In her international best seller, The Century of the Child, Ellen Key pro­claimed the “right of the child to choose its parents.”97 Key and others claimed that traditional religious morality had sacrificed the health and well­being of children as well as women to the Moloch of patriarchal marriage. The “new morality,” she said, “must deem […]

The ideology of the citizen-mother was based on a kind of social contract, in which women’s provision of citizens to the state was rewarded by the grant­ing of political rights and various kinds of support. In the immediate prewar years, feminists objected that the state had not fulfilled its side of the bargain. Some called […]

In the first years of the war, most feminists in all the belligerent countries affirmed that motherhood was a form of national service. “We will be the mothers that the fatherland needs!” wrote the German socialist Henriette Furth in 1915. Women’s groups of all shades of opinion greatly expanded their charitable work for maternal and […]

In the prewar era, feminists had compared motherhood figuratively to military service. In wartime, metaphor became reality. As military casualties mounted, patriotic physicians abandoned any pretense of concern for indi­vidual mothers or children, and insisted on production at any cost. In 1916, the German physician Hugo Sellheim declared in a lecture given to the female […]

But a minority of pacifists in all countries still held up the mother as a symbol of love, compassion, and nonviolence. Aletta Jacobs (since her marriage Aletta Jacobs Gerritsen), who was president of Holland’s Association for Woman Suffrage, summoned women who wished to “protest together against the horrors of war” and perhaps even to “find […]

What was the effect of the wartime experience on the culture and politics of motherhood? Prewar feminists had aspired to two ideals of the post-patriarchal family: one centered on the independent mother and the other on the egali­tarian two-parent household. The wartime experience, though it seemed to reinforce the first model, actually tilted the balance […]

At the close of the war, feminists hoped for peace not only in international but also in gender relations, to which wartime had brought so much tension, disorder, and conflict. Sometimes, a return to nurturing motherhood was proposed as a remedy. Amid the revelry that marked the signing of the Armistice, the British suffragist Catherine […]

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 […]

The struggle to improve the legal status of the mother in and outside of marriage faced new obstacles in the interwar years. The process of reform that had begun in the prewar era produced some results, but its momentum was reduced in some countries and halted in others. We will first look at changes in […]

“A home without a mother is like a body without a soul,” declared the manifesto of the French Women’s Civic and Social Union.87 The mother at the hearth became an icon of the interwar era—a sentimental image that served powerful material interests. Although they showed signs of recovery in the mid-1920s, the postwar economies were […]