The Legacy of World War II
In the years that immediately followed World War II, the ideology of patriotic motherhood seemed to have reached its apogee. The trend toward young marriages and large families that was known as the “baby boom” affirmed life and hope after the death and despair of the war years. Not only did many women leave their wartime jobs for full-time motherhood, but new welfare-state policies, some of which fulfilled long-standing feminist demands, supported mothers, children, and families. Many commentators predicted the imminent demise of feminism. But the opposite occurred. Within a quarter of a century, a new women’s movement energized a vocal group among the younger generation. At the same time, the development of new contraceptive techniques and increases in women’s educational level and workforce participation seemed to usher in a new era in human history, when motherhood would become an option to be chosen rather than a destiny to be accepted.
But as it ceased to be a destiny, motherhood emerged even more fully as a dilemma. The two trends that have been traced throughout this book— heightened standards of maternal care on the one hand, women’s drive for independence and self-realization on the other—clashed in the postwar era. By 1970, many leaders of the new feminist movement claimed that the maternal dilemma was insoluble under existing conditions, and made that claim the basis of a new analysis of sexism, the subordination of women, and patriarchy itself. After sketching in the historical context—World War II and its aftermath—this chapter will examine three major postwar issues: laws affecting mothers, children, and reproduction; mothers in the labor market; and the rebellion against maternity.
Unlike World War I, during which suffrage and other organizations were at the height of their influence, the war of 1939-45 inspired little feminist activity. In countries ruled by totalitarian regimes, such as Germany, Italy, and Austria (as of 1938), feminist organizations had been abolished well before the war, and most of their leaders had been condemned to exile or silence. In the democracies, feminist groups had steadily lost membership
and funding and by 1939 were in decline. During the interwar years, the leaders of these organizations had followed the example of other progressive reformers and shifted their emphasis from the rights of women to those of human beings, especially of those who belonged to the racial, ethnic, and political groups that were persecuted by the Nazis and fascists.1
During the war, feminist activity was brought to a temporary halt in the many countries that were occupied by the Nazis. For example, most of the French organizations (with the exception of the Catholic Women’s Civic and Social Union) were disbanded and their periodicals discontinued in 1940. In Great Britain—for a while the only belligerent nation that preserved democratic government—most feminist leaders followed the precedent of 1914 and threw their support behind the mobilization of women. But by comparison to World War I, when women had been rewarded for their patriotism with the right of suffrage, World War II brought meager gains. Child allowances payable to mothers, which activists such as Eleanor Rathbone had demanded since World War I, were part of the new postwar welfare-state legislation, but such measures had long since lost their connection to feminism. Social services such as day-care centers, which were provided during the war, were discontinued in its aftermath. Although women in several countries received the right to vote in the wartime and postwar eras— in France in 1944, in Italy in 1945, in Belgium in 1948—this resulted more from a general commitment to democracy and postwar reconstruction than from specifically feminist activity.2
Postwar societies were haunted by the still vivid memory of fascist dictatorships. Despite their bombastic praise for the traditional family, both the Italian and German regimes had undermined it by abolishing all rights to personal privacy and making reproduction a public function that served the state. In other respects the two regimes differed. Mussolini’s policies were straightforwardly natalist, combining harsh restrictions on access to birth control and on the employment of married women with forms of public assistance—such as child allowances payable to fathers—that strengthened male supremacy in the home and in the state.3
The Nazi regime also enacted some benefits to families, such as family allowances (also usually payable to fathers), loans to married couples, and financial and institutional assistance to unmarried mothers. But unlike those of the Italian regime, Nazi policies were more concerned with racial purity than with natalism. Eugenic measures enforced prolific reproduction on the racial elite and compulsory sterility on stigmatized minorities, including the handicapped, mentally ill, and racially tainted.4 In wartime, the ideal of patriotic motherhood was degraded through macabre celebrations of Mother’s Day, which exhorted mothers to take pride in the death of their sons.5 However, National Socialist propaganda did not always present women in stereotypically domestic or maternal roles. In the immediate prewar and wartime years, posters that urged married women to join the work force portrayed women as heroic workers in many occupations.6
