From N ecessityto Choice
During the interwar period, some feminist movements shifted their attitude toward birth control from skepticism to support. In societies that were only beginning to realize the extent of wartime casualties, this alliance of feminism and birth control could arouse both anxiety and misogyny. A popular novel by the French author Clement Vautel, Madame ne veutpas d’enfant (the very title became a natalist slogan) portrayed the sinister vamp Malthusia, whose lectures often opened with the command, “tu n’engendras point” (“Thou shalt bear no children”). “In France, everything is coming together to help us,” she cackled fiendishly, “we no longer believe in God or the Devil; we love money more and more. . . we must dread the children that would prevent us from having fun.”1 Feminist authors gave a different picture of the modern mother. In her novel, Honourable Estate (1936), Vera Brittain portrayed two characters: Janet, married at the turn of the century, who resented the child whom she was forced to bear, and her daughter-in-law Ruth, who was an emancipated woman and a willing mother. “To begin with, I wanted the twins and we agreed about having them, whereas your mother was not only unready for a child and quite ignorant, but apparently never consulted,” explained Ruth to her husband. “Don’t you see that it is just because I am better qualified than your mother and still able to go on with my work that I care for the twins so much? … If our own mothers had been encouraged to learn what was going on in the world instead of being told their place was the home, the War might never have happened.”2
Brittain reaffirmed the claims of prewar maternalists such as Helene Stocker and Nelly Roussel that, in the area of reproduction, the interests of individual women and those of the state were identical. In the interwar era, this formerly radical argument moved into the feminist mainstream as what Atina Grossmann has called a “motherhood-eugenics consensus, which assumed that motherhood was a natural and desirable instinct in all women, only needing to
be properly encouraged, released, and regulated, and which understood the bearing of healthy offspring as a crucial social task.”3 But by the end of the interwar era, this consensus had been severely disrupted. Birth control literature carried contradictory messages: while preserving the notion of motherhood as a social task, it exalted desire above duty. The right of the parents was to choose to bear children; of the child to be wanted. These were principles that could legitimate decisions both for and against childbearing. Birth controllers often preached a new hedonism that reversed conventional moral notions by portraying personal happiness rather than reproduction as the primary purpose of marriage. The ideology of the citizen-mother was undermined by its misuse by governments in the service of natalism, militarism, and the many forms of employment discrimination that were described in the previous chapter. Eugenics, having reached the height of its influence in the 1920s, was discredited in the 1930s and 1940s by the horrific example of National Socialist racial and reproductive policies and by changing scientific paradigms. After sketching in the historical context, this chapter will look at feminist birth control activists and their positions on three issues: family limitation, eugenic legislation, and reproductive decision-making.
This brief summary, which will draw on the many excellent histories of birth control movements in various countries, will exclude Italy and Portugal—nations that were under dictatorships that prevented the growth of such a movement during most of this period. Before the war, birth control had been supported by only a minority of feminists, chiefly on the political left. Broadened support in the interwar era was due both to ideological and technological change. The old Neo-Malthusian ideology that had advocated birth control as a remedy for the poverty caused by overpopulation was widely questioned in an era of declining birthrates. “To confront the fact of population decline with the assertion that there are too many people in the world or that it does not matter if the human race dies out,” remarked the British demographer Enid Charles, “is merely flippant and generally insincere.”4 Birth control movements reoriented their propaganda toward the welfare of parents and children—a focus that appealed to feminists, whose positive views of marriage and family were explored in the previous chapter. A gradual change in the attitudes of some churches—particularly the Anglican Church, which at its 1930 Lambeth Conference gave reserved support to the use of contraception in marriage—created a more permissive climate in Protestant countries.5 And the popularization of barrier methods such as the cervical cap and the diaphragm held out the promise that women might be able to practice contraception even without the cooperation of their partners.
In many countries, birth control activists—among whom were many professed feminists—sought to make contraceptive advice and technology available, especially to the low-income population that had little access to medical care. The ideology and practice of birth control movements varied, and the two most internationally influential models emanated from Germany and Britain.
