From N ecessityto Choice During the interwar period, some feminist movements shifted their attitude toward birth control from skepticism to support. In societies that were only beginning to realize the extent of wartime casualties, this alliance of feminism and birth control could arouse both anxiety and misogyny. A popular novel by the French author Clement […]

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 […]

Should reproductive decisions be left entirely to the individual? How could the mother’s right to self-determination be balanced against the right of the child to be born healthy—as Ellen Key had put it, the “right of the child to choose its parents”? As we have seen from an earlier chapter, the eugenics movement gained many […]

The resistance to eugenic and natalist legislation eroded the conception of motherhood as a public service and made way for a more individualistic view of reproduction. Birth control literature affirmed parental desire as the most important reason for childbearing. The first right of all babies, stated Marie Stopes, was “to be loved before birth as […]

Killing the “A ngel in the H ouse” In 1911, Ellen Key called the mother-child bond the purest of all human relationships and motherhood “the most perfect human condition, where happiness consists in giving and giving is the greatest happiness.”1 But inter­war authors emphasized the darker side of mother-love, often picturing mothers as the enforcers […]

As in the prewar era, social scientists of the interwar era turned to the origins and history of the family for answers to questions such as these. Two theories still competed for legitimacy, one of which claimed that both families and states had originally been mother-headed, and the other that some form of recognized fatherhood […]

Feminists of the interwar era had high hopes that a new scientific under­standing of childhood would transform the practice of motherhood. The British novelist Winifred Holtby, for example, rejoiced that “during the past twenty years children in Europe and America have been considered, propiti­ated, indulged and studied as perhaps they never had been before.”43 But […]

As we have seen from previous chapters, public debates on the maternal role were driven by economic concerns. As women were blamed for taking jobs away from men, powerful groups opposed the employment of married women—an opposition which they justified by pointing to the importance of the mother’s full-time presence in the home. A family […]

Child-rearing, said the German socialist leader Clara Zetkin in 1906, “must not just be the work of mothers, but the common work of parents.”99 But in the writings of feminists of the prewar era, such positive views of the father’s role were few. Indeed, campaigners for the legal right of mothers to con­trol their children […]

The reception of psychology hastened the decline of maternalism and its exaltation of mother-love as a benevolent force in the family and society. For feminists this trend had mixed consequences. On the one hand, the tendency to make mothers responsible for all of the problems of society fueled the backlash against feminism, and could justify […]