The matriarchal theories of this era have often been attributed to a mere sentimental nostalgia for an era of female rule.106 But on the contrary, their impact was energizing. To be sure, the debate on the origins of the family reached no definitive conclusions—it produced a multiplicity of discourses, both feminist and anti-feminist. However, the […]

The Law of the Father If the fields of history and anthropology offered examples of strong and inde­pendent mothers, then feminists could hope that the maternal dilemma was not a permanent aspect of the female condition, but might be someday be resolved. The first step toward raising the status of mothers was to change the […]

“Despoiled of her noblest prerogatives and deprived of all rights over the fruits of her womb, who legally belong to the father. . . the lowest and most pitiable of slaves.”19 The words in which the socialist activist Nelly Roussel described the legal status of the French wife and mother could have been applied to […]

However disadvantaged the position of the married mother, she was fortu­nate by comparison to her unmarried sister. “An invisible mark of disgrace, inflicted upon them by an unjust and harsh morality, divides them from the others,” remarked the German social reformer Adele Schreiber of unmarried mothers. “Ashamed and humiliated, they must defy all natural laws […]

Love and Work Legal equality was an important goal, but it meant little without economic independence. Mothers who depended on their male partners for their own subsistence and that of their children could hardly develop into autonomous individuals or responsible parents. Though women’s dependence and domes­tic servitude were age-old problems, the new century brought the […]

Advocates of women’s emancipation challenged virtually all conventional notions of female difference, whether of physical strength, intellectual acuity, or emotional stability, that were invoked to bar women from various kinds of work. During the prewar era, the British Olive Schreiner claimed for women “our share of honoured and socially useful human toil, our full half […]

In 1895, the Swedish author and activist Ellen Key gave a lecture entitled “The Misuse of Women’s Energy” before several women’s groups in Sweden. Key struck a sensitive nerve when she charged women with misusing their newfound emancipation in a futile struggle to imitate men while denying the deepest needs of the female personality. “For […]

Both proposed routes to economic independence—employment and endowment—rested on some of the same highly untraditional assumptions. Mothers were to be independent of male breadwinners and the state was assigned some functions that were traditionally performed by the family. And advocates of employment and endowment alike insisted that motherhood was now a phase in the life […]

Legal equality, economic independence—these were indispensable bases for the reconstruction of motherhood on the basis of gender equality. But even the achievement of these ends could not relieve a still more basic form of servitude. “For what is poverty, what is all the misery of industrial exploita­tion,” asked the leader of the League of German […]

Despite the taboos on women’s knowledge and discussion of sexuality, the right of women to decide on the number and timing of pregnancies was advocated in most feminist groups by 1900. As Carol Dyhouse points out, the topic was usually placed in the general context of “feminine autonomy within marriage and of mutual desire and […]