“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 unstable. Rates of unemployment fluctuated until their rise in 1929-30 signaled the onset of the greatest crisis as yet experienced by Western capitalism, the Great Depression. Women could hardly be blamed for rising rates of male unemployment. Their removal from their wartime jobs had restored the gender segregation of the labor market, and few competed directly for male jobs. The employed woman was nonetheless a useful target for anger that might otherwise have been directed against governments, politicians, and trade-union leaders.
Although this attack was aimed at all working women, married women were singled out for special forms of discrimination. For while public opinion accepted the employment of the unmarried woman—though of course at a lower level than a similarly qualified man—the married women could be portrayed as fully occupied in the home. And her occupation was defined as motherhood. The notion that motherhood was a job—in fact a service to the state—that might deserve compensation had been developed by feminists and other progressives in the prewar era. Now it was co-opted in many countries to serve anti-feminist agendas: not only reduction of the female workforce but also population policies that assumed that full-time mothers were more fertile than their employed counterparts. Natalist groups, which gained greatly in influence in the interwar years, often urged their governments to offer cash subsidies for childbearing—a measure that was designed to compensate families for mothers’ lost wages and thus deter them from working.
Feminists recognized the trap that had been set for them. In 1917, the British socialist Wilma Meikle had already warned that the return of peace would also bring back “the Great Domestic Cant of Good Wifehood and Good Motherhood.”88 The German legal expert Camilla Jellinek observed in 1921 that “sometimes you hear people say very frankly that women should stick with their natural function, having children, and everything else is superfluous and harmful.”89 In 1923, the editorial board of La Frangaise complained of a tide of reactionary propaganda that defined the position of women as “the home and the pedestal. . . the home where they want to imprison women. . . the pedestal where they want to put her.”90 But an opposing strategy was difficult to devise. Feminists could not afford to affirm domestic motherhood, for this would betray the core constituency of professional and white-collar workers who because of their privileged status were often selectively targeted for dismissal. To allow these women to be sent home against their will would be to reverse gains made over an entire century of struggle for professional opportunities. But still less could feminist organizations afford to make the employed mother into a role model, for this might offend the majority of mothers who did not wish to work outside the home. The only solution was to break down the dichotomy between domesticity and employment by claiming that these were not rigid opposites but flexible options. Full-time domesticity, full-time wage work, or some combination of the two—all might be appropriate choices for the individual mother.
The British “family endowment” controversy showed that keeping the mother’s options open was a complex task. Eleanor Rathbone, who had headed the Family Endowment Society during the war, became the president of NUSEC in 1919. Along with her colleagues Elinor Burns, Mary Stocks, Maude Royden, and Kate Courtney, Rathbone was convinced that wartime dependency allowances payable directly to mothers had improved the standard of living and the morale of working-class families, and argued for the retention of these subsidies in peacetime. Motherhood, Rathbone argued, was a job much like any other—indeed, in some cases “a career in itself.”91 It differed from other skilled work chiefly because it provided “no money remuneration for the mother’s task, no guarantee of her maintenance while she performs it, and… no consequential relationship recognized by society between the quality and quantity of her product and the quantity and quality of the tools and materials that she has at her disposal.”92 Such work deserved a salary, or “family allowance,” which Rathbone envisaged as a subsidy for each child under five—whether raised by taxes or by insurance was left open.
