What was the effect of the wartime experience on the culture and politics of motherhood? Prewar feminists had aspired to two ideals of the post-patriarchal family: one centered on the independent mother and the other on the egalitarian two-parent household. The wartime experience, though it seemed to reinforce the first model, actually tilted the balance toward the second. For the mother-headed family was associated with the hardship and bereavement of wartime; by contrast, the restoration of the two-parent household promised a return to stability, harmony, and fertility.
More than ever, prestigious spokesmen prescribed marriage and motherhood as every woman’s destiny. Dr. Gaston Variot, the head of the Institute of Child-Care in Paris, declared that “young girls and women must now think of the repopulation of France, and fill up the house with children quickly after the war.”158 To be sure, the supply of healthy young men had been decimated. But Dr. Variot insisted that women must be persuaded to marry the wounded, whose injuries had not diminished their genetic value.159 The British Eugenics Education Society even recommended that the wounded be given a special badge to attest to their fitness for paternity.160
But the literature of the postwar period offered few happy endings. In Rebecca West’s novel, The Return of the Soldier, the shell-shocked veteran did not even recognize his wife, and returned to the love of his youth, who was married to someone else.161 The returning soldier portrayed by Ernst Toller’s play, Hinkemann was castrated.162 In his short novel The Fox, D. H. Lawrence depicted a female couple who offered hospitality to a demobilized soldier. Having fallen in love with one of the women, the soldier jealously killed the other.163 These literary figures had their real-life counterparts in the men who returned disabled, emotionally disturbed, or unable to adapt to civilian life.164 Natalist zealots proposed polygamous marriage as a solution to the shortage of suitable husbands. Jane Misme rejected this degrading suggestion, but admitted that many women would be deprived of motherhood. They were, she said in 1916, “victims of war. Just as men have sacrificed their lives or their health, women will suffer in their souls.”165
Feminists had hoped that wartime measures that assisted working mothers would be preserved and expanded after the war. But returning veterans demanded the removal of their female competitors. Even before the war was over, feminists expressed concern about the widespread summary dismissal of women from their wartime jobs. The return of women to the home, wrote Marie-Elisabeth Luders, depended on the presence of the family breadwinner and his ability to earn an adequate wage, and under existing conditions neither could be relied on.166 Helena Swanwick feared that the cry of “back to the home” would be raised “whether the women have a home or not.”167 The editors of La Frangaise continued to support women’s right to work, but added that such work must be reconciled with maternal obligations: “the France of the future,” stated an editorial of 1918, “cannot sacrifice maternity to work, or work to maternity.”168
Feminists predicted confidently that postwar governments would recognize the contributions of women by making it possible for them to fulfill their true potential, both as mothers and as human beings. The Italian Donna Paola (Baronchelli) praised the work of Italian women in the fields of maternal and child welfare and hoped that the mother of tomorrow would be a “conscious citizen” who would become the educator of “a new Italian people—new in spirit, in thought, in customs.”169 As we have seen, medical coverage and social benefits for mothers and children were improved during the war, a trend that would continue in the interwar years. In some countries, such as Britain, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria, the granting of suffrage rights signaled lawmakers’ appreciation of women as mothers as well as workers. But fears that the female would outnumber the male electorate came to the fore in the British law that set a minimum voting age of thirty for women, but of twenty-one years for men. In France, an initiative to give women the vote passed one legislative chamber, the Chamber of Deputies, but was defeated in the upper house, the Senate, where members insisted that it might endanger population growth. And in Italy, woman suffrage failed because of the disorganization of the liberal parties and the rise of the militantly anti-feminist fascist movement.170
While feminists dreamed of a postwar world where the mother could finally be a free individual, the generation of male authors who served at the front cherished a very different fantasy. The modernist literature and visual art that they created was full of anger at women for refusing their maternal and feminine roles. A playful variation on this theme was the revue The Breasts of Tiresias (Les Mamelles de Tiresias) by the soldier-poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which though written in 1903 was first performed (in a revised version that contained some topical references to the war) in Paris in 1916. In far-off Zanzibar, a housewife named Therese declared that she would have no children, removed her breasts (represented by balloons) and went off to become a general, a deputy, and a city councillor. Whereupon her husband assumed the breasts and his patriotic responsibility:
Women who crave emancipation Have called a halt to procreation!
“We’ll bear no more” they boldly state.
“You’ll simply have to populate Our land with apes and elephants,
With snakes and ostriches and ants.”
Just like the queen, who oversees Her busy, buzzing hive of bees (Though less industrious than these)
Our women have become quite sterile.
They’ve placed the Fatherland in peril!
So shout aloud, to near and far,
“We need more kids for Zanzibar.”
Despite the accident of gender,
We love our land, and we’ll defend her.
If women will not breed the race,
We men will do it in their place.171
Unlike this versatile hero, who immediately produced more than 40,000 children for the Fatherland, real men could not learn to have babies. But they could devise new ways to stem the tide of emancipation, keep women out of male careers, and control their reproductive capacities. And these would be major policy directions during the next two decades.
|
|
“Think of our future: vote for the Center Party.” In the interwar era, all German political parties emphasized the importance of mothers and children to the survival of the nation. (Deutsche Zentrumspartei, Berlin: A. M. Cay, 1918-25 (?) Poster archive: Hoover Institution.)