Adele Schreiber, one of the first women to be elected into the Parliament (Reichstag) of the Weimar Republic, regarded reproductive choice as a right and duty of citizenship. Not for German mothers the medals for large families that were awarded in France—their honor was to be “the free mothers of a free generation.”36 But in this as in other areas of life, new freedoms brought new uncertainties. Couples who assumed “this terrible responsibility of the deliberate creation of life,” wrote Naomi Mitchison, were forced to ask such questions as “we willed this life, are we justified?” or “ought we to deny life to a being. . . who might be alive and happy?”37
What were the ethical guidelines for reproductive decision-making? And how should mothers balance their obligations to their children, to society, and to themselves?
Most feminist reformers based their reproductive ethic on relational rather than individualistic arguments, and portrayed birth control primarily as a benefit to children and families. This was in part a defensive strategy, for anti-feminists never tired of deploring the modern woman’s distaste for motherhood.38 Auguste Isaac, who was among the leaders of one of the largest French populationist organizations, the National Alliance against Depopulation (Alliance nationale contre la depopulation), complained that mothers corrupted by materialism and frivolity had forgotten “the influence and the prestige that arise from a prolific maternity.”39 Nelly Roussel charged men such as Isaac, the proud father of eleven, with using patriotic rhetoric to justify “their own lack of self-control and glorify the suffering of their wives,” and claimed—in defiance of legal prohibitions—that mothers who responsibly limited their families served both their children and their country.40 The editors of the British suffrage periodical Time and Tide affirmed that the “real meaning of birth control” was “children, the happiness of children and the rights of children, and the chances of making fine citizens out of her children. . . That is why birth control, in its real sense, in its larger sense, has come to stay.”41
The era’s demanding standards of child-care were often invoked to support this rhetorical strategy. In a statement issued in 1927, the Dutch National Women’s Council (Nationale Vrouwenraad) asserted that “the more people understand the high minimum standards of hygiene that are necessary to the care of newborns and older children, the more the conception of offspring becomes an event that cannot depend simply on accident.”42 And indeed, these standards were constantly rising. Eglantyne Jebb, a British Quaker who had been a leader of her denomination’s campaign to assist children in wartime and continued as an international child-welfare activist, introduced into the League of Nations a resolution entitled the “Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” which was passed by that body in 1924. “Recognizing that Mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give,” the document affirmed the child’s right to all “the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually.”43 According to a French socialist periodical, the Voice of Women (La Voix des Femmes), these requirements included schooling, adequate housing equipped with bathroom and laundry facilities, and access to the natural world.44 One of Marie Stopes’s best-selling advice manuals admonished parents that “Baby” required “fresh air to breathe” and the opportunity “to play in the sunshine with his limbs free in the air; to crawl about on sweet, clean grass.”45
Obviously, these conditions could be provided by only a minority of prosperous families, and were beyond the means of the poor. Left-wing activists thus often resorted to traditional Neo-Malthusian arguments that birth control was a remedy against poverty. Henriette Alquier, the French teacher who was placed on trial in 1926 for advocating birth control, deplored the plight of the proletarian family, in which unwanted pregnancies too often produced children destined for early death or permanent illness. “I am the mother of a family,” she declared to the judge. “I am defending the birth of healthy children.” Lamenting the misfortune of a family that had lost four of its eighteen children, she assured the judges that “before these four coffins, none of you could have claimed that it was not a crime to conceive children who were condemned to death before they were born.”46
As working-class women had no access to the services that were provided to wealthier women by private doctors, the large families of the poor came to symbolize class injustice. Delegates to the annual conference of the British Labour Party in 1924 insisted that women of all classes were entitled to contraceptive advice and demanded that such advice be made available in publicly financed health centers (a demand that was fulfilled in 1929). “We stand for the woman who is very poor,” declared Mrs. Hagger, a delegate from Epsom, “and who is unable to get the information that she may desire.”47 The Swedish activist Elise Ottesen-Jensen traveled through the rural northern section of the country giving lectures on birth control and fitting diaphragms. She justified her work as a benefit to the mother who was “always in agony because she was afraid that she must give life to a new, unwelcome being who might burden the family still further.”48
