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 volunteers of the Red Cross that “women can give children to the fatherland. . . it is up to her to make up for all our losses, and. . . to ensure the survival of the nation.” Like war itself, childbirth was a life-threatening ordeal in which eligible citizens had no choice but to engage: “The entry of a new citizen into the world is a bloody battle,” continued Dr. Sellheim, “in which women are often wounded, sometimes fatally.”81 An influential pamphlet by two French physicians stated in 1918 that women who shirked their duty “to have babies, to have babies, always to have babies” did not deserve the name of citizen.82
Underlying such shrill and desperate exhortations were fears of a crisis in civilian morale. The fall in birthrates, which in Britain declined by 26 percent, in Germany by 52 percent, in France by 38 percent, was due not only to the absence of fathers, but perhaps also to the conscious refusal of parents to bring children into a world of poverty, uncertainty, and violence.83 According to the historian Belinda Davis, working-class Berlin women who struggled to survive amid shortages so “resented the notion, spread by some private organizations, that the mother of many young children contributed more to her country’s needs and that she should therefore be rewarded for her efforts” that they contested the need of such families for increased rations. Women who became pregnant under these circumstances were deemed “selfish and suspect.”84 In 1915, Margaret Llewelyn Davies remarked on a “current of general opinion which is among the working classes, resulting in the refusal to have children,” which she called “a kind of strike against large families.”85 Evelyn Greville Warwick, a British feminist and social reformer, noted ominously in 1916 that the war had “left in the hearts of the survivors so vivid a sense of the horrors of life that many a man will hesitate to become a father lest his sons have to take their place in time to come on the fields of war and his daughters chance to be among the dwellers in a conquered city.”86 Fearing a renewal of the “birth strike,” governments in all three countries resorted to coercion as well as to positive incentives. Both the natalist legislation itself and the ways in which feminists responded to it differed in Britain, France, and Germany.
Even in wartime, natalist pressure was not nearly so strong in Britain as on the Continent. An act passed in 1915 mandating the reporting of all births and stillbirths to local medical officers was designed to control abortion.87 Most feminists argued, as they had in the prewar period, that childbearing might indeed be encouraged, but could not be compelled. The physician Mary Scharlieb testified before the National Birth Rate Commission in 1916 that measures to prohibit the sale of contraceptives, though perhaps desirable, would be ineffective. “I think that we must try to educate the conscience of the nation—try to make them understand that they are committing racial suicide—try to make them willing to have children.”88
According to the British historian Jeffrey Weeks, both the knowledge and the use of contraceptive technology increased during the war—a trend influenced by the publication of the Women’s Cooperative Guild’s volume Maternity.89 The working-class mothers who contributed to this volume were strongly committed to the care of their children but angrily resisted involuntary childbearing. Many complained of forced motherhood under conditions of domestic slavery. “I cannot tell you all my sufferings during the time of motherhood. I thought, like hundreds of women do today, that it was only natural and you had to bear it. I was left an orphan and, having no mother to tell me anything, I was quite unprepared for marriage and what was expected of me,” wrote one, “I often think women are really worse off than beasts.” Another reflected that “when you have got an unkind husband it is a terrible life.”90 And they resisted coercion by the state as well as by husbands. “Preventives are largely used,” reported one. “Race suicide, if you will, is the policy of the mothers of the future. Who will blame us?”91 The modern woman, wrote the pacifist Helena Swanwick in 1915, felt the need “to be a complete person,” and would resist pressure, whether religious, legal, or social, to spend “all her best years in incessant child-bearing.”92
In France, a committee composed of physicians nominated by the Commissioner of Public Assistance proposed new laws that sharpened the penalties for performing, seeking, or advocating abortion and for the spread of information on contraception—a proposal that became the model for a law that was finally passed in 1920.93 Caught up in the wartime emergency, some prominent feminists supported these coercive measures. In 1916, a new addition to the already large number of natalist organizations, the League for Life (Liguepour la Vie), included the feminist leaders Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger and Cecile Brunschvicg along with some prominent male politicians in its executive committee. Schlumberger, herself the mother of six children, was the head of a large organization, the French Union for Woman Suffrage (Union Frangaisepour le Suffrage des Femmes, or UFSF).94 In the mainstream feminist newspaper, La Frangaise, she declared in an article of 1916, entitled “The Distinctive Duty of Women,” that “mothers owe service to the country just as do soldiers on the front,” and that “any young married people in good health who refuse to give a child to France in the first year of peace should be considered deserters.”95
The historians Karen Offen, Anne Cova, and Paul Smith place this statement in the context of a resurgent campaign for woman suffrage, which in the form of a municipal franchise or a “familial vote” seemed a political possibility. The “familial vote” would have given the parents of large families additional votes, and feminists hoped that mothers as well as fathers would be thus enfranchised.96 Was Schlumberger’s patriotic stance part of a “deliberate political trade-off,” asks Offen, and was “reproductive servitude the ultimate price of women’s admission to French citizenship?”97 Although not all feminists agreed with Schlumberger, wartime censorship—which penalized any support of birth control or family limitation—prevented the open discussion of her position.