In the German-speaking world, the birth control movement engaged a large group composed chiefly of radical, socialist, and communist women and men and from the beginning was associated with other progressive aspirations, including the reform of sexual mores. The Weimar Republic, where in the early years many policies were made by social democratic and liberal parties, provided a friendly climate for these efforts. Such laws as those that still theoretically prohibited the advertisement of birth control devices were loosely enforced and eventually struck down. The first birth control clinic of the postwar era was opened in 1919 by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who was also a crusader for homosexual rights, at his new Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. The mainstream feminists of the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) consistently supported access to contraception and discussed reproductive issues at their annual meetings and in committees. But they did not openly advocate birth control—which offended the religious and moral beliefs of some members— and opposed the legalization of abortion.6
The German birth control movement was invigorated in 1927 by a visit of the American activist Margaret Sanger to Berlin. Under Sanger’s inspirational leadership, the German Committee for Birth Control, composed chiefly of women physicians, set up a network of marriage counseling centers (.Eheberatungsstellen), which were sponsored both by private organizations such as the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund fur Mutterschutz or BfM) and by public health authorities.7 In these centers, contraceptive advice was often dispensed to both married and unmarried people (and Helene Stocker’s clinic offered it “whether they intend (ed) to marry or not”8). Organizations such as the League for the Protection of Mothers and Family Hygiene (Liga fur Mutterschutz und Familienhygiene) and the Reich Association for Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene (Reichsverband fur Geburtenregelung und Sexualhygiene) manufactured and sold contraceptive devices throughout the country.9 The Austrian socialists who controlled the government of the nation’s largest city, Vienna, set up a public marriage-counseling center to give advice on contraception and other sexual problems, but their plans to extend these services remained unfulfilled.10
The support of German-speaking radicals for the reform or repeal of abortion laws distinguished them sharply from their counterparts in other countries, many of whom avoided the issue. German-speaking communists glorified the Soviet Union for legalizing abortion and called for the complete repeal of all legal prohibitions.11 In 1919, they launched a campaign in German-speaking Switzerland. When a communist-sponsored proposal to decriminalize abortion was accepted by the City Council of Basel, which as a textile-manufacturing city was a center of labor activism, the city’s women’s organizations organized mass meetings to debate the proposal. Considering it too radical and a threat to sexual morality, the majority rejected it. Though not yet allowed to vote, the Basel women had enough influence to persuade the Council to repeal the law.12
Social Democratic women’s organizations in German-speaking countries generally opposed the decriminalization of abortion but advocated legalization subject to medical, eugenic, and social indications (a progressive stance by this era’s standards).13 A modification of the German abortion law in 1926 to permit terminations to save the life or health of the mother made it the most lenient in all Europe. But communists who demanded complete decriminalization collaborated with socialists—a rare instance of such cooperation!—to sponsor a series of mass demonstrations in 1931. The movement spread to Austria, where socialist delegates to the Parliament (Nationalrat), including Adelheid Popp and Therese Schlesinger, proposed liberalized “indication” laws. Upon their seizure of dictatorial power in 1933, the German National Socialists banned the birth control organizations, forced their leaders into exile, regulated abortion according to a racial ideology that recognized only the eugenic indication, and legalized the compulsory sterilization of individuals whom they considered genetically defective. In Austria, abortion reform was also blocked by the rise of a right-wing dictatorship in 1934.14
The British birth control movement developed a more conservative ideology, which was shaped in large measure by the charismatic personality of Marie Stopes. Her best-selling books, especially Married Love, which was published in 1918, placed more emphasis on private, and specifically marital bliss—portrayed against a background of middle-class comfort—than on social reform or sexual radicalism. Stopes, who founded the Society for Birth Control and Racial Progress in 1921, was opposed to abortion, which she believed that contraception would make unnecessary. Her class-biased version of eugenic theory, very different from that of socialist birth controllers, associated poverty with hereditary deficiency.
