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 child welfare, now often with support from private donors and local governments. To name only a few examples: French women volunteered their services to the League to Combat Infant Mortality (Ligue contre la mortalite infantile), which sponsored urban pure — milk stations, child-care centers, and kindergartens; German groups from the radical League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund fur Mutterschutz, or BfM) to the conservative Patriotic Women’s Associations expanded their services to families; British volunteers worked with the Red Cross Society, the Belgian Refugees’ Fund, and the Soldiers and Sailors Dependents’ Fund to help women and children in need.36 When Italy entered the war in 1915, women’s committees in many cities cooperated under the leadership of a National Women’s Committee (Comitato nazionale femminile) to create childcare centers for working mothers and services for the children of soldiers.37
However, such charitable ventures were not sufficient to fill the immense need for social services. “The progress of the race,” wrote Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head of the British socialist group known as the Women’s Cooperative Guild, in 1916, “can best be served by raising motherhood to a position of power and equality, so that the rights of parenthood may be shared by both men and women. For this we shall find that comprehensive reforms are needed, which will entail national provision for the practical needs of motherhood and infancy, the wiping out of old laws, and the passing of others consistent with modern ideas.”38 In the wartime crisis, feminists developed a host of new arguments in favor of the reforms that they had advocated in peacetime.
For many decades before the outbreak of war in 1914, reformers had pointed out that the patriarchal laws of marriage, which condemned married mothers to subordination and unmarried mothers to destitution and disgrace, harmed children as well as mothers. And in wartime governments and opinion leaders hardly needed to be persuaded of the importance of preserving the lives of children. But the tradition of male supremacy in marriage was still strongly defended, and changes in the status of married mothers in belligerent countries were very limited. Among the most important was the French law giving mothers, who had been unable to make important decisions about their children during the prolonged absence of their husbands, the rights of guardianship over their children in 1915.39
The status of “illegitimate” children, who died at twice the rate of their legitimate age-mates, caused greater concern. Even Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, who before the war had left philanthropic concern for infant welfare to the Empress, wrote from his military headquarters to the Ministry of the Interior in 1916 that the health of mothers and children, and particularly of the illegitimate, must be given higher priority.40 However, even patriotic fervor could not overcome the traditional moral notion that any improvement in the status of unmarried mothers and their children undermined Christian marriage. Changes in these laws, too, were very limited.
At the outbreak of war, the German League for the Protection of Mothers submitted a petition to the Imperial government requesting that illegitimate children and their mothers be included in dependency allowances and survivor benefits, and that fathers in military service be allowed to marry and legitimate their children in absentia.41 These measures, which were also supported by other influential organizations, were passed. German policymakers also expressed a new concern about the high mortality rate among illegitimate children, and some supported legal reforms that the BfM had advocated for years, including the abolition of the provision known as the exceptio plurium (which exempted a putative father who could prove that others might have fathered the child) that made it easy for fathers to avoid support obligations. Helene Stocker remarked ironically that politicians were now enthusiastic about an agenda that they had ignored or reviled in peacetime: “the need for a comprehensive protection of mothers (Mutterschutz).”42 However, the continuing strength of conservative Christian groups prevented the reform of German laws on illegitimacy.43
The French government, too, passed measures allotting support payments to the unmarried partners of soldiers and their children, and permitting soldiers to recognize their children from the Front. In 1916, the French Chamber of Deputies approved legislation allowing such children to be legitimated after the deaths of their fathers so long as their mothers could present evidence of paternity. But this, legislators stressed, was a provisional measure for the duration of the war.44 In Rome, the National Committee for Legal Assistance to the Families of Service Personnel (Comitato nazionale per l’assistenza legale alle famiglie dei richiamati) campaigned successfully for the allotment of support payments to the children of unmarried parents and set up legal services to help soldiers and their partners regularize their unions and legitimate their children.45
The legal status of the “illegitimate” child also became a prominent issue in Britain, where before the war it had received less attention than on the continent. In 1915, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association, a private agency entrusted with the distribution of governmental separation allowances to the dependents of service men, held a public meeting to discuss a controversial proposal to include unmarried partners and their children in these benefits. The agency’s decision to pay allowances to unmarried parents who were in a stable relationship unleashed a national debate. Some argued that such a policy would encourage irresponsible female behavior and warned against the “excited and giddy girls” who “haunted the camps and caused mischief and scandal.”46 Others argued that these children were too important a resource to waste: “the mothers of our soldiers’ children,” said a Conservative member of Parliament in a letter to the editors of the Morning Post, “are to be treated with no scorn or dishonor, and. . . the infants themselves should receive a loyal and unashamed welcome.” They were, the speaker insisted, “the children of the state.”47
