equal rights to inheritance and support. “A nation bled white by the war,” she stated, could not afford to waste any of its human resources. But Roehl objected to any compulsory attribution of the father’s name, which she claimed that many unmarried mothers did not desire.63 Marie Baum, a delegate from the liberal German Democratic Party, objected that the situation of the child of unmarried parents was so different from that of the “legitimate” child that complete equality of rights was hardly conceivable.64 Moreover, added Gertrud Baumer, who was also a Democratic Party delegate, such fictive equality might actually create problems for the unmarried mother herself, whose control of her child might be disrupted by too much paternal interference.65 Catholic and conservative delegates declared that an equal status for illegitimate children might undermine the stability and respect due to legitimate marriage.66
And this conservative position prevailed. The final version, which became Article 121 of the Weimar Constitution, made no reference to legal rights at all but guaranteed to illegitimate children “conditions for their physical, spiritual, and social development that are equal to those of legitimate children.”67 This clause defined the child of unmarried parents more as an object of philanthropic concern than as a citizen with rights. Indeed, the major innovation of the Weimar Republic was the assignment of rights of guardianship, not to the mother—who was usually deemed incapable of exercising them—but to a governmental agency, the Jugendamt, or youth welfare bureau. According to the legal scholar Camilla Jellinek, who presided over a national network of legal counseling centers for women, this measure somewhat improved the financial situation of female-headed households.68 The League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund fur Mutterschutz) continued to insist, as in the prewar era, that the child should be under the mother’s guardianship and should bear her name.69 Unmarried mothers who were employed, dependents of an employed person, or destitute were eligible for maternity insurance and other forms of assistance in Germany.
The rise of the Fascist regime in Italy, which consolidated its totalitarian rule in 1925, and the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany in
1933, created a new and disturbing perspective on many of these issues of sexual morality, including the status of single mothers and their children. For these movements cynically co-opted an originally progressive critique of conventional morality for use in the service of their militarist and racist agendas. Regardless of marital status, declared Heinrich Himmler (who was head of the political police, or SS) any mother of good blood who produced a child for the Volk was to be honored.70 After the National Socialists took power in Germany, unmarried mothers who could prove that they themselves and the fathers of their children were of acceptable “racial” stock received improved benefits. The discriminatory provisions of this law would not have been acceptable to Camilla Jellinek, who because of her Jewish descent was forced to give up all her public activities, nor to most of her colleagues in the League of German Women’s Organizations, which disbanded shortly after the Nazis took over.71
The right-wing government of Austria emulated the Nazi example. In
1934, after the Nazis took over in Germany, a Catholic leader, Maria Wolfring, was appointed by the Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss as head of an organization known as the Mothers’ Protection Bureau (Mutterschutzwerk), which modeled its services to unmarried mothers on those of the Nazis and
Fascists. At the opening of a home for destitute single mothers, Wolfring proclaimed that it was “a wonderful thing to be an Austrian mother.” Though they themselves had initiated many charitable efforts on behalf of poor mothers and children, two Austrian Catholic groups—the Catholic German Women’s League (Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund) and the Catholic Women’s Organization (Katholische Frauenorganisation)—refused to participate in this initiative, which they criticized both for undermining traditional morality and for exploiting motherhood in the service of the state.72 Criticism of state policies was silenced when Austria was forcibly incorporated into the Third Reich in 1938.