But though certainly prejudiced against some women, Stopes had strong feminist convictions. She affirmed the married woman’s right not only to sex education and birth control, but also to economic independence and professional self-fulfillment. “The pursuit of her work or profession and honorable achievement in it,” she wrote in 1920, “is not at all incompatible with, but is highly beneficial to her motherhood.”15 Of all this period’s birth control activists, Stopes had the widest international influence. Her effective and widely imitated “Mothers’ Clinic,” which opened in London in 1921, dispensed contraception and other forms of practical help to women regardless of income.16 Stopes’s example was followed in Northern Ireland with the establishment of the Society for Constructive Birth Control, which opened the first birth control clinic in Belfast in 1936.17
The women members of the British Labour Party took a more radical approach. The Workers’ Birth Control Group, under the leadership of Dora Russell, campaigned to make contraception accessible to working-class women in publicly supported maternal and child-welfare clinics. Birth control found less sympathy on the British than on the German political left. The male leadership of the British Labour Party, responding to its Catholic constituents, repeatedly refused the demand of the Party’s Women’s Section to include access to birth control in the Party’s program.18 The initiative thus passed to middle-class organizations, including the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), which endorsed birth control for married women in 1926. In 1929, the Health Ministry authorized the dispensation of contraceptive advice in public medical centers. With few exceptions British birth control organizations, which united into a coordinating body known as the National Birth Council Association, avoided the controversial topic of abortion reform until 1936, when a small group of militants, including Russell and the journalist Stella Browne, formed the Abortion Law Reform Association.19
The contrasting German and British approaches were publicized through the World League for Sexual Reform, founded in 1928, which supported the efforts of birth controllers in many countries, especially in Scandinavia. The Swedish Elise Ottesen-Jensen, who worked for birth control as journalist, organizer, and traveling lecturer, was a socialist and a supporter of German reformers such as Hirschfeld and Stocker. In 1934 an organization under her leadership, the National Society for Sexual Education (Riksforbundet for sexuell Upplysning, or RFSU), opened a clinic in Stockholm. In 1938 the Swedish government provided public support for this and other clinics. Ottesen — Jensen was also a militant supporter of abortion-law reform, and in 1934 was tried and convicted for referring a woman to an abortion provider.20 Ottesen — Jensen had close ties to a feminist group centered in Fogelstad, which included the parliamentarians Elizabeth Tamm, and Kerstin Hesselgren (who were mentioned in the previous chapter), and Dr. Ada Nilsson, a physician and public health activist who advocated benefits to mothers (such as maternity insurance and well-baby clinics) and the free dissemination of contraceptive advice.21
The Norwegian Katti Anker-Moller, whom we have already met as an advocate of the rights of mothers during the prewar era, was an admirer of Stopes, some of whose works she translated into Norwegian. In 1922, upon returning from a visit to Stopes’s London clinic, she founded a clinic in Oslo, and by 1937 similar clinics existed in thirteen other towns. In 1939, these clinics received public financing. Moller did not agree with her British mentor on all issues—for example on abortion, which Moller believed should be legalized.22 In Denmark, where no such forceful leadership emerged, only one birth control clinic existed in 1932.23 The Dutch birth control movement declined in influence after the death in 1924 of its leader, the internationally renowned physician and sex reformer Johannes Rutgers. In the 1930s, however, the influence of Marie Stopes provided new momentum. In 1931, a clinic named for Aletta Jacobs opened in Amsterdam, and by 1940 eleven additional clinics had been established.24
In general, therefore, the democratic countries of Europe saw a slow, uneven, but nonetheless steady growth in the public acceptance of birth control during this era. A notable exception to this trend was France. In 1920, the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate enacted a law that penalized not only the sale of contraceptives and the performance of abortions, but also the public advocacy of any form of family limitation.25 Religious proscription reinforced political repression. In 1930, the papal encyclical Casti Connubii warned the Catholic faithful against “any use whatever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its power to generate life,” and against abortion, even when necessary to save the mother’s life.26