Children of the state? This indeed was one logical outcome of the argument that motherhood was a distinctively female form of military service. Some feminists affirmed this duty with enthusiasm. Among them was Marie Stopes, who during the war tried her hand at play-writing. The heroine of her play, The Race, published in 1918 (it was apparently never performed), defended her decision to bear a child by her soldier fiance. “My body serves my country, just as much as Ernest’s, only in a different way,” she told her horrified mother. “A soldier gives his body to death; a woman gives hers to bring life.”48 Emmeline Pankhurst offered to raise fifty of “the nation’s babies,” and actually adopted four. Her daughter Sylvia, a socialist, insisted that such vulnerable children should not be left “to the fluctuations and caprice of private charity,” and recommended that Britain should follow the example of Norway and raise paternal support obligations.49
But others found this affirmation of unmarried motherhood harder to accept. Some cited traditional moral standards. The Oxford undergraduate Vera Brittain, later to become a well-known author and reformer, confided to her diary that some offers of support were “so extremely favorable to the offenders as to encourage others to repeat the same sin, and thus undermine our whole social and moral structure.” As a more mature woman, Brittain regretted her youthful self-righteousness.50 Other opponents turned to more modern ideas, including the right of the child to a stable and loving home environment. In an editorial in the suffrage paper, Common Cause, Maude Royden approved the decision to support innocent and valuable children but deplored what she called “the temptations of militarism,” particularly “the most dangerous to women—the tendency to regard them merely as potential mothers of men.” Each child, she said, had the right to be born of “a faithful love. Its coming should be earnestly desired, looked forward to with joy, received with reverence. . . . And therefore a woman or a man who becomes responsible for the birth of a child from a passing emotion and evanescent passion. . . is an illegitimate mother, and an illegitimate father.”51
A campaign to revise Britain’s uniquely harsh law, which unlike those of the Continent forbade the legitimation of children even by the subsequent marriage of their parents, produced no immediate results. But in 1917, a new organization entitled the National Association for the Unmarried Mother and her Child was founded to advocate the improvement of the legal and social status of single-mother households.52
Before the war, feminists had been almost the only public speakers to take a positive view of the wage labor of mothers, which had been seen by others as an evil to be tolerated or prohibited. Under wartime conditions such work was widely acknowledged to be an urgent, though temporary, necessity. But how would women’s obligation to work affect their equally pressing obligation to reproduce? Governments now promised forms of support for working mothers that feminists had advocated, often without success, during the prewar period. Feminists hoped that this new assistance would ease the dilemma of motherhood and paid work. The Austrian Margarete Minor predicted that women’s wartime achievements would show, once and for all, that “the argument whether motherhood can be combined with professional work is outdated,” for “women have shown themselves capable and reliable in all manner of occupations.”53
In France, the gynecologist Adolphe Pinard, who joined the physician and reformer Paul Strauss in heading a governmental agency devoted to maternal and child welfare (Office central d’assistance maternelle et infantile), denounced “the factory, killer of babies” (“l’usine tueuse d’enfants”) and recommended that pregnant women and mothers of infants be barred from industrial work. But a panel of physicians drawn from the Academy of Medicine argued that work was not damaging to mothers and children as long as sufficient leave time and social services were provided to them. At its 1917 convention, the French League for Woman Suffrage recommended the extension of maternity leaves and the provision of child-care centers and nursing rooms in factories. In 1917, a law required factories that employed more than 100 women to provide an hour’s break each day and facilities for breast-feeding.54
The League of German Women’s Organizations (BDF) devoted its “Wartime Convention” (Kriegstagung) of 1916 to the theme of work and motherhood. Continuing this group’s long-standing support for women’s professional ambitions, speakers denied that career commitments in themselves weakened women’s “will to motherhood.” They insisted that, on the contrary, the patriotic woman worker wished to fulfill her “moral responsibility for reproduction,” but could hardly do so without social services including maternity insurance and public child care.55
