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 configuration composed of breadwinner and full-time mother was now presented both as pleasing to God and as highly beneficial to children. In 1937, a series of articles in the newspaper of the French Catholic organization, The Women’s Civic and Social Union (L”Union feminine civique et sociale) contrasted the healthy and well-disciplined children of the housewife-mother with the neglected brood of the career woman. “When these babies [of the housewife] are adults,” concluded one such article, “they will owe their sense of responsibility and their motivation to do their duty, come what may, to a woman who sacrificed herself for them day in and day out just because she was their mother.”68 This organization cited the results of research that showed that most employed mothers worked only out of economic necessity and would gladly quit their jobs.69
As we have seen, feminists faced both theoretical and practical difficulties in formulating an effective answer to such arguments. Some, to be sure, still rallied behind the socialist ideal of collective child-rearing as a means both to the support of working mothers and the socialization of children. Alva Myrdal, who knew that her own decision to hire a full-time governess was beyond the means of most women, campaigned along with her colleagues in the socialist women’s groups for public day-care in Sweden.70
Some socialists even praised the Soviet Union, where this ideal seemed to be on its way to realization. Dora Russell, Madeleine Pelletier, Helene Stocker, Beatrice Webb, and many others traveled eastward to observe the new society, and especially its educational institutions, firsthand. But despite many positive impressions—even the enemies of the Soviet Union, wrote Dora Russell, had “to admit the loving care which the Russians give to their children”—most were troubled by the regimentation and conformity that pervaded the Soviet child-care centers.71 The notion that the child belonged to the state, though popular in the prewar era, had been discredited by the experience of World War I. “Children belonging to society!” exclaimed Vernet, “the rule of the barracks!”72 States that “educate and prepare their human material for starvation, slavery, and slaughter,” wrote Dora Russell, were “not to be trusted with our children.”73
Unlike these socialists, whose attitude was ambivalent, liberal feminists were thoroughly horrified by Bolshevism and reacted by defending the family, which with all its faults now seemed a bulwark of civilized values. For the German liberal politician and feminist leader Gertrud Baumer, the home preserved the “orderly rhythm of life, the feel for connection and structure” that were the basis of all social morality.74 The British theologian and peace activist Maude Royden rejected the notion of motherhood as “a mere episode—the birth of the child—followed by its rearing in some Utopian nursery or co-operative creche,” and declared that the “factory-made child” was even less satisfactory than other mass-produced items.75 Aspirations to fully socialized child-care were deflated by the political controversies as well as the financial crises of the interwar era.
But while affirming the importance of strong familial relationships, both liberal and socialist feminists questioned the necessity for the mother’s constant presence. They pointed out the real difficulties of raising children in the home—an environment designed to suit the comfort and taste of adults. Mothers who prided themselves on giving up their jobs and becoming fulltime homemakers, said the French socialist Marguerite Martin in the socialist periodical La Voix des Femmes (The Voice of Women), often actually mistreated their children by punishing normal childish rambuctiousness because it endangered the household furnishings.76 Children were too often punished for the mistakes of adults, lamented Adele Schreiber, who deplored the plight of the only child—“spoiled and at the same time deprived of real happiness,” burdened by the emotional demands of adults, and vulnerable to “all forms of nervousness and neurosis.” Schreiber’s remedy: “This child belongs in a kindergarten!”77
This period’s most influential preschool educator was the Italian educator Maria Montessori, whose “Children’s House” (Casa dei Bambini) was designed to be a child-centered and child-proof educational environment. In the interwar era, Montessori enjoyed international prestige, and was invited to many countries to give lectures and training courses and to visit the many nursery schools that used her system.78 Montessori declared that children’s right to grow “according to the laws of their nature” was violated by adults who treated them as “something inert and helpless for which they must do everything.” In the conventional home, she wrote in 1936, parents who did not want to be “disturbed or annoyed” attempted to confine and restrict the child “until he reaches an age when he can live in the adult world without distress. . . prior to this, he has to obey the parents like a person deprived of civil rights.”79 The Children’s House provided a more enabling setting for children’s growth, work, and activity.
