At the close of the war, feminists hoped for peace not only in international but also in gender relations, to which wartime had brought so much tension, disorder, and conflict. Sometimes, a return to nurturing motherhood was proposed as a remedy. Amid the revelry that marked the signing of the Armistice, the British suffragist Catherine Gasquoine Hartley deplored the behavior of the “screaming girls” who greeted the soldiers. “In one group a woman was carrying a baby, and a tiny child dragged at the hand of another girl, crying drearily, and no one noticed. . . . Surely this squandering of Woman’s gift, this failure of herself, must cease now that peace has come.”1 But as the initial euphoria was followed by a more realistic view of women’s status in interwar societies, many voices were raised against this one-sided view of women’s destiny. Among them was that of the flamboyant British activist Dora Russell. “In actual fact, a woman is as capable as a man of combining love of a mate, parenthood, and physical and intellectual work,” she wrote in 1925. “If we cannot have children and remain intelligent human beings. . . then indeed our emancipation is a mockery.”2 Russell included both maternity and fulfillment through work in her definition of emancipation.
Feminists of the interwar era have often been stereotyped as conservative. For instance, Susan Kingsley Kent accuses British leaders of endorsing “conservative and reactionary images of masculinity and femininity”; and Claudia Koonz depicts German feminists as devotees of “motherly love in its separate sphere.”3 Certainly, these years saw the decline of militancy and a new emphasis on the reconciliation of the sexes, and large and vocal religious women’s organizations gave high visibility to some conservative positions. But by the 1930s, progressive feminists in every country—and even some members of conservative religious groups—had coalesced around a view of motherhood that was distinctly modern and included equality of parental rights, the right to combine marriage and motherhood with paid work,
controlled reproduction, and rationalized child-rearing. After sketching in the historical context, this chapter will focus on the first two issues—the legal rights of mothers in marriage, and the combination of motherhood and job or career. The others will be discussed in the two chapters that follow.
Feminists’ positions on these issues evolved in the context of more general changes in attitudes toward reproduction, child-rearing, and the role of the state. As we have seen from an earlier chapter, most prewar feminists did not simply affirm woman’s maternal vocation, but problematized it by depicting it as one side of a dilemma, the other side of which was the desire for individual autonomy or self-realization, sometimes in the form of paid work. In the interwar era, issues surrounding motherhood and paid work moved to the forefront of public concern. And the maternal dilemma continued as a prominent theme in feminist debates, but with a change of emphasis from the individual mother to the family group.
The context for this shift of focus was the widespread perception that the family was in crisis—a crisis that was attributed not just to the stress of postwar readjustment, but to changes in the status of women. In the closing days of the war, feminists renewed the campaigns that had been suspended in 1914. And in the first years of peacetime, they reached the height of their influence. Shortly after the war, women had gained the right to vote in many countries—such as Britain, Germany, Austria, Britain, Ireland (where the British law was extended to women, and ratified in 1922 by the newly created Irish Free State), the Netherlands, and Sweden. In France, where women did not gain suffrage rights, organizations such as the National Council of French women and other liberal organizations nonetheless gained in prestige and influence.4 In many countries, legislation—for example, the British Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 and German educational reforms that admitted women to university teaching positions and to the legal profession—gave women new access to educational opportunities and to professions. In wartime, women had not only taken on new vocational roles, but had claimed new personal freedoms in dress, social behavior, and recreational activities.
Public opinion responded anxiously to these changes in women’s status. For example, the influential British journalist Victor Gollancz associated his country’s resurgent women’s movement with “revolutionary methods, sex strikes, and sex wars” which might abolish all distinctions of gender.5 Groups representing male workers, including professional organizations, veterans’ associations, and labor unions, retaliated against this imagined threat by denying job opportunities to female workers. And mothers—actual or poten — tial—were singled out for discriminatory treatment by policies and laws that mandated the dismissal of married female workers in many occupations, particularly in privileged civil service and teaching positions.6 As unemployment was defined as a male problem, married women who were dismissed were often denied insurance and other forms of financial assistance.
The family, too, was sometimes portrayed as a war zone. The popular French novelist Henry Bordeaux described the marital conflicts of reunited couples. “We talk of marriage between men and women,” he observed, “as one talks of peace between the Germans and the French. The husband wants to impose conditions. . . . Women do not want to obey and don’t know how to command.”7 Such apprehensions were shared by many feminists. The Austrian Grete Meisel-Hess warned that “the tensions that the war created seem still to hover in the air. People have not had enough of the pain, the hostility, the destructive fury. . . Marriage and war have infected each other.”8
The popular culture of the era exuberantly fed these obsessions by portraying the emancipated woman as a seductive man-hater—red-lipped, sharp-toothed, and sadistic. “I am a vamp, I am a vamp, I’m a fierce wild beast,” sang the cabaret stars of Berlin: