Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (15 page)

As again after the Second World War, such anxieties provoked the state to act more and more as surrogate parent and fount of moral authority. As divorce rates rose sharply, it reasserted the values of family cohesion—since “moral order,” in Mussolini’s words, produces “public order”—in order to show women and children their proper place. “A nation is not a collection of individuals placed beside one
another; it is a group of interlocking families,” insisted the Radical French politician Édouard Herriot in 1919. “The organic cell is not the individual but the family.” It was, in other words, not just the Right which felt the vital importance of restoring the family—and if necessary checking individualism—for the sake of the nation’s well-being.
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All this meant exorcizing a frightening apparition which had emerged during the war—the independent and emancipated young woman with her own place in the labour force and her own income. Tuppence Beresford, for instance—the heroine of Agatha Christie’s 1922 thriller
The Secret Adversary
—who had been a wartime nurse, entered the post-war world with new demands for equal work opportunities, sexual independence and an active life. Despite the reality of growing female employment, however, especially in new service industries, role models like Tuppence were increasingly denounced as manifestations of “sexual Bolshevism,” threatening the traditional authority of the male. The
garçonnes
of the 1920s, Bright Young Things with their bobbed hair and slim hips, were accused of displaying a selfish love of pleasure, and a frightening disregard for the nation’s future. “Smoking, wearing short hair, dressed in pyjamas or sportswear … women increasingly resemble their companions,” wrote an alarmed Frenchman. How could such androgynes ever be turned into responsible mothers?
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To such suspicions there was a nervous political undertone. The Bolsheviks had opened up breathtaking vistas in relations between the sexes, swiftly emancipating Russian women to an extent unparalleled anywhere else in Europe—curbing the power of the Church, sweeping away traditional patriarchal privileges and allowing women to sue for divorce. Some Soviet policy-makers even talked about eventually abolishing marriage altogether and encouraging free unions of men and women; not surprisingly, critics believed that the war-torn Russian family was being encouraged to “wither away,” together with the other institutions of bourgeois life.
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All of this—in the anti-Bolshevik climate of the 1920s—hardly helped the cause of female emancipation in the rest of Europe. True, women won the vote under many of the new constitutions, but they still remained without it elsewhere—in France, Italy and Greece, for
instance, and only on. a very limited basis in the UK before 1930. Moreover, splits opened up within the women’s movement: the old suffragist focus on electoral equality was less and less satisfactory to younger activists with more practical concerns. “For the working woman, the vote … does not represent her emancipation,” argued one Greek communist. “Because in this matter of supreme importance, what concerns her above all is the entire social problem.”
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Constitutional provisions for equal opportunities were effectively neutralized by the new cult of the family, and by unchanged male-dominated family-law codes. “The State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved,” ran article 41 of the 1937 Irish constitution, making it clear where women were supposed to be working. Conservatives, male-dominated unions and ex-servicemen’s organizations blocked many efforts to improve women’s employment rights, and often succeeded in forcing them to quit wartime jobs for men, while professional women were often obliged to leave work upon getting married, as was the case for instance inside the British civil service.
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In contrast to the selfish hedonism of the single working woman, the wife and mother (for the two were generally equated) encapsulated the “heroic form of Everyday life.” Or as a Fascist propagandist put it: “Maternity is the patriotism of women.” Even Stalin came round to a similar view—alarmed by soaring divorce and abortion rates in Russia as peasant women flocked to the cities—and in the mid-1930s the libertarian laws of the early Bolsheviks were replaced by a new Soviet commitment to the traditional family.
