MATERNITY AND THE STATE
Mothers were of little interest to the state until the end of the nineteenth century when national concerns about population decline fuelled a new political concern about maternal and child health.
Population policy which addressed both the quantity of births as well as the quality was driven by international conflict within Europe and national self-aggrandisement. Fertility decline was evident across western Europe although it was most marked in France. Politicians and feminists — who described the falling birth rate amongst the middle and upper classes as a birth strike — focused attention on the absence of state support for women's most important social role, and on concern about the alleged poor quality of the offspring of the less well off. In the early 1900s many European governments had begun to assume the mantle of the so-called nurturing state, a term coined by the French feminist Hubertine Auclert (1848—1914) who, in 1885 challenged her own government to embrace its ‘motherly' role, calling on it to be enabling and protective rather than merely siphoning resources away from the populace.91The acceptance by European governments that motherhood was a political issue, even if for selfish national reasons, resulted in limited practical benefits for mothers before the First World War. Most west European states had introduced some form of maternity leave before 1914. As early as 1883 the German health insurance law provided maternity benefits to female factory workers for three weeks after the birth of a child. In 1900 a new labour protection law in Sweden made provision for four weeks of maternity leave for female industrial workers, but since no financial support was earmarked the law merely reinforced women's dependence on a male breadwinner during her four weeks' enforced leave.92 Likewise the 1909 maternity protection law in France had good intentions, but no benefits were paid during the eight weeks' leave.
Four years later the Strauss Act extended this law to six weeks' mandatory paid maternity leave for all working women.93 In Italy, the Cassa Nazionale di Maternita (National Maternity Fund) was created in 1910 and came into force two years later. The insurance fund was intended to provide financial support for working women who, under the labour law, were prohibited from working for one month after childbirth, although problems in administering the financial contributions actually resulted in female workers going on strike against the scheme.94 In Norway and in Britain, in 1909 and 1911 respectively, insured women and the wives of insured men were entitled to maternity payments. Similarly, in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands maternity benefit was incorporated into insurance schemes. Everywhere, such benefits to mothers were limited in scope and execution.Women required practical help as well as financial support to enable them to combine child care with paid work. In Russia, the provision of summer nurseries which directly helped women working long hours in the fields, and which provided children with meals, health care and activities, were an unqualified success. They allowed women to work and they combated popular resistance to welfare at the same time as saving lives, although this success was achieved at the cost of weakening female child care culture and the bypassing of mothers themselves.95 Elsewhere in Europe practical support took a less institutional approach. The provision of maternity leave and milk depots in France, without means testing, was a positive step towards real improvements in the condition of mothers and children, in contrast with the situation in Britain where a more disciplinary attitude was adopted. Here, mothers' entitlement to milk depended on their financial circumstances and in one London milk depot women were given detailed instructions regarding interval-feeding and disinfecting equipment.96 Mothers everywhere resisted the patronising and judgemental maternity services provided by religious and middle-class philanthropists when alternative municipal services were available.97
In Britain in 1915, the Women's Co-operative Guild proposed an extension of state support for mothers in the form of weekly maternity payments, the establishment of maternity centres to dispense advice and nourishment, maternity homes, and an increase in the provision of maternity beds in hospitals.98 Similar demands were being formulated across Europe by feminists critical of the piecemeal state benefits so far introduced and determined to capitalise on the growing understanding at the political level that motherhood was an important social role that deserved state support.
In Britain, the concept of the mother's endowment, formulated and promoted by Eleanor Rathbone (well-known for her advocacy of family allowances) was predicated upon the belief that ‘motherhood is a service which entitles a woman to economic independence'. This critique of women's dependence upon men and upon the myth of the breadwinner wage was also taken up by French feminists although, in both Britain and France, the legislation of the pre-war decade merely perpetuated women's dependence since women were identified, first and foremost, as wives and mothers rather than as workers.99 In France and Italy though, some feminist campaigners recognised that there could be no fundamental change in the status of mothers until women were empowered as citizens. Women should be granted citizenship rights on the basis of their role as mothers: in the words of the French feminist Leonie Rouzade, ‘If one gets rights for killing men, one should get more rights for having created humanity.'100 Motherhood ‘became a “political strategy” for feminist activism'.101