Many historians have criticized French feminists for their initial failure to protest the 1920 law, which Nelly Roussel termed the loi scelerate (abominable law). But some radicals continued to draw attention to the issue. In 1927 the teacher Henriette Alquier, a member of a communist teachers’ union, was tried for publishing an article that promoted “neo-Malthusianism,” and was acquitted.27 In the 1930s the founding of the periodical Probleme Sexuel (Sexual Problem) by Berthie Albrecht, a member of the World League for Sexual Reform, and the opening of a clinic in Suresnes by the physician Jean Dalsace, reinvigorated the opposition to the “abominable law.”28
Religious prohibitions influenced legislation in other Catholic countries as well. Belgium passed a law based on the French model in 1923 and the Irish Free State prohibited the advertisement and sale of contraceptives in 1929 and their importation in 1935.29 Spain’s law of 1928 against the propagation of contraceptive theory or practice was briefly overturned in 1931 by the leftwing groups who founded the Second Republic. In the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona, radical physicians founded a birth control clinic in their House of Mothers ( Casa de Maternidad), which provided a variety of services to mothers and babies, and pushed for the legalization of abortion in the autonomous region of Catalonia. These efforts were halted by the right-wing counterrevolution in 1939, and the Fascist government passed laws that upheld Catholic teachings.30
Proponents of what French feminists scornfully termed repopuldtrie (“populationitis”) and lapinisme (“rabbit-breeding”) blamed declining birthrates on the spread of the birth control movement. But this was a reversal of cause and effect; in fact, it was the widespread determination to limit family size that drove the expansion of the movement. Prohibitions against access to contraceptive technology could not prevent the use of the nontechnological methods, such as coitus interruptus, through which birth control had been practiced for a century or more. The “rhythm” method, which utilized the woman’s natural infertile periods rather than birth control technology, was accepted by the Vatican and came into use in Catholic countries in the 1930s.31 Between 1920 and 1933 the birthrate per thousand population fell from 25.5 to 14.7 in Britain; from 25.9 to 14.7 in Germany; from 21.4 to 16.2 in France; from 29.5 to 27.7 in Spain; and from 23.6 to 13.7 in Sweden.
The decision to limit families arose chiefly from a new feeling of entitlement to the pursuit of happiness and self-realization. Contrary to the gloomy obsessions of natalists, the falling birthrates of the interwar years signaled no widespread rejection of motherhood—in fact (as we have seen in chapter 6) the number of women who married and had children actually increased. As Yvonne Knibiehler, the historian of motherhood, points out, many women of this generation aspired to be “more motherly and happier mothers than their mothers and their grandmothers.” Freed by household technology from heavy labor and by prosperity from pressure to work outside the home, middle-class mothers devoted themselves to their small families, preferably consisting of a girl and a boy, in houses made cosy and comfortable by modern conveniences. The growth of the toy industry and the increasing lavishness of Christmas festivities were signs of a newly child-centered culture.32
However, advances in the control of fertility raised more disturbing possibilities, including an individualism that could not be contained by this domestic ideal. The rationalization of reproductive behavior through the separation of sexuality and pregnancy, writes the German historian Karen Hagemann, constituted a “decisive step toward the emancipation of the female sex.”33 One possibility was the avoidance of motherhood without renouncing heterosexual satisfaction. Another was a new solution to the maternal dilemma: the planning of childbearing to fit into new life-plans. “Intelligent and perhaps truly feminist women want two things,” wrote the British novelist Naomi Mitchison in 1930, “they want to love as women, to have masses of children by the men they love. . . and they want to do their own work, whatever it may be.”34
Though feminists expressed widely different views on reproductive issues, they agreed that the elevation of maternity from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom—still a utopian goal—would add a new dimension to the maternal dilemma. They called on women to find a new balance between freedom and responsibility. “Evidently,” remarked the French feminist and politician Cecile Brunschvicg, “women no longer wish to be considered as destined only for motherhood. But we firmly believe that the more aware they are of their rights, the more they also realize their duties.”35 But duties to what, or to whom? The following sections will address feminist conceptions of freedom, responsibility, and choice.