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This inter-war European ideology of motherhood had deep roots. A long-term fall in national reproduction rates had begun towards the end of the nineteenth century, just as the competition between empires and nations was heating up. The growing importance of conscript armies made the size and health of a country’s population an issue of military and national security, especially as Europe’s states seemed locked in a Darwinian struggle for mastery. The French worried that Germany’s faster population growth meant their own eventual extinction as a great power. The Germans were not so worried about the French but were terrified of the “teeming Slavic hordes” to
the east. Hungarian nationalists believed they faced a “battle without hope,” in the struggle against “folk-death” at the hands of Slavs, Germans and Romanians. The British, especially after the Boer War, wondered how a “declining race” could govern a gigantic empire. As Giuseppe Sergi, a leading Italian eugenicist, informed the Italian Society for the Progress of Science in 1916, Europe generally—still in thrall to the idea of empire—was gripped by the fear that its “superior races” were in decline.
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The First World War, of course, made the whole outlook much worse, leading national leaders to peddle the view that “pregnancy is the woman’s active service.” In their effort to encourage births, the French authorities circulated wartime postcards which exhorted soldiers on leave to “work for repopulation” and asked young women to “work for France.” British pro-natalists published scary accounts of what awaited their countrymen in books like
The Menace of the Empty Cradle
, or the 1916
Cradles or Coffins? Our Greatest National Need
. In Germany, the Reichstag passed laws outlawing contraception and restricting abortion. “The general welfare of the state has to have precedence over women’s feelings,” insisted the preamble to the anti-abortion bill.
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Nor did the fears of population decline vanish after the war ended. On the contrary, rising divorce rates and a series of gloomy demographic predictions pushed the issue into the headlines. “Fewer British babies. Sudden birth slump. Population may become stationary in Britain if decline lasts,” warned the
Daily Mail
, after one statistician warned that the population of England and Wales would drop to 31 million by 1975 and to a mere 17.7 million by the century’s end. France’s leading demographer estimated that his country’s population would shrink to 29 million by 1980. Weimar Germany was transfixed by a 1927 pamphlet entitled
Geburtenrückgang
(written by Richard Korherr, who would later become head of the SS Statistical Service and as such responsible for estimating the death toll of European Jewry for Himmler during the war), while
Volk ohne Jugend
(People without Youth) was quickly sold out on publication in 1932 and went into three editions. And global anxieties overlapped with national ones. “The present fall in the European birth rate,” warned an Italian commentator on social policy, “is an evil against which it is necessary
to react in the name of Western civilization, the supremacy of which might be threatened by the overflowing masses of the coloured races.”
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“Go back home and tell the women I need births, many births,” Mussolini instructed the heads of Fascist women’s organizations. But the Duce and Hitler were not the only ones, or even the first, to aim in this direction. Many of their propaganda ideas were modelled on the efforts of the French, who issued a medal “for the French family” to productive mothers—bronze for five children, gold for ten—who did their patriotic duty in the aftermath of the Great War’s bloodletting. Lobby groups like Belgium’s League of Large Families pressed for tax breaks and enjoyed substantial memberships. Employers promoted family allowances in order to help workers have more children; such measures also made the recipients more loyal to their firm and less likely to strike. In the 1920s, Mother’s Day—an invention of florists and stationers—showed in another way how capitalism was able to take advantage of the obsession with motherhood.
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Maternalism was drilled into young women from the time they entered school. “Infant management” and “domestic science” or “housecraft” were provided in English schools to teach “the craft, art and profession of a good mother.” French schoolgirls were trained in “puericulture,” learning how to feed and bathe babies and change their nappies. Later, young mothers were exposed to propaganda health campaigns like National Baby Week, whose Infant Welfare Conference in London in 1923 displayed items for the health-conscious mother, or to the expertise offered in Sir Frederick Truby King’s Mothercraft Training Centres. Their German equivalents read magazines like Weimar’s
Die Deutsche Hausfrau
(The German Housewife), published by a popular middle-class housewives’ organization, or visited one of the many travelling health exhibitions organized by the Dresden Hygiene Museum in order to ensure the “national fitness and the physical and mental health of future generations.” No fewer than seven million people visited the Ge-So-Lei (Gesundheit, soziale Fürsorge und Leibesübungen/Health, social welfare and exercise) exhibition, with its prominent publicity for the League of Child-Rich Families. For many of these women, the collapse of Weimar marked the culmination of a move “away from liberalism, towards obligations;
away from the career woman, towards the housewife and mother.”