Rathbone insisted that she had no intention of driving women from the workforce, and that on the contrary her proposal would improve the position of the working mother. She argued that it was unfair to stereotype the breadwinning role as male, for the many women who also supported dependents were as much in need of a “family wage” as men. Rathbone—a Fabian Socialist who believed in the power of social engineering to solve the most intractable of social problems—claimed that a shift in the responsibility for supporting children from the family to the state would invalidate the chief argument for gender discrimination: the belief that men needed more money because they were family breadwinners. She added that the mother’s entitlement to the allowance should not be predicated on her employment status; indeed “independent minded women” who were “not fitted by temperament for an exclusively domestic life,” might use some portion of the allowance to pay for child-care while they worked outside the home.93
Rathbone was well aware of the danger that subsidies for childbearing might put pressure on women to bear more children. But natalism found much less support among British elites—who tended to see reproduction among the poor chiefly as a drain on the welfare budget—than among their continental counterparts.94 Rathbone appealed to these attitudes by insisting that the allowances would bolster the status and self-respect of poor women and thus actually increase their ability and motivation to limit births.95 The illegitimate child’s entitlement, she suggested, should be contingent on the parents’ willingness to “stabilize their union”—a conservative stance by comparison to that of many continental feminists who defended the rights of the unmarried mother.96
After this proposal was included in NUSEC’s program in 1927, some members resigned and joined another feminist organization, the Six Point Group, whose doctrine of gender equality opposed any stereotyping of women as mothers.97 Too narrow a focus on maternity, these dissidents objected, obscured the larger issues. “The equalitarian knows that it is not maternity in itself which is the disability,” wrote Elizabeth Abbott, “it is the horribly low and unequal status of woman, the everlasting conception of her as a means to an end instead of as an end in herself, that makes not only maternity but sometimes every hour of a woman’s day a disability.”98 Along with activists of all nations, some of these women joined The Open Door International, an organization founded in Berlin in 1929 in order to defend the increasingly threatened rights of women in the workforce. “A woman, irrespective of marriage, parenthood, or childbirth, should have the right at all times to decide whether she should engage in paid work,” read this organization’s charter. “A free race is not born of slave mothers.”99
Though family endowment received the support of the major British socialist women’s organization, the National Conference of Labour Women, in 1922, other working-class women demurred. Married working women often feared that the subsidies might be used as a reason to dismiss working mothers from their jobs. Housewives, who contrary to Rathbone’s assumption usually controlled a considerable portion of their families’ budgets, often believed that the family was already a partnership and were suspicious of state inter- vention.100 Major opposition came from the male trade unions, who feared that the provision of family allowances would be a substitute for pay raises. When the Labour Party decided not to support family allowances in 1929, the discussion came to an end, and was not resumed until World War II.101
French feminists also worked toward a flexible definition of the maternal role that valued mothers’ work both in and outside the home. In France, where wartime losses had deepened the obsession with population growth, subsidies for child-rearing were supported across a political spectrum that ranged from religious conservatives to communists.102 Since the 1890s, some companies and governmental agencies had supplemented wages with child allowances that were normally payable to fathers. In 1919 the National Council of French Women enlisted women in the “struggle against depopulation,” and called for improved child welfare services and aid to large families. But, like their British colleagues, they insisted that there were many ways of mothering and defended the right of all women, regardless of marital or parental status, to employment opportunities and equal pay.103 Some feminists were highly skeptical about the consequences of payment for childbearing, chiefly because most of the proposals designated fathers, rather than mothers, as the recipients. The socialist Madeleine Vernet protested that childbearing should not become a commercial operation, but should be regarded as “an affair of the individual conscience.” Vernet called for a more general state “endowment” of all women from the age of twenty—a provision that she insisted must not release men from the obligation to support their children.104 The Estates General of Feminism, a meeting that included many organizations, endorsed child allowances in 1929.105
Because the 1920s was a decade of low male unemployment in France, opposition to the work of married women did not become serious until the onset of the Great Depression in 1931. But as unemployment figures rose, public opinion turned against married female workers. Natalist propaganda, which was widely distributed in schools, churches, and places of employment, portrayed the working mother as a sinister vamp who was willing to sacrifice the welfare of her children and her country to her own selfish ambition.106 In 1932, the Catholic women’s groups founded a new organization, the League for the Mother at Home (Ligue de la Mere au Foyer) to promote full-time motherhood. Though opposed to a legal ban on married women’s employment, this group proposed a supplemental allowance to nonworking mothers as a kind of maternal salary that might induce them to leave the workforce. “There is no better way of honoring the mission of the mother,” proclaimed the Women’s Civic and Social Union.107