The Nazi women’s organizations—the National Socialist Women’s Association (NS Frauenschaft), the German Women’s Bureau (Deutsches Frauenwerk), and the League of German Girls (Bund deutscher Mddel)— cannot be called feminist, for they had no freedom to set their own agendas or to criticize government policies. But a faint and distant memory of the feminist movement was kept alive by Gertrud Baumer, who continued to edit Die Frau—formerly the organ of the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine)—until 1944. Always a patriotic German, Baumer usually avoided censorship by publishing articles on politically neutral topics. Her political stance combined cautious criticism (which sometimes attracted the unfavorable notice of the Propaganda Ministry) with half-hearted approval of the Nazi regime. In 1940, she reprinted a speech by SS chief Heinrich Himmler that exhorted Germans to respect unmarried mothers (of course, only those of the racial elite), who bore valuable offspring for the nation, and warned women who refused their maternal duty that they were no better than deserters (in fact, the Nazis made abortion a capital crime in 1943).7 In an anguished letter, Dorothee van Velsen, a former leader of the German Women Citizens Association (Deutscher Staatsbugerinnenverband) asked Baumer why—since protest was out of the question—she could not simply have ignored this distasteful tirade. Baumer responded that her readers deserved to be informed about important policy questions, and the speech had made some useful points. She added defensively that “you can’t come up with any magazine in Germany, that. . . goes as far with criticism and independent thinking as Die Frau.”8 In Germany as elsewhere, the horrors of total war discredited these and other Nazi policies.9
After World War II, all the Western European states committed themselves to the support of families and children. State subsidies—known in Britain as “family allowances” and in Germany as Kindergeld (money for children)— helped parents with the costs of child-rearing. Many feminists of the interwar era had supported family allowances on the condition that the money be paid directly to mothers—a demand that was fulfilled in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. France allotted a special subsidy, or “allocation de salaire unique,” to mothers who did not work outside the home. In other countries such as West Germany, Ireland, and Italy, however, family allowances were distributed as a wage supplement, and thus usually to the male breadwinner.10 Postwar family policies were strongly natalist: France, declared General de Gaulle, who served a brief presidential term in 1945-46, needed twelve million beautiful babies.11 And in the short run, these policies were successful. In France, live births per 1,000 women aged 15-49 increased by about a third, from 60 in 1935 to 82 in 1960; during the same period this birthrate grew in Britain from 54 to 77; in Norway from 55 to 78; in the Netherlands from 77 to 90.12
But though in some ways a return to interwar natalism, postwar policies reacted to the recent experience of totalitarianism by emphasizing privacy. The invasion of the family by the state, declared Helene Weber, a Catholic
delegate of the German Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-demokratische Union, or CDU), had violated “a divinely endowed order, which predates all political institutions and to which the state must accommodate itself.”13 In more secular language, the West German sociologist Helmut Schelsky praised the family as a bulwark against the coercive pressures of the state and as a safe haven for the “formation and development of the individual.”14 The patriotic duty of motherhood was not enforced by new coercive measures.15 In fact, the cheerful prospect of rising birthrates dispelled long-standing fears of population decline and created an atmosphere in which coercive laws— such as those that in some countries still restricted access to contraception and abortion—could be challenged. And though compulsory sterilization continued in Scandinavia, eugenic theory—now associated with antiSemitism and genocide—had fallen into such disrepute that the notions of population “quality” which had been invoked to justify coercive policies during the interwar years all but disappeared from discussions of reproduction.16
The general revulsion against totalitarian family policies also contributed to dramatic changes in experts’ view of the maternal role. Starting around 1938, a reaction against the stringent methods prescribed by experts of the interwar era was already well under way.17 By the war’s end, the frightening spectacle of totalitarian states and their uniformed, regimented, bannercarrying youth groups—in Hitler’s own words, “tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel”—had discredited parental sternness. The sociologist Theodor Adorno, himself a refugee from Germany, asserted that strict and rigid childrearing produced an “authoritarian personality” prone to prejudice and aggression, while more affectionate methods encouraged independent thought and constructive citizenship.18 Another testimony to the importance of parental affection came from the psychiatrist Anna Freud, who with her famous father Sigmund Freud had taken refuge in London. Freud and her British colleague Dorothy Burlingame concluded from their work in day-care centers and with the many children who were evacuated from bombed-out cities that the separation of the child from the mother was the most damaging of wartime traumas.19
The British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who had also worked with institutionalized children, based his theory of “maternal deprivation” on Anna Freud’s research. Another important influence was Melanie Klein’s picture of the infant psyche as a boiling cauldron of mixed loving and hostile emotions, chiefly directed at the mother. Bowlby warned that infants might react to their mothers’ absence, even for short periods, with overwhelming feelings of anger and guilt—anger at mother for leaving, guilt at perhaps having driven her away—that might cause permanent psychological damage. The mother’s constant and consistently loving presence, he declared, was “as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health.”20