As we have seen, the Children’s House was originally intended to contribute to a project that was popular in the prewar era—the creation of cooperative households. In the interwar years, this project found little support. To be sure, those paragons of progressive thought, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, worked with an architect, Sven Markelius, to build an apartment house with a central nursery in Stockholm, which opened in 1932. But few people in Sweden—least of all the Myrdals themselves, who designed their own beautiful villa—or in other Western countries found the communal life appealing.80
But its separation from its original, utopian context probably increased the appeal of Montessori’s system to educators in many countries. In Vienna, a group of young socialist women led by Lili Roubiczek, a Montessori student, founded a nursery school for poor children which they called a Children’s House (Haus der Kinder) in 1922 and persuaded the city’s socialist government to include similar facilities in new public housing projects. The new system gained the support of the well-known psychologist Anna Freud (daughter of Sigmund), who later praised the Children’s House as the seed-bed of adult autonomy: “for the first time, not the praise or disapproval of adults, but joy in the success of one’s own work came into its own as a suitable impetus.”81 In Amsterdam, likewise, a group of teachers pioneered the Montessori method, which was later adopted by many Dutch public schools.82
Although Montessori and her colleagues identified themselves more as educators than as feminists, the system was praised in the feminist press. Madame Montessori, observed an editorial in the British feminist periodical Time and Tide, recommended “that every mother should be freed from the incessant care of the home for some part of each day. . . . The Children’s House not only relieves the mother of the care of the child while she is at work, it also awakens her to a higher sense of responsibility.”83
But attempts to expand early childhood education beyond these private institutions failed. In Germany, socialist educators campaigned to make kindergarten classes a part of a comprehensive and secular public school system open to children of all classes and religions. But at the Imperial School Conference, held in 1919, the socialists were overruled by their conservative and religious colleagues, who voted to keep kindergartens in private hands.84 In Britain the very limited increase in the number of public nursery schools, from fourteen in 1919 to twenty-eight in 1929, was due (according to the historian Kevin J. Brehony) both to budgetary constraints and to “the patriarchal view that the best place for young children was at home with their mothers.”85 France had a public system of early childhood education, the Ecoles Maternelles (founded by the educator Pauline Kergomard in the 1880s), but according to the feminist newspaper La Frangaise, these institutions were underfunded and inadequate, their hours were too short to serve working families, and their teachers often lacked training.86 And in Sweden, a parliamentary initiative by socialist women to gain public support for a national system of nursery schools failed in 1937.87
The failure to build public institutions was not only due to insufficient financial resources, but to a widespread belief that the raising of small children should be entrusted to the mother herself. And this view was held by a large group of women, including not only religious conservatives but also socialist feminists such as Madeleine Vernet. Vernet based her hopes for peace and the reconciliation of social conflicts on the mother-child relationship, which despite her knowledge of psychology she still believed to be the only source of tenderness in a mechanized and impersonal world. She hoped that women’s claims to political and social equality would strengthen, rather than weaken their commitment to motherhood. Though a strong supporter of equality in marriage, she opposed full-time work for mothers.88 “A woman owes nothing to her husband, even the sweetness of home—she gives it to him if she chooses. But she owes a nest to her little one.”89
But Vernet’s views were so controversial among her readers that in 1926 she opened the pages of her journal to their responses. Many readers agreed with Vernet, particularly working-class women who were more likely than their middle-class counterparts to view work outside the home as a burden. But other correspondents objected that child-rearing did not require the vigilance of the mother hen: “real affection,” wrote one reader, “is not a function merely of constant presence, but it resides in the invisible links that unite human beings.” Surely, the new household technology would lighten the burden of domestic work and give women the time to develop their individual interests. And thus “this heartbreaking problem, which sets her maternal heart against her conscience, will cease to exist, because her life will be a harmonious whole, in which each of her great duties—conjugal, maternal, and human—will be able to be completely realized.”90
In the hostile climate of opinion created by the economic crises of the interwar era, feminists in many countries defended the compatibility of career and motherhood. Negative stereotypes of employed mothers and their neglected children were counteracted with positive pictures of the working mother as the mainstay of her family. “Women’s work is ceasing to be provisional,” wrote Adele Schreiber, “Economic circumstances often require both parents to work. And the more important her professional work is to a women, the less inclined she will be to give it up.”91 Feminists also cited changing demographic patterns: in periods of high birthrates and short lives, a woman’s entire adult life might well have been occupied with the care of dependent children, but now the period of full-time parenthood had decreased as life expectancy had lengthened.
And thus arose a new problem: how to fill the so-called empty years? A contributor to La Mere Educatrice pointed out that maternity, though the noblest of callings, “does not take up the whole life of woman,” who after the child-rearing phase could return to “the place in society that she has never really left.”92 Doctor Houdre-Boursin, the author of popular French advice literature on maternity and child-rearing, advised that children should be raised at home until the age of three or four, “but when they start school, and the mother has free time during the day, then why not contribute her skills to society?”93 Dora Russell developed an ambitious life plan for the mother of the future: “the ideal would be for a woman to continue her education at least till eighteen, have her first child at twenty-four, then perhaps three others at two-year intervals. … At thirty-five every mother of four children would, in a community of good schools, convenient houses, and well-run restaurants, be free to take part again in public life.”94 Winifred Holtby held up her own mother, a local politician, as a paragon of post-parental independence. “I can visit or leave her without compunction, knowing that she has her life to live as much as I have mine.”95
But all this was more easily said than done. Vera Brittain, who in 1926 married George Catlin, a professor at Cornell, remarked that “my life with G. had raised in acute form the much-discussed issue so tritely summarized as ‘marriage and career.’ ” When her career as a journalist failed to thrive in Ithaca, Brittain decided on what she called a “semi-detached” marriage and spent half of every year in London. She bore two children and tried to continue her writing. “My life has been nothing but the two children,” she wrote to George, “with intervals of spasmodic effort to keep my end up in the world of journalism.” When her autobiography, Testament of Youth, was finally completed, she exulted: “How wonderful it was to have produced such a large book and brought up John and Shirley, too!”96 Dora Russell, who bore four children (two by Bertrand Russell and two by another partner), realized in 1931 that she was “a very different person from the young woman to whom having a baby had been an inconvenient interruption to intellectual life. … I had become a professional mother-figure.”97 And despite her success and prominence, Alva Myrdal felt confined by her familial responsibilities. “Since she wanted to combine home life, marriage and children with other significant work, she felt increasingly underutilized in her work capacity,” wrote her daughter. “. . . Already she was surprised by her lot and somewhat dissatisfied with it.”98 To whom could these overburdened mothers turn for help? Perhaps to the fathers of their children?