Looking back over the fifteen years that have passed since I began the research for this book, I am truly grateful to a large number of people and institutions for the help and support that they have given me. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided a grant that enabled me to travel to libraries […]

When Nora, the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, walked out the door of her comfortable home, her husband Torvald frantically sought to hold her back. “Before all things, you are a wife and mother,” he protested. “I don’t believe that any longer,” was Nora’s response, “I believe that before all else I am a […]

Any historical consideration of such a diverse and controversial phenom­enon as feminism must begin with a definition. The terms “feminist” and “feminism” were first used in the late nineteenth century by the French suf­fragist Hubertine Auclert, and by 1900 these terms were in use throughout Europe and in North and Latin America. From that day […]

This will be an international and comparative history that includes all of the national cultures of Western Europe. The focus will be on Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany (the Nazi era, during which feminist organizations were prohibited, will be discussed only as it influenced devel­opments in other countries and in postwar West Germany). […]

At the turn of the twentieth century, when our story begins, feminist rhetoric was pervaded by the exaltation of motherhood as the woman citizen’s most important right and duty. In our own time, historians’ responses to this tendency, which they have called “maternalism,” have covered a broad spec­trum from vehement denunciation to fulsome praise. Some […]

The following chapters will trace the stages of this process during the period from 1890 to 1970. The time period will be divided into four segments: the prewar era (1890-1914); the period of World War I (1914-18); the interwar era (1918-39); and the era of World War II and the postwar era (1945-70). The distribution […]

The M other-Age Ibsen’s heroine, Nora, aspired to emerge from her sheltered “doll’s house” and to become an autonomous human being as well as a wife and mother. But was such a thing possible? Scholars looked to the past for answers to this question—often with dismal results, for history and prehistory seemed to show that […]

Like every rich and complex work, Das Mutterrecht could support a wide variety of interpretations. One of these was offered by Bachofen’s account of the age of classical matriarchy, when women dominated both state and fam­ily. This model found minority support among feminists of every country but was most fully elaborated in France and Britain. […]

But many feminists found the mythical mother-age unappealing—their ideal was not female supremacy, but gender equality. And they, too, cited Bachofen, who (along with many later researchers) had clearly designated the period of mother-right as a primitive stage in human development. In most countries, the majority of feminists insisted that the evolution of the family […]

In the years before World War I, the great increase in the membership and influence of feminist organizations provoked a backlash against feminism. Among anti-feminists, Bachofen’s imaginative picture of a matriarchal age and a war between men and women could arouse terror as well as fascination. The psychological theories of this era reconceptualized the battle […]