German feminists, and especially those of the mainstream League of German Women’s Associations (BDF) have often been stereotyped as fervent nationalists.98 But although many agreed with their French counterparts that childbearing was a service to the nation, as a group they proved more resistant to natalist pressures. German feminists of all political persuasions objected to the exploitation of motherhood in the service of militarism. Gertrud Baumer, who in addition to her position as the leader of the National Women’s Service was the editor of the best-known German feminist periodical, Die Frau, argued in 1916 that reproduction was indeed a form of public service, but a voluntary one that the state could not compel. “People, who belong to us, are our greatest wealth—in the end, the only wealth that we possess, and there is nothing greater than to give life to another person.” Pointing to women’s protests against wartime hardships, she characterized sinking birthrates as an expression of “pessimism about the future,” and concluded that only “the belief in social justice” could restore “the courage required for parenthood.”99 The failure of Germany’s natalist associations— unlike those of France—to put women in prominent roles left them vulnerable to criticism. In 1916, Helene Lange commented on the inaugural meeting of one such organization, the Society for Population Policy (Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungspolitik) that it was “very strange” that “in a matter in which nature has given women a not inconsiderable role. . . they are allotted only token representation.”100
In Germany, three laws—one that strengthened penalties for abortion, a second that forbade all advertisement or sale of contraceptives, and a third that tightened control over prostitution and the reporting and treatment of venereal disease—were introduced in the Reichstag in 1918.101 In a resolution passed in the same year, the BDF endorsed some clauses in the new laws, including the criminalization of abortion and the prohibition of the door-to — door peddling of contraceptives. But the resolution objected to any total ban on the sale of contraceptives: “in the interests of many families who are under economic pressure, and to protect women, we should not prohibit the restriction of births. Therefore, in our opinion the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of contraceptives goes too far. The means of preventing both venereal disease and conception must be available in apothecary shops, drugstores, and shops that sell medical supplies.”102
In October of 1918, the collapse of the German army on the Western Front and the prospect of an armistice initiated a period of political change, marked by the appointment of a new Chancellor, Max von Baden, and the first steps toward the liberalization of the monarchy. In this freer atmosphere, feminists of all political persuasions spoke out against “compulsory childbearing” (Gebarzwang). The socialist women’s groups organized protest meetings against a state which (as the socialist women’s newspaper, Die Gleichheit, put it in October of 1918) “forces you… to bring as many children as possible into the world, by depriving you of the only harmless means of deciding for yourselves how many children you want to have.”103 In an article entitled “Coercive Population Policy,” Baumer declared “with a feeling of painful humiliation” that there was “no area of legislation. . . in which it is more woefully apparent to women that laws are made for them without consulting them or even taking their viewpoint into account.”104 The proposed laws were, in fact, never passed, for by the winter of 1918 the Imperial government disintegrated under the impact of defeat, and the successor regime, the Weimar Republic, inaugurated a less coercive population policy.105
The cult of militarized motherhood also demanded of mothers, as of draft boards, the selection of the healthy. In Britain, where military service did not become compulsory until 1916, grief for a “Lost Generation” expressed a popular belief that the war had claimed a disproportionate number of upper-class young men—seen through the lens of nostalgia and class prejudice as the best, healthiest, and brightest.106 Some medical authorities feared that the removal of these men from the gene pool was a threat to the nation’s future. “Some of us are trying to encourage the men to marry before they go,” testified a prominent physician and eugenicist, Caleb Saleeby. “I am doing so for the definite eugenic end, as they are the pick of our men.”107 Marie Stopes agreed: the heroine of her play, The Race, warned that if “all the fine, clean, strong young men. . . who go out to be killed should leave no sons to carry on the race” then the next generation would be bred from “the cowardly and unhealthy ones.”108
During the war years, public health authorities urged mothers to avoid the production of unhealthy children who, like these unfit fathers, would burden society. An exhibition held in Dresden in 1916 included both advice on children’s health and warnings against “irresponsibly produced children.”109 Alarmed at the prospect that returning soldiers would spread venereal disease, public health authorities in the belligerent countries proposed new measures directed against women, including stiffer controls on prostitutes.