One problem with this rhetorical strategy is that it seemed to call for a reduction of numbers among the poor, but not among the rich. It might therefore seem to support a variety of right-wing agendas—racist population policies, class snobbery, conservative opposition to the expansion of public social services. Left-wing birth controllers took care to point out that family limitation was not a desirable end in itself, but a means of coping with adverse circumstances. They urged nations that were threatened by population decline to encourage the poor to have more children by creating services for mothers, children, and families. The corollary of this argument was often that a state that provided such support could expect mothers to reciprocate by increasing birthrates: “First protection for mother and child— and then increased birth-rates,” demanded the German socialist Adele Schreiber. “First housing and food—and then large families!”49 Dora Russell saw the problem with these arguments, which turned women’s freedom of choice from an individual right into a temporary expedient. “Even if we lived in Buckingham Palace,” she said, “we would not want a baby every year.”50
Arguments for birth control as a remedy for poverty supported a highly important cause—the provision of contraception through public services. Nonetheless they were unconvincing. The uncomfortable fact was that birth control was much less frequently practiced by the poor and sick than by the healthy and prosperous middle classes, who were perfectly able to produce large and flourishing families but simply chose not to. “The tendency to refuse the maternal role is steadily increasing,” wrote the German socialist Alice Ruhle-Gerstel. “And birth control is particularly popular among the classes that are not affected by poverty.”51 Did women whose health and economic status fitted them for motherhood have an obligation to produce children? Feminists, who often shared the obsession of their contemporaries with the dangers of population decline, sometimes passed harsh judgment on people who were in a position to have large families, but chose not to. The French feminist newspaper La Frangaise condemned such couples—“their materialism is shocking.”52 Maude Royden, a well-known British suffragist and theologian, likewise affirmed that all healthy women wanted to have children, with the deplorable exception of those who were “too idle, cowardly, and selfish.”53 Though she affirmed women’s right to choose, Dora Russell nonetheless saw childbearing as an important moral commitment.54 “Some may find it hard to understand my passionate involvement, almost intoxication, with the idea of children as the future of mankind,” she wrote. “Bertie and I, for all the individualism of our personal lives, were inspired by an abiding sense of responsibility to humanity.”55
But the definition of reproduction as a service that women owed to society, the nation, or even “humanity”—an exalted term which in practice could only mean the state of which the prospective children would be citizens— lost some of its credibility in the interwar era. Feminists in all the belligerent countries had vainly hoped that peace would bring a reorientation of state population policies to serve human rather than military needs. “We stand for a population policy, but not one that uses mothers as instruments of the arms race,” said Gertrud Baumer, a leader of the liberal German Democratic Party and the long-time editor of Germany’s foremost feminist periodical, in 1919, “but one that protects, cares for, and strengthens existing life.”56 But the rebirth of militarism in a new and virulent form disappointed this hope. In 1933, in a political atmosphere now saturated in the aggressive and racist rhetoric of the Nazis, Baumer defended the private sphere of the family against governmental intrusion and insisted that “the will to reproduce is a matter for the individual, not for the state.”57
In the campaign organized by German left-wing parties for the legalization of abortion, which reached its peak in 1931, antimilitarism was a dominant theme. The German Communist Party struck a new note with a slogan— “Your body belongs to you”—which bypassed all instrumental arguments to affirm reproductive freedom as an individual right. Of course, this slogan sounded strange when it came from people who took their orders from the rulers of a totalitarian state where abortion rights had already been limited and would soon be utterly abolished. But this was nonetheless an effective propaganda tactic that drew huge numbers of women to the cause.58 The theme song of the antiabortion campaign—a poem by Bertolt Brecht that was set to music by Hanns Eisler—bitterly mocked the ideology of patriotic motherhood by placing it in the mouth of a heartless physician who says to his destitute and unwillingly pregnant patient,
You will be a lovely mother, that’s for sure,
And you’ll send some cannon-fodder off to war.
You’re a woman—it’s your fate,
To have babies for the state.
So don’t argue—it’s too late,
We’ll have no more fuss and bother!