Amid this hostile atmosphere, liberal and socialist feminists moved toward a resolute defense of the rights of all women, including wives and mothers, to accept employment. To be sure, they differed on the extent of such rights, for only a minority supported Open Door International, which militantly opposed all legislation designed to protect mothers by regulating their hours and working conditions. But they asserted not only that that the mother’s wages—particularly in homes where the father might be unemployed—were often necessary to her family’s survival, but that the mother’s employment often enhanced her own and her family’s well-being.108 “It is not the constant presence of the mother that ensures the good upbringing and education of the children,” declared an editorial in La Frangaise. “It is the spiritual and emotional character of the mother—and of the father, let’s not forget his responsibility! . . . With the support of the school, the worker or civil servant can give the state both male and female citizens that are just as valuable as those produced by women who limit themselves to the domestic sphere.”109
In 1938, the decades-long debate on family law and population policy culminated in the appointment by the government headed by Edouard Daladier of a Commission on Population, which produced a new code of family law (Code de Famille) in 1939. Strongly influenced by the religious groups, the Code introduced governmental child allowances that were payable only to parents who were married. A supplementary payment was allotted to mothers who did not have paying jobs, and remitted directly to them. Mothers received a special subsidy for a first child born within two years of the couple’s marriage but only on the condition—to be certified by public child-welfare authorities—that they cared for their children properly. Starting with the third child, allowances were paid to the family breadwinner—if both parents were employed, to the father in recognition of his status as “head of the family.”110 Partly because of the unified opposition of women’s groups across the political spectrum, no law that forbade married women to work was passed.
By contrast to French and British feminists who supported both child allowances and women’s employment rights, feminists in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden took a much more negative view of state payment for childbearing. In these countries, family-allowance schemes had little support from progressive or left-wing forces. Instead, they originated on the political right and were clearly intended to support new forms of discrimination against married women workers.
In Germany, family allowances were advocated chiefly by an organization known as the League of Large Families (or Bund der Kinderreichen), which had close ties to the conservative parties and to the Catholic Center Party. Like the French natalist organizations, this group aimed to maintain patriarchal family structure as well as to build population by making governmental child allowances payable to male breadwinners. Although many right-wing women, including the members of the conservative housewives’ associations (Reichsverband deutscher Hausfrauenvereine) supported these measures, most liberal and socialist feminists opposed them. Several delegates to the General Meeting of the BDF in 1924 pointed out that subsidies payable to fathers discriminated against single women who were breadwinners and subverted the important principle of equal pay for equal work.111
Gertrud Baumer, who during the Weimar era served as a liberal delegate to the Reichstag as well as the editor of the BDF’s journal Die Frau, was one of many feminists who appropriated the language of eugenics and population policy to defend women’s right to employment. She claimed that cash incentives might damage population “quality” by encouraging imprudent reproduction, and that improved housing and education would protect children better than cash subsidies for childbearing.112 Socialist women took a similar approach. The aim of population policy, said the prominent socialist intellectual Henriette Furth, was “not to bring about an increase in births, but to take care that only healthy and strong children are born and that all conditions for a favorable environment are created and guaranteed.”113 At its annual congress of 1929, the BDF divided on the issue of family allowances.114 Baumer conceded to her opponents in the housewives’ associations that such allowances might be necessary in the existing dire emergency, but insisted that the “motivation and the will” to childbearing should under most circumstances be left to the individual, not manipulated by the state.115
Amid the economic crises that threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic, right-wing politicians attacked the right of married women—so-called “double earners”—to employment. This attack targeted the small female elite of civil servants whose rights to tenure and retirement pensions were coveted by men. The Constitution of 1919 had guaranteed equal access to all governmental positions and had specifically invalidated all the laws that had previously required women to resign such positions when they married.116 But like many of that constitution’s provisions, this one was ineffective. In 1925 a temporary austerity measure required the dismissal of female (but not of male) civil servants when they married. Policies that required teachers to leave their jobs when they married also continued in force. The women’s professional organizations contested several dismissals in court on constitutional grounds, but did not succeed in changing the law.