Starting in 1914, private organizations, sometimes with aid from local or national governments, established new child-care centers, called “War Kindergartens.”56 In 1917 Marie-Elisabeth Luders, the prominent feminist who had been appointed the head of the National Committee on Women’s War Work (Nationaler Ausschuss fur Frauenarbeit im Krieg) drafted a set of guidelines which, had they been implemented, would have almost completely socialized child-care. Luders recommended that every locality should establish publicly funded centers which would be accessible to factories and open twenty-four hours a day. Younger infants, she specified, should be cared for in the mother’s workplace, and older children must be provided with free school meals and after-school care, also on a round-the-clock schedule. Always concerned to provide employment opportunities to educated, middle — class women, Luders was careful to specify that such institutions must be staffed by trained personnel.57 But by 1917 the desperate financial situation of national and local governments made such proposals thoroughly impractical. Only a small percentage of the children of industrial workers were cared for in public day-care centers, which were not popular among mothers.58 Luders complained constantly that the men who made social policy, including the staff of the War Ministry, lacked all “experience and training” on issues concerning child-care.59 The many frustrations that she encountered in her dealings with the military authorities led to her resignation in 1917.60
Luders was not the only reformer whose utopian hopes for the expansion of public child-care were disappointed. In Britain, Margaret McMillan, a child-welfare activist who was a member of the Independent Labour Party, had worked to improve preschool education since the 1890s, when she had campaigned for the provision of free lunches, health care, and baths for the children. She had opened her first nursery school for the children of workers in 1911. In 1916, she opened a new nursery school in Deptford, one of several that were funded for the children of munitions workers by the Ministry of Munitions. McMillan did not regard this and other nursery schools as a temporary expedient, but as a permanent part of the progressive society that she hoped would emerge from the war. “Why, we are asked, do we want nursery schools?” she asked. “Should not every mother take entire charge of her little ones until they are of school age?” This question, she pointed out, was asked only of working-class mothers. “The well-to — do mother never attempts to do it alone. She engages a nurse, perhaps also a governess… I don’t wish to continue the parallel. It is too cruel. The working-class mother in her home has no help at all.”61
McMillan, whose nursery schools provided baths and clean clothing, imagined that her well-scrubbed children would bring moral as well as physical regeneration to a world that was polluted by war, poverty, vice, and disease. Each afternoon, she recounted, “the gate of the Nursery opens and a troop of lovely children file out and pass, a river of beauty and grace, up the dim alley and across the public square flanked by public houses.” Despite their working-class background, McMillan claimed that these children were as healthy as “the well-groomed nurslings of Hyde Park or Mayfair.”62 However, most of the nursery schools founded in wartime hardly lived up to this prototype. They were understaffed, regimented, and institutional, and mothers were reluctant to use them.63 In 1918, an Education Act required support by local governments for these schools. But McMillan’s hopes for universally available early childhood education were disappointed, for by 1919 only fourteen nursery schools had been founded.64
Other feminist demands were also recast as patriotic responses to the wartime emergency. In Germany, the maternity coverage that had been added to the national insurance system in 1883 and expanded in the early twentieth century was further enlarged at the outbreak of war to provide coverage for an eight weeks’ leave to the dependents of service men and to guarantee several benefits that had been optional, including reimbursement for medical services and supplemental grants to mothers who breast-fed.65 Many women’s groups, especially those affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, called for an additional increase in the rate of coverage to replace the worker’s daily wage.66 In Britain, where the maternity benefits that had been passed in 1911 were minimal, the socialist Women’s Cooperative Guild and other groups called for a more comprehensive protection of maternal and infant health. And this campaign, which was now supported by opinion leaders in medicine, public health, and government, produced impressive results. The Maternity and Child Welfare Act, passed in 1918, required local governments to support an extensive network of centers that served maternal and infant health.67
Their successes in the public sphere emboldened British feminists to address the more sensitive issues raised by the position of women in the family, still defined as a private realm that was insulated against public scrutiny. Feminists in every country had asserted that the liberation of mothers from economic dependence was an essential step toward equality. In wartime, the comparison of the mother to the soldier, whose patriotic services were compensated, was often adduced to justify some form of “maternal salary.” Though debated in all the belligerent countries, this idea gained the greatest prominence in Britain. Other European countries granted dependency allowances to the wives and children of soldiers, but these benefits were meager and inadequate. But in Britain, where military service was not compulsory when war broke out in 1914, the government was forced to provide incentives for men to volunteer. Among these was an allowance payable to wives and mothers without a means test and at a level on which families could actually subsist. Of course, this entitlement was actually intended to reward the services of male heads of household by supporting their dependents.