By contrast, feminists emphasized men’s share of the responsibility for spreading disease. School-based sex education gained more public support; for example, in Britain the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease recommended the teaching of “the laws of moral hygiene” in all “types and grades of education.”110 The push for voluntary or compulsory health certificates for married couples, reinforced by the passage of such a measure in Sweden in 1915, also continued. In France, the premarital health certificate was advocated by the prominent anti-prostitution activist Marcelle LeGrand Falco. But the physician Blanche Edwards-Pilliet considered that such a requirement would be ineffective, and argued instead for an intensive program to educate young people of both sexes on the danger of venereal disease.111
In Germany, representatives of the League for the Protection of Mothers and of the socialist women’s groups attended a meeting held in 1917 under the auspices of natalist organizations such as the Society for Population Policy (Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungspolitik) and the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassehygiene). Along with many other participants, they advocated premarital health examinations chiefly in order to protect the health of women and their children from infection by diseased men. Some female delegates also appealed to women’s own sense of responsibility by insisting that the health examination should be required of brides as well as bridegrooms. But the Ministry of Health looked unfavorably upon any measure that would cut back on the number of marriages and births, and endorsed only a recommendation that a leaflet on the dangers of hereditary disease and the importance of wise mate-selection be distributed by local marriage offices. This became law during the Weimar Republic.112
Maternalists often claimed that motherly concern for children was a universal emotion that knew no distinction of class or nationality. But in wartime, tenderness was out of fashion. Whereas the child—or at least the healthy child—of the nation was regarded as a priceless resource, the child of the enemy could be seen as a hated invader. In January 1915, French newspapers reported that many pregnancies had resulted from rape by German soldiers during the invasion of Belgium and northern France in the previous autumn. According to these same reports, a Belgian priest had dramatically abjured Catholic doctrine and exhorted the victims to emulate Herod’s massacre of the innocents: “Let no impure blood corrupt the purity of your veins. … I give you absolution before God and men.”113 Incitement to abortion and infanticide was repudiated by the Catholic press but taken up by nationalist propagandists. If their mothers killed these children of rape, wrote the eminent journalist and novelist Maurice Barres, “what jury would condemn them?”114
The response of French feminists to these reports was so deeply divided that the editors of both the mainstream paper, La Frangaise and the left-wing La Bataille Syndicaliste opened their columns to debate. What to do with the “children of the enemy”? On the one hand, the victims of rape excited sympathy and outrage. On the other hand, many correspondents remarked that those who advocated the termination of these pregnancies were hardly concerned about the women—in fact, they were among the most fanatical opponents of abortion or contraception under other circumstances. Rather, they were motivated by sheer, murderous hatred for the enemy.
And could a child be the enemy? Some readers clearly thought so. “France should get rid of everything German,” stated a letter to La Frangaise in 1915. Some feminists took advantage of the crisis to break taboos that forbade the advocacy of abortion. “Don’t you think that, in such cases, abortion is not a crime but a duty?” wrote a correspondent who pitied the mother who held “the child of the foreigner at the breast in the place of a French child.”115 No mother, wrote the lawyer Maria Verone, should be condemned to such a “horrible maternity”; nor, according to the feminist Camille Belillon, should she be regarded simply as a “baby mill.”116
But the editor of La Frangaise, Jane Misme, held to her maternalist position that mothers and children deserved respect and help, whatever their circumstances. “It is with all the strength of my maternal instinct that I speak,” she wrote, “to defend, here and everywhere, the mothers and children who are treated as outcasts.”117 Misme asserted that the conservative men who exploited the victims’ plight for propagandistic purposes were hypocrites, for they had never objected to marriage laws that produced countless “legitimate” children of rape.118 When spokesmen for the government affirmed that these children, if abandoned by their parents, had the same right to foster care as all needy children, Misme asked how they would be treated by foster families who might well know or suspect their origin.119 Likewise Marcelle Capy, a socialist reporter for La Bataille Syndicaliste, condemned the “utter hatred” expressed in letters to the editor, and affirmed her faith that “women, whatever their nationality, have stayed close to their nature, and could thus never reject an innocent, newborn life. . . Have women become just like men, for whom the law of guns and executioners is supreme?”120
The visceral hostility to the “children of the enemy” was reinforced by racist theories that the genetic quality of the French population was threatened by this infusion of inferior German blood. But some feminist authors, especially those who advocated a matrilineal family structure, insisted that the child of a French mother was French, whatever the father’s nationality might be. In one of the many fictional accounts of this dilemma, the husband of a raped woman decided against killing or abandoning the child and resolved that: “we will make him into a good Frenchman, and that will be our revenge.”121
How could a mother love such an unwanted child? In order to explain this, the mother-child relationship had to be divested of its moral and spiritual content and recast as a purely visceral and instinctive bond. The child-welfare activist and pacifist Madeleine Vernet portrayed a fictional rape victim, Marthe, who was determined to abort, kill, or abandon her child. But when she saw the baby’s face, she felt “the call of the flesh, which affirms life and existence. . . Sublime, unchanging, is maternity not its own reason for existence, and is it not sufficient in itself?”122 However, such maternal instincts were clearly not universal. In 1917, the servant Josephine Barthelemy was tried for the murder of her newborn infant. Although she declared herself innocent of murder, she claimed to have been the victim of rape by German soldiers. In a decision supported by public opinion, she was acquitted.123
Among the psychological effects of the war was to continue the destruction, well under way in the prewar years, of the Victorian ideal of the mother as pure and altruistic “angel in the house.” For the wartime mother lived independently, did the work of a man, protested raucously in the streets, and often refused her traditional burden—in the words of the British pacifist Maude Royden, the bearing of children into “a world so unready for them.”124 And all mothers were not the loving, compassionate, and responsible beings that some prewar feminists had made them out to be. Indeed, many shared in wartime hatreds that could include even newborn babies among the enemy.