Bowlby’s theories appealed to postwar policymakers who aimed to raise birthrates and reconstruct families. They were often used to justify such discriminatory policies as the closing of day-care centers and the denial of employment opportunities to married women. Nonetheless, most mothers responded positively to Bowlby’s emphasis on love and spontaneity.21 Likewise the American pediatrician Benjamin Spock, whose Common-Sense Guide to Baby and Child Care was translated into several European languages, urged mothers to cultivate their own and their babies’ capacity for love and expressiveness. “Enjoy your baby,” urged this influential manual.22
Postwar psychological theories contributed to the process of change that has been noted in earlier chapters: the transformation of motherhood from a lifetime identity to a finite and limited job. For although experts considered intensive maternal care to be indispensable in the first five years of life, they advised that the school-age child needed independence.23 A definition of full-time motherhood as an intense but short-term obligation fit well into the family patterns of the postwar era. Couples of all social classes now planned their families, and children were typically born close together during the first years of the marriage.24 And because female life expectancy had increased from about 50 years in 1900 to about 74 years in the 1960s, women could expect to live for 40 years after their youngest child entered school.25 Instead of responding to the newly prosperous economy as they had been expected to do, by withdrawing from the labor force, women entered it in ever greater numbers, and the fastest growing segment of the female labor force was that of older married women.
Thus though it is often characterized as conservative, the postwar era was marked by rapid changes in the family, the status of women, and the maternal role. In this process of change, traditional feminist organizations played only a minor role. After the war, these groups—for example, the National Council of French Women (Conseil national des femmes frangaises), the German Women’s Circle (Deutscher Frauenring, a successor organization to the BDF), the League of Swiss Women’ Associations (Bund schweizerischer Frauenvereine), the British Six Point Group (which in 1949 merged with the National Council for Equal Citizenship) and Women’s Cooperative Guild— continued their work, which was centered on issues such as the political rights of women and the reform of family law. But these groups did not attract many younger women.
An obstacle to innovation in some areas was the growth of mammoth women’s organizations within Western European communist parties, of which the French and Italian were the largest. The women’s organizations sponsored by these parties, the French Union des femmes frangaises(Union of French Women, or UFF) and the Italian Unione donne italiane (Union of Italian Women, or UDI) recruited large numbers of predominantly working — class women. Under pressure to accommodate to a conservative political atmosphere, the communist parties abandoned many of the progressive views on women’s issues that they had promoted during the interwar era.26 Communist women continued to assert the right of mothers to work outside the home, aided by social services and collective child care. But they often downplayed these demands to join in the popular cult of domesticity and natalism.27 In Britain, where there was no strong communist party, the political interests of working-class women were represented by the women activists of the Labour Party. These women, though many were veteran feminists, placed national issues, such as those involved in the building of the welfare state, before specifically female concerns.28 Not until the rise of a new feminist movement after 1968 would left-wing women openly rebel against the male leadership of their parties. And the very existence of these groups, whatever their views, fueled a right-wing reaction against any form of feminism, which was often (however mistakenly) denounced as a part of a larger communist plot to subvert the family, religion, and the security of the Free World.
Partly because of the conservatism of both liberal and communist women’s organizations, many of this era’s most innovative approaches to issues concerning women and their status were produced by intellectuals who, though deeply concerned with the status of women, did not identify themselves as feminists. They were often unfamiliar with the feminist theory of the past—names such as Helene Stocker, Olive Schreiner, Nelly Roussel, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman fell into oblivion. Ignorant of history, these postwar thinkers often struggled to reconstruct ideas and theories that they could more easily have derived from the rich literature left by a century and a half of feminist thought and practice. As Karen Offen has so rightly pointed out, they laboriously “re-invented the wheel.”29 But the absence of historical consciousness also left room for fresh ideas. These thinkers were the critics but also the products of postwar culture—a culture that emphasized individualism, privacy, and self-realization. By turning their attention away from abstract theories and toward an exploration of the experiences and feelings of mothers themselves, they laid the foundation for a new feminist movement that would declare that “the personal is the political.”