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And at the same time as women were being urged to turn into producers of babies, the state was making it harder for them to have abortions. “Abortion places a heavy burden on the state,” wrote one Soviet doctor, “because it reduces women’s contribution to production.” In 1936 abortion was criminalized in the Soviet Union just as it had been previously in much of the rest of Europe. Far from communism succeeding in spreading its scandalously libertarian ideas through the continent, it had in its turn succumbed to the pro-natalist reassertion of traditional family and gender roles.
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Catholic countries had always been sharply opposed to abortion, but their inter-war policies became even more repressive thanks to the intervention of the Vatican, after Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical on the sanctity of marriage. Italy introduced heavy penalties for illegal abortion and doctors were obliged to report cases to the authorities. At one stage, the Fascist government even toyed with the idea of registering all pregnancies; its Laws on Public Safety did turn “impeding the fecundity of the Italian people” into a crime of state, while the 1930 penal code included a chapter headed “crimes against the integrity and health of the race.” France outlawed abortion in 1920, noting that “in the aftermath of the war, when almost one and a half million Frenchmen sacrificed their lives so that France could have the right to live in independence and honour, it cannot be tolerated that other French have the right to make a livelihood from the spread of abortion.” But the trend extended beyond the Catholic world: Britain’s 1929 Infant (Life Preservation) Act turned abortion into a statutory offence punishable by life imprisonment.
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Across Europe, however, the wishes of the state and of women remained far apart. Twentieth-century abortion legislation remained as difficult to police as its Napoleonic equivalent. Prosecutions were few, and failed to have much impact upon a practice which remained widespread among women of all classes. Experts in the 1930s guessed that there were as many as half a million abortions a year in France, 150,000 in Belgium. In Weimar Germany, where there were more
prosecutions under anti-abortion laws than in the first years of the Third Reich, anywhere up to 800,000 abortions took place each year. Abortion, in other words, was a regular method of birth control. Laws against it did not have any appreciable impact on birth rates; they simply made the practice more dangerous and furtive for millions of women. Indeed, women may have had greater recourse to abortions than they would have done otherwise because of the state’s simultaneous attack on other forms of birth control. France had banned the advertising and sale of contraceptives in 1920, followed by Belgium in 1923 and Italy in 1926. In Franco’s Spain, birth control was rejected by the medical profession on religious grounds. “All restrictions to fertility are dangerous for the health of the woman; all women darken their souls with the black crěpe of mortal sin,” warned one Spanish doctor in 1941.
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Outside Catholic Europe the movement for birth control was more powerful, and in the 1920s some highly effective lobby groups were able to counter the pro-natalists and argue in favour of contraception, either as a woman’s right or on eugenic grounds as helpful to the nation’s health. In Britain, Marie Stopes transfixed the public with her message that birth control was an important element of marital harmony. Her Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, alongside other groups, set up birth-control clinics, flooded the country with pamphlets and operated a scheme of missionary Birth Control Caravans.
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The German birth control movement was even stronger and more politicized, perhaps because it faced much greater and more determined opposition, amid a far deeper sense of national crisis. For Helene Stöcker—left-wing intellectual, rationalist and leader of the Federation for the Protection of Mothers—the outlawing of contraception implied society surrendering control over nature. In her mind, birth control had a eugenic purpose, for “as humankind has subjected all other things to its rational insight, so must it become increasingly master over one of the most important matters for humanity: the creation of a new human. One will have to find means of preventing the incurably ill or degenerate from reproducing.” As such statements showed, Left and Right were not so far apart as sometimes appeared. Both dreamed of a eugenic Utopia and were confident
of their ability to reach it. The Third Reich actually liberalized some Weimar abortion provisions, again on eugenic grounds, but closed down birth-control centres and clamped down on the advertising of contraceptives.
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