Most famous of the vamps was Monique, the heroine of La Gargonne (The Bachelor Girl), by the French novelist and sex reformer Victor Margueritte. An instant publishing sensation in 1922, the novel sold a million copies by the end of its first decade in print, and was translated into many languages.10 Monique rejected an arranged marriage and set out on a “bachelor” life, complete with career, lots of wild partying, and affairs with glamorous partners of both genders. But lest the novel subvert its own moral by making its wayward heroine seem enviable, the author cursed her with sterility. After an abortion, Monique found herself unable to conceive, and reflected sadly that “she had won nothing beside her freedom. Her work? What good was it, if it only fed her loneliness? … If no child was to be given to her, what was there left?”11 As Mary Louise Roberts remarks, Monique was the female counterpart of the impotent or emasculated male veterans who wandered helplessly through postwar fiction.12 And the solution to this anguish was marriage, for when she found a sympathetic husband and gave up her misguided independence, Monique’s fertility was miraculously restored.
The reconstruction of the family was also a central concern of the national community. Governments faced with the task of reintegrating returning veterans into society and reversing wartime declines in birthrates promoted marriage and family stability. The constitution of the German Weimar Republic devoted a clause to the family: “Marriage is the foundation of family life and of the preservation and increase of the nation, and stands under the protection of the constitution.”13 The French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, declared in 1919 that although the Versailles treaty did not specifically “stipulate that France undertakes to produce a great number of children,” nonetheless “that should have been its very first article, since. . . France will be ruined because there will not be any Frenchmen left.”14 The Swedish Minister of Social Affairs wrote to a newly appointed Population Commission that “measures will have to be instituted to encourage marriage. . . and the bearing of children.”15 The concepts of “marriage” and “family” were widely debated and took on a broad range of meanings.
One influential familial ideal was promoted by religious and right-wing women’s organizations. In Germany, conservative religious women organized in the German Evangelical Women’s League (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund) and the Catholic Women’s League (Catholischer Frauenbund) .16 In France, Catholic women united in the National Union for Woman Suffrage (Union Nationale pour la Vote des Femmes), the Women’s Civic and Social Union (Union Feminine Civique et Sociale), and French Women’s Catholic Action (Ligue Feminine d’Action Catholique Frangaise). By 1937 these groups together claimed a membership of two million women, far surpassing the liberal National Council of French Women (Conseil National des Femmes Frangaises), whose membership declined from about 300,000 members in 1926 to about 200,000 in the 1930s.17 Large Catholic organizations, including the British St. Joan’s Society and the Dutch Christian Women’s League (Christen-Vrouwen-Bond), were formed in all countries with substantial Catholic populations.18
The Catholic groups took as their guide the papal encyclical Casti Connubii, which when promulgated by Pope Pius XI in 1930 became the era’s most influential religious statement on family life and sexual morality. The Pope denounced the false doctrine that “the wife, being freed from the care of children and family, should, to the neglect of these, be able to follow her own bent and devote herself to business and even to public affairs,” and lamented “the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian.”19
But despite its wide appeal, this religious ideal of the family was by no means uncontested or even dominant among Western Europeans during the interwar years. Another major development of this period was the increased influence of socialist women’s groups, such as those that developed within the British Labour Party, the German and Scandinavian Social Democratic Parties, and trade-union movements everywhere. These working-class women, who sometimes cooperated with liberal feminists, rejected religious doctrines of male supremacy and based their definition of the family on a comradely relationship between husband and wife. Partly in order to distance themselves from the Russian Bolsheviks, who were reputed to have socialized women as well as other means of production, democratic socialists disavowed radical doctrines of “free love” and lauded the joys of monogamy. For example, the German socialist periodical Die Gleichheit (Equality), aimed at a working-class female readership, extolled marriage as “the intimate spiritual comradeship of two equal partners.”20
This ideal proved to be extremely popular. During the interwar era, the spread of moral values previously professed chiefly by the middle class to the working-class majority increased the popularity and prestige of marriage.21 Dismal predictions that the wartime holocaust of men would produce a generation of lonely widows and wild bachelor-girls were not fulfilled. In fact, the rate of marriage increased in most European countries. For example, whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century about 80 percent of British women had married by age fifty, by 1940 the proportion was about 94 percent.22 In Germany about 55 percent of all men and 53 percent of all women were married in 1910; by 1939 these figures had risen to 63 percent and 58 percent.23