The unmarried mother and her child in Scandinavia, Germany, and Austria were fortunate compared to their British counterparts. British law still offered no way for such children to be legitimated, and set paternal support obligations at a minimal level. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, a philanthropic organization founded during the war, joined NUSEC, in a campaign to change these laws.73 Among the legislative goals formulated by NUSEC was a measure designed to entrust the responsibility for collecting support payments to a public authority, to apportion these payments to the circumstances of the father rather than the mother, to allow for the legitimation of children by the subsequent marriage of their parents, and to give illegitimate children equal inheritance rights with their legitimate siblings in cases where parents died intestate.74 The outcome of these and other initiatives was the Legitimacy Act of 1926, which permitted the legitimation of children by the subsequent marriage of their parents, unless the parents had been married to others at the time of conception. This law, of course, affirmed the norm of the two-parent, nuclear family and helped only those children whose parents wished to form such a household. For the others, adoption by unrelated families—which was legalized during this period—was the preferred solution.75
In France, women’s groups also championed the rights of the unmarried mother. Feminist lawyers such as Maria Verone and Marcelle Kraemer-Bach, who formulated the positions taken by the National Council of French Women, advocated legal reforms that would make paternity suits easier while preserving the mother’s rights of guardianship.76 The socialist Madeleine Vernet also argued passionately that “we can have no real progress while the mother, creator of life, can be dishonored by the very fact of her maternity.”77 And yet even Vernet had changed with the times. During the prewar years, she had rejected marriage as a form of servitude and had herself borne a child in an unofficial, though stable relationship. But in the postwar era Vernet married her companion and publicly repudiated “free love.” And she no longer extolled the emancipatory possibilities of unmarried motherhood. On the contrary, she declared, such an abstract ideal of liberation failed to take into account the difference in the needs of the two sexes; in a nonmarital partnership “the man risks nothing, but the woman risks motherhood.”78
These progressive groups and individuals were drowned out by the more numerous Catholic women’s organizations, who joined their male allies in
a militant defense of marriage. To give the unmarried mother the rights of her married counterpart, they argued, would undermine the status of the legally constituted family.79 The political clout of the religious groups was apparent in the French law on social insurance that was passed in 1928. For the first time, the state sponsored maternity coverage for women whose income was under a certain limit, whether they were employed themselves or the dependents of an employed husband. But much to the outrage of feminists, unmarried mothers were not included in this benefit.80
In Spain, the confrontation between liberal and socialist feminists and the forces of religious conservatism occurred in the context of political upheaval and civil war. Under the Spanish monarchy, the status of women had been regulated by laws modeled on the Napoleonic Code.81 In 1921, soon after its founding in 1918, the first national feminist organization, the National Association of Spanish Women (Asociacion National de Mujeres Espanolas), submitted a petition to the parliament (Cortes) requesting several improvements in the status of women, including equal parental rights for married mothers and, for unmarried mothers, the right to care for their children even when their fathers had gained paternal rights by recognizing them. In 1925, when this petition had not produced results, the feminist periodical Feminal published a series of articles that proposed revisions in the Civil Code.82 A military dictatorship that shared power with the monarchy from 1923 until 1931 brought only limited rights of suffrage for female heads of families.
The fall of the monarchy and the founding of the Second Republic in 1931 opened the way for many forms of social change. Ruled by a coalition of liberal and socialist parties, the Republic not only gave women the right of suffrage (1931) but also modernized family law to permit secular marriage and divorce, give equal rights to husband and wife, and equalize the status of children born in and outside of marriage. These laws, which were upheld by several left-wing women’s organizations, including the communist AntiFascist Women’s Association (Agrupacion de Mujeres Antifascistas) and the anarchist Free Women (Mujeres Libres), placed the new Spanish Republic “in the forefront of the parliamentary democracies of Europe.”83
But the Republic was immediately opposed by a counterrevolutionary coalition of conservatives, Catholics, and monarchists that in 1934 united in the Spanish Falange (Falange Espanola). Its female auxiliary was a group known as the “Women’s Section” (Section Femenina), which was led by Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of the Fascist General Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. Like the French Catholic organizations, the Women’s Section far outnumbered secular women’s groups. Spanish women were predominantly conservative and religious, and the electoral setbacks suffered by the leftwing parties in elections held in 1933 were attributed largely to women’s votes.84
In 1936, republican groups formed a new Popular Front, which they inaugurated in a parade that included many liberal and socialist women. In a “Letter to Soldiers,” General Primo de Rivera cited the behavior of these abandoned women—who had shouted “Children yes! Husbands no!”—to justify the overthrow of the Republic.85 In 1941, after the Spanish Civil War and defeat of the Republic, the fascist regime headed by General Francisco Franco repealed the Republic’s marriage laws, condemned women who lived in nonmarital unions to fines and imprisonment, forbade daughters to leave their fathers’ homes except for marriage or a convent, and prohibited the employment of all married women whose husbands’ income was sufficient to support a family.86
Thus despite widespread perceptions of a “crisis of the family,” the laws pertaining to marriage, motherhood, and family relationships changed little in the interwar era. Only in Scandinavia and in Britain were marriage laws permanently changed, and these changes completed a reform process that dated to the prewar years. In other countries, paternal power was among the last remnants of patriarchal marriage to be abolished, sometimes not until the 1970s. The anxieties that were expressed through the defense of marriage, patriarchy, and “legitimate” child-rearing were deepened by the economic crises of the era, to which we shall now turn.