In 1932, when the Great Depression had reached catastrophic proportions— in that year, 43 percent of the German workforce was unemployed—a so-called Double Earner Law (Doppelverdienergesetz) was introduced into the Parliament (Reichstag) that permanently invalidated the constitutional protection of female civil servants from dismissal upon marriage. In opposition to this law, the BDF moved beyond practical arguments to defend the rights of working mothers as individuals. “Our nation is not well served when capable workers are replaced by those who are less capable. And it is an injustice to working women not to recognize that they regard their profession not only as a means of financial support, but of giving meaning to life by the expression of their talents.”117 But the opposition ended in disunity and defeat. The liberal feminist deputies and organizations were abandoned by the women delegates of both the socialist and the conservative parties, who in solidarity with their male colleagues endorsed the bill. When a major women’s professional organization, the Union of Post-Office and Telegraph Workers, opted for a compromise solution (a partial payout of their pensions upon dismissal), liberals gave up a resistance that now seemed futile.118
In Austria, as in Germany, a series of legislative proposals targeted married women in the workforce. The National Association of Women Employees (Reichsverband weiblicher Angestellter), which was led by single civil servants, favored the removal of their married competitors.119 But other women’s groups joined the opposition. The solution to working mothers’ “double burden,” declared an editorial in the socialist periodical Die Frau in 1931, was to provide benefits such as guaranteed maternity leave and day-care centers, not discriminatory employment policies.120 The mainstream League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Osterreichischer Frauenvereine) warned its members in 1933 that a proposed “Double Earner Law” (Doppelverdienergesetz) placed “all of the achievements of women over the past two decades” in jeopardy.121
Two Austrian Catholic organizations—the Catholic German Women’s League (Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund) and the Catholic Women’s Organization (Katholische Frauenorganisation)—joined liberal and socialist groups in defending the rights of married women. The Catholic women agreed that the dismissal of married women—who in fact were often breadwinners—undermined rather than supported family life. They also insisted that the loss of married female teachers and social workers would be a great misfortune to a society that could not do without their wisdom and experience. And they were repelled by the glorification of motherhood—now pervaded by National Socialist racism—above all other professional, educational, and spiritual aspirations. The coalition of Catholic women’s and professional groups did not succeed in defeating the Double Earner Law, which was passed in 1934, but they continued to protest it. On the Mother’s Day holiday in 1936, the Catholic groups and the Archdiocese of Vienna sponsored a day-long meeting for mothers who were employed.122
Dutch feminists opposed state subsidies for parenthood, which in the Netherlands as in Germany were supported by right-wing and religious groups that aimed to reinforce the father’s position as head of the family. In 1920, liberal and socialist feminist organizations formed a “Committee of Action against the Family Wage” (Comite van Actie tegen Gezinsloon). The Dutch Women’s Organization warned that any such scheme might give the state too much control over family life and childbearing—a fear that was justified in a country where Catholic and Protestant religious parties dominated politics. The feminist leader Wilmoet Wijnaents Francken — Dyserinck even charged that payment for children might incite marital rape by fathers greedy for state subsidies.123 But this opposition was unsuccessful: a “Child Allowance Act” (Kinderbijslag), passed in 1939, provided for family allowances payable to fathers and excluding “illegitimate” children.124
In 1937, a legislative initiative by a Catholic-dominated government to ban married women from many workplaces aroused the concerted opposition of a wide spectrum of Dutch women’s organizations, which founded the Committee for the Defense of the Freedom to Work for Women and the Committee on the Dismissal of Married Women in the Civil Service. In order to discredit the widespread stereotype of the working mother as a ruthless egotist, the latter committee designed a questionnaire to investigate female civil servants’ reason for working. The results showed that these women’s work, which often supported children, parents, and disabled husbands, was the mainstay of their households.125 Because of the fall of the government in 1939, the measure was never passed. In neighboring Belgium, a similar coalition of feminists and trade unionists defeated legislative initiatives that would have denied civil service positions to married women.126
Swedish feminists were even more successful in defending the right of married women and mothers to paid employment—a success that was due both to their skillful tactics and the favorable climate in which they worked.