Just shut up and be a lovely little mother.59
Feminists across the political spectrum responded with increasing skepticism to the tributes to patriotic mothers that became ever more frequent with the heightening of military tensions. In the 1920s, a “Mother’s Day” holiday was sponsored by conservative groups in Germany and Austria and celebrated with patriotic ceremonies. Glad as she was to see mothers recognized, wrote Henriette Herzfelder in the journal of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Osterreichischer Frauenvereine), she doubted the sincerity of such tributes in a state where most mothers were still the poorest and most oppressed of all citizens.60 In 1920, as they formulated the draconian law against abortion and the sale of contraceptive devices, French legislators also created the “Medal of the French Family” (“Medaille de la famille frangaise”) which was awarded in bronze to mothers who had five to seven children, in silver to those who had six to ten children, and in guilded silver (vermeil) to those who had ten or more.61 In 1938 a sentimental monument showing mothers mourning their fallen sons, was dedicated in Paris to the “sublime mothers” of France. The editorial writers of La Frangaise rejected these tributes from a government that still denied women the right to vote. “Alas for peace!” they exclaimed in 1938. “Don’t be so sure that these mothers won’t respond with raucous indignation, ‘Children? Cannon fodder? No, thanks.’ ”62
The rise of Nazism and Fascism, which promoted motherhood through a combination of thumping propaganda and coercive legislation, exacerbated these fears. From Italy, the British feminist Cicely Hamilton reported that “the aims of Fascism, where women are concerned, are conservative: the life domestic, a husband and a home, and children, future citizens of Italy, the more the better! Give her these, and she has all the interests she needs, and likewise does her duty by the State.”63 Winifred Holtby noted that the “cult of the cradle” transcended national boundaries. “In Italy, in Germany, in Ireland, and in France today fecundity is revered as a patriotic virtue. Babies are potential citizens and potential soldiers. . . . The mother who fills the cradle enables her sovereign to rule the world.”64 Virginia Woolf warned in 1938 that in Italy and Germany, the “monster” of male supremacy had come “more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions not only between the sexes, but between the races.”65 Reacting to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Sweden’s representative to the League of Nations’ Social Committee, the feminist and politician Kerstin Hesselgren, asked “how could women wish to bear children in a world that is so hopeless, so insecure! I have heard numbers of women say this.”66
Austrian socialists ridiculed the Nazi schools for mothers where lessons in racial dogma and in knitting baby clothes were combined.67 Austrian
Catholic women criticized the Nazis’ exaltation of motherhood on religious grounds—Catholicism, which venerated the Virgin Mary and respected the celibate as well as the married state, did not reduce the value of the individual woman to her sexual and reproductive functions.68
But were there more constructive ways for the state to encourage parenthood? To devise a democratic approach to natalism was the aim of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the authors of a controversial book entitled Crisis of the Population Question (Kris I befolkningsfraget) who in 1935 were appointed by the Swedish government to its prestigious Population Commission. The Commission’s charge was to recommend policies to reverse the trend toward small families and low birthrates—a trend that the Myrdals and many others believed was a threat to the survival of the Swedish nation.69 Alva Myrdal, who was influenced by the feminist birth control advocate Ada Nilsson, rejected the crude French natalist measures as well as most of the even more tyrannical laws passed by the German government since the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The decision to bear children, she insisted, was intensely private, and could no longer be swayed by “exhortations to duty, to patriotic glorification, or religious obedience.”70 Nor should a democratic government engage in coercion: the Population Commission recommended that existing laws that restricted the sale of contraceptives be repealed, that family planning services should receive public support, and even that abortion should be legalized under some circumstances. But the Commission called on the state to encourage childbearing through positive measures such as the creation of state-subsidized housing designed to accommodate large families, recreational facilities for parents and children, medical services for mothers and babies, and affordable day-care that enabled mothers to pursue career or volunteer interests. Alva Myrdal also urged state educational institutions to encourage a positive attitude toward marriage, childbearing, and the family.71 Some of these measures—including legalized birth control, legalized abortion under certain conditions, welfare payments to impoverished mothers, and public housing for poor families—were passed by the Swedish parliament in 1937-38.72
This program met with a very mixed public response. Although Myrdal herself emphasized the differences between her own version of natalism and that of the Fascist nations, her colleagues in the Social Democratic Workers’ Party were not entirely convinced. They expressed considerable aversion to governmental involvement in reproductive decision-making. “No dictatorship, no children on command!” responded one woman to a poll conducted by the Party. “An attitude toward life which disregards the well-being of people and which focuses instead on fulfilling a debt to society cannot be accepted by Social Democratic women,” insisted another. “We must decide by ourselves whether we want children and how many we want.”73
The interwar years saw the growth of a stubborn individualism that resisted even benevolent attempts to regulate reproduction in the interests of society or the state. Most feminists, as we have seen, viewed this trend with ambivalence, for they still regarded motherhood as a right and duty of citizenship. But their resentment of the heavy hand of the state eventually brought many to question this notion. A few openly made the libertarian claim that the only guide to reproductive decision-making was to the individual’s own conscience. Among these was the British journalist Stella Browne, one of the few activists in that country who openly advocated the legalization of abortion as well as of access to birth control. “Apart, however, from the present laws and customs affecting women,” she wrote in 1917, “the fundamental question arises, whether maternity can ever be a duty towards any outside entity—state, individual, or deity. I deny that it can.”74 In 1935, still undaunted, she said that abortion was an “absolute right” that should be “available for any woman. . . For our bodies are our own.”75 Another libertarian was the French physician Madeleine Pelletier, who became a victim of the repressive French laws when she was convicted of performing abortions and confined to an insane asylum in 1939, where she died in the same year.76 “The prohibition of abortion is an attack on the human individual,” declared Pelletier in 1930. “For if we have any property, it is our bodies. Society has a claim to those assets that are in a certain sense public, but our bodies belong to us alone.”77