At the same time, attitudes toward marriage became more individualistic. Divorce rates (still very low by contemporary standards) doubled in Germany and Sweden and increased fourfold in Britain.24 Divorce changed the lives of some prominent feminists. The French Marcelle Kraemer-Bach married at the end of the war, and divorced a year later. “The ecstatic adolescent was dead,” she wrote. “There I was, ruined by my husband, with a baby in my arms, facing reality and forced to reinvent myself.”25 Both Kraemer-Bach and another divorced Frenchwoman, Yvonne Netter, became prominent lawyers.26 The German social worker and politician Else Ulich-Beil was the mother of two sons when her husband demanded a divorce in 1929. “I put the divorce decree in my drawer. And there, unread, it burned in 1944.”27
Gender roles in marriage were understood as complementary, and many wives aspired to a domestic existence occupied by housework and childrearing. Working-class women were even more likely than their middle-class contemporaries to rejoice in domesticity and to consider employment outside the home as, at best, a necessary evil.28 Housewives’ organizations such as the National League of German Housewives’ Associations (Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine) and the Danish Housewives’ Federation demanded respect and financial support for the full-time homemaker.29 However, many married women continued to work outside the home, at rates that varied among nations. In Britain, married women were only about 14 to 16 percent of the female workforce; in France, however, half of all female workers were married in 1920.30 Around 1930, 29 percent of all married women were employed in Germany, but in Sweden only 9 percent, in Denmark 10 percent to 12 percent, in the Netherlands 10 percent, and in Ireland only about 5 percent held paying jobs.31 Two models of motherhood— one based on full-time homemaker status and the other on a combination of domestic work and employment—competed for legitimacy.
This era’s feminist organizations created their own approaches to marriage, the family, and parenthood. The leaders of the British National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), which succeeded the National Union of Woman Suffrage Societies, criticized the prewar suffragettes as mindless imitators of men, and called for a new respect for female difference. Though they continued to link motherhood to citizenship, the “new feminists” shied away from the exalted moral claims that had been advanced by prewar maternalists such as Ellen Key, and soberly defined motherhood as a job almost like any other. Not all British feminists supported the new ideology: an active and vocal minority founded an organization known as the Six Point Group to oppose what they considered a dangerous emphasis on gender difference at the expense of equality.
Feminists in other countries likewise affirmed motherhood as an essential task of the female citizen.32 They, too, shifted away from maternalist rhetoric to emphasize the couple or the family over the mother as an individual.
“Marriages have never been more numerous,” declared an editorial in La Frangaise, “Wherever there is a man and women who love each other, there is a family.” Warm and comforting images of family life expressed hopes for peace in a land ravaged by war.33 The pacifist Madeleine Vernet, who continued to publish her journal La Mere Educatrice (The Mother-Educator) extolled the family as the basis of social harmony. “The ideal for which we must strive,” she wrote, “is that of a man and woman who depend on each other, collaborating in two areas, family and society.”34 In Germany, the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine or BDF) stated in its program of 1920 that “as the highest and most intimate form of human community, the family must be the seed-bed of all spiritual development. The purity of family life is thus the basis of the health and strength of soci — ety.”35 And in Austria, an editorial in the socialist periodical The Worker (Arbeiterzeitung), proclaimed that the experience of motherhood and family life must provide the basis for a “human, comprehensible, real-life politics. Politics that lays hold of them (women) and that they experience first hand.”36
These moderate and family-centered programs are often interpreted as a sign of the decline of feminism and the blunting of its formerly militant message.37 But in fact, they sometimes provided powerful arguments for gender equality. The modern woman, feminists asserted, would never become a mother under conditions of subordination and economic dependency. The diversity of interwar women’s movements—which as we have seen contained a spectrum of political positions ranging from religious conservatism to socialist radicalism—made a unified approach to issues concerning marriage, work, and parenthood very difficult. As Anne Cova has remarked, leaders who tried to pull together these warring factions often walked “the razor’s edge.”38 Nonetheless when faced with a backlash against all the gains that women had made over the past decades, many interwar feminist movements moved from the conciliatory programs of the 1920s to a more militant defense of equality in the 1930s. And their struggle was not simply defensive, but also innovative, creating an image of the mother as both nurturer and worker which anticipated the “new feminism” of the second half of the century.