As in other countries, the controversy centered on the very small group of married women who held desirable jobs in the civil service. As Silke Neunsinger has shown in her comparative study, political, social, and gender conflicts were far less bitter in Sweden than in Germany. A smaller percentage of Swedish wives worked for pay (9 percent in 1930, compared to 34 percent in Germany) and overall rates of unemployment in Sweden, even at the height of the Depression, were much lower (22 percent in 1932, and 43 percent in Germany). And unlike Germany, where the Depression years saw political polarization, the breakdown of parliamentary government, and the rise of the Nazi dictatorship, Sweden was governed by a worker/populist alliance of the Social Democratic and Agrarian Parties. In the 1930s, Swedish socialists shifted their emphasis from class struggle to national unity, picturing the nation as the “People’s Home” (Folkhem), where all citizens were valued and cared for.127
But even in this relatively benign environment, opposition to the employment of married women in the civil service was strong, and by 1934 thirteen legislative initiatives calling for their dismissal had been brought before the national parliament (Riksdag).128 The self-interest of male civil servants was embellished by nationalist arguments that the employment of mothers outside the home reduced birthrates and threatened the nation’s future development.
A more positive perspective on the work of married women was created by Alva Myrdal, who would later become the best-known Swedish woman of her era. In her life and in her work, Alva Myrdal confronted the maternal dilemma. When Alva Reimer, who was born in 1902, married the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in 1924, she envisaged their marriage as an intellectual as well as a romantic partnership. After her marriage she continued her studies, almost completed a doctoral degree in child psychology, and gained prominence as an educator, author, and social reformer. But the arrival of three children in 1927, 1934, and 1936 plunged her into a severe conflict between her commitments to maternity and to these professional interests. Perhaps partly for this reason, she always emphasized parenthood and child-rearing as central issues for the state as well as the family. In 1934, she and her husband addressed an important social issue in a book entitled Crisis in the Population Question (Kris I befolkeningsfraget). The wide attention given to this controversial book made its authors—both of whom belonged to Sweden’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti)—into public figures. In 1935, Gunnar Myrdal was appointed as Secretary of a government-appointed Population Commission, and Alva Myrdal as a consultant on parental education. Alva Myrdal was also appointed to a governmental commission on married women’s work. At this stage of her life, Alva Myrdal identified herself more as a socialist than as a feminist. But she was deeply influenced by two prominent female parliamentarians— Kerstin Hesselgren and Elizabeth Tamm. Both women were members of an independent feminist group that met at Fogelstad (Tamm’s estate) and was well known for its positions on women’s employment, birth control, legalized abortion, and a number of other issues.129
Alva Myrdal and her political allies avoided confrontational tactics and adroitly manipulated dominant political concerns to address the rights and needs of women. Drawing on the Myrdals’ recent book, they warned that the prevailing trend toward low marriage and birthrates might eventually produce a sparse and aging population that would be unable to maintain the nation’s cultural or economic vitality—a fear that was shared by the Population Commission. The female delegates rejected the solution proposed by right-wing parties—cash incentives for childbearing—and objected that such handouts would be of no help to the unemployed and would depress wages, alienate labor unions, and encourage childbearing for the wrong reasons.130 They also flatly contradicted the familiar argument that married women’s employment lowered birthrates. On the contrary, they asserted that the prohibition of married women’s work could only discourage marriage and motherhood by depriving couples of the woman’s income, which was often needed to support a new household. Alva Myrdal reinforced economic with eugenic arguments, predicting that these misguided prohibitions would deter ambitious and intelligent women from marrying and thus exclude the most “qualified” group from motherhood. Realizing that natalism had more popular support than feminism, the Committee defended “the right of the working woman to marry and have children” rather than the right of the married woman to work.131 Swedish feminists also cleverly appeased their opposition by protesting that the number of female civil servants was too insignificant to threaten the job opportunities of men.