But Eleanor Rathbone, who at this time worked as a social worker with the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Family Association, chose to “misread” the provision as a form of state support for women, and specifically for mothers—a benefit that she believed must be extended beyond the wartime emergency.68 She was convinced that the government allowance, which “distributed the means of subsistence according to the number of persons in the family concerned,” provided a far more adequate level of support than could be given by a male breadwinner who himself was at the mercy of an unpredictable and inequitable labor market.69 The socialist Woman’s Cooperative Guild and several women’s trade-union organizations insisted that motherhood deserved a wage. In 1915, the Cooperative Guild justified this demand by publishing a volume entitled Maternity: Letters from Working Women in which members described “the conditions under which they had brought children into the world.”70
This volume contained 160 autobiographical accounts—compiled shortly before the war—of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing.71 Written by the working-class women who headed the Cooperative Guild’s local groups, these stories left no doubt that maternity was indeed a “blood tax” equivalent to that levied on men by military service. In her preface, Davies made clear that these mothers belonged to the elite of the working class and considered themselves “more fortunately placed than most women.” And yet the stories were shocking, creating “on the whole an impression of perpetual overwork, illness and suffering.”72 Davies denied that the banishment of mothers from industrial work would solve the problem: “people forget,” she pointed out in her introduction, “that the unpaid work of the working — woman at the stove, at scrubbing and cleaning, at the washtub, in lifting and carrying heavy weights is just as severe manual labour as many industrial operations in factories.”73
One mother wrote that she had “six children, all living, and what a terrible time it is, to be sure, especially during the last two months—only just enough to live on and another coming. . . . The mental strain in addition to bodily labour must surely affect the child.”74 Another had lost six children before she reared one. “I was very unfortunate in my married life,” she recalled, “and at one time thought that I was not going to rear any children.”75 Most of the contributors agreed that “the state… if it wants citizens, and healthy citizens. . . must make it possible for men and women to have families while living a full life themselves and giving a full life to their children. . . The first requirement is, then, the improvement of the economic position of the family.”76 But Davies added that the mother needed not only material benefits, but also individual freedom and dignity—“the means and the leisure to live a life of her own without which she is unfit to give life to her children and to direct it during their most impressionable years.”77
In the dark days of wartime, many feminists thus hoped that the state’s new appreciation of the value of each of its citizens would bring a new dignity to motherhood. “My sincere desire is that a better time is dawning for working-class mothers and their babies,” wrote a British mother.78 Certainly, the wartime emergency had motivated legislators to improve some of the material and medical conditions surrounding pregnancy, birth, and childrearing. But the very limited success of efforts to improve mothers’ legal and economic status suggested that these mothers were valued more as the producers of a vital and scarce commodity than as individuals or as citizens. In July 1917, the Queen of England recognized a national “Baby Week” by opening an exhibition on infant health in Westminster, where she was greeted by a guard of honor of mothers and children. A speech by the Bishop of London explained frankly why these mothers were honored. “The loss of life in this war had made every baby’s life doubly precious.”79 The German socialist Henriette Furth clearly saw the intent behind such patronizing rhetoric, which was also common in Germany. “Without any respect for our individual rights and our personal aspirations,” she charged, in 1915, such men “demand children, children, and more children! . . . And how will they force us to bear them?”80