These tactics were not original—they had been employed by feminists elsewhere—but the success that they gained was unique. Swedish feminist groups such as the Frederika Bremer Association (Fredrika-Bremer forbundet) joined labor organizations to stage protests against the firing of married women, and a women’s political party, the Women’s List (Kvinnolistan), gave a prominent place in its platform to women’s rights in the labor force.132 And the result was the passage of a law in 1938 that prohibited the dismissal of women workers on account of marriage. Other legislation of the 1930s created a benefits program that included grants payable to mothers to cover the expenses of childbirth, public housing made available to large families, and governmental loans to newly married couples. The latter measure, which except for the absence of racial and political discrimination resembled a similar law that had recently been passed by the Nazis in Germany, was proposed by right-wing delegates and not endorsed by Myrdal and her associates.133
However precarious and limited its success, the defense of the rights of the married woman worker was important. In other countries, where feminist and trade-union movements were abolished by totalitarian governments, women workers were defenseless against male backlash. In Italy, Mussolini’s regime excluded women from most forms of professional employment, including many teaching and civil-service jobs, paid family allowances and marriage benefits to fathers, and trumpeted the slogan “Women go home!” (“Le donne a casa”).134 In Germany, the National Socialist regime dissolved all independent groups, including the League of German Women’s Organizations and the League for the Protection of Mothers, and organized women in a party affiliated umbrella group known as the National Socialist Women’s League (Nationalsozialistisches Frauenwerk). The Nazi government took over the discriminatory laws that had been passed during the Weimar period and added some new ones, such as quotas on the admission of women to universities, expulsion of women from certain professions, loans to married couples that required the wife to resign her job, and family allowances payable to fathers. Some of these measures were modified a few years later when unemployment figures decreased and women were needed in the workforce to replace men in military service.135
Less tyrannical but equally anti-feminist was the government of Ireland, where an independent republic (Eire) succeeded the Irish Free State in 1937. A women’s movement that had been active during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and had won the suffrage in 1918, had fallen into decline in the 1920s. Women politicians devoted their energies to mainstream national politics rather than to women’s issues, and did not openly object to discrimination against married women workers.136 The so-called Marriage Bar of 1929, which required female civil servants and local government workers to resign their jobs upon marriage, was institutionalized by a new Constitution passed in 1937. This Constitution stipulated that “the state shall . . . endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obligated by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.”137
In many ways, feminism declined in the 1930s. Amid the economic and psychological stresses of the Great Depression, the membership of the liberal and socialist groups dwindled. But as the historians Marjan Schwegman and Jolande Withuis have pointed out, this era was also marked by the forging of new coalitions and a vigorous defense of the rights of women to combine motherhood and employment.138 And this struggle was not merely defensive, but showed important changes in views of motherhood, citizenship, and women’s choices. In the prewar era (as we have seen in chapter 3) many feminists agreed with the highly influential Ellen Key that paid work outside the home for mothers was a “waste of women’s energy,” and that motherhood was or should be the married woman’s full-time occupation. The working mother was usually portrayed as a downtrodden victim of poverty and exploitation, and a truly fulfilling combination of career and motherhood was a utopian aspiration. But by 1940, most feminists regarded the combination of motherhood and a career outside the home as an option that every woman should be able to choose. To be sure, the emphasis was still on elites, chiefly on a small group of white-collar workers and professionals. The narrow focus on this group was chiefly due to the fact that they were singled out for discrimination, but class prejudice also played a role. “During the first third of the century,” recollected the British activist and author Vera Brittain, “the only support usually available to working wives was that of organized women, who repeatedly called attention to the ‘dysgenic’ effect of marriage-bars upon a society where the number of children produced by healthy, intelligent and disciplined mothers was already far too few.”139 Some feminists, however, vindicated the right of all citizens to realize their potential through work as well as love. “Democracy calls for the development of all talents, and the encouragement of all initiatives,” wrote the French lawyer Yvonne Netter. “And does activity not bring happiness?”140
But in the hostile atmosphere of the 1930s, the working mother could not look for much social support. She could claim only the freedom to find a personal solution. “Certainly, the combination of marriage, job and motherhood causes serious problems,” conceded the German socialist Adele Schreiber, “but it is up to the woman herself to find a solution that suits her own conscience and abilities.”141 In the concluding chapter of her book, Nation and Family, Alva Myrdal warned that the maternal dilemma could not be solved by individual efforts—it was a social problem that required a social solution. “The risk is great,” she continued, “that society will proceed so slowly in solving these problems of woman’s existence that new and even more desperate crises may invade the whole field of women, family, and population.”142 One of the prerequisites for a successful solution was the freedom to control reproduction in order to synchronize maternal and career commitments. And this will be the theme of chapter 7.
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