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|
|
"A New World for Women"?
Abortion Law Reform in
Britain during the 1930s
STEPHEN BROOKE
| "Abortion
must be the key to a new world for women," wrote
the British feminist Stella Browne in 1935. Browne believed that
the public emancipation of women in such areas as politics and the
economy demanded and was dependent on their emancipation in the
private sphere of sexual and reproductive practice: "freedom of
choice and deliberate intention are necessary for [women] in their
sexual relations and their maternity, if they are to make anything
of their status and opportunities." Toward this end, she advocated
abortion as an "absolute right" spanning public and private realms.1
|
1 |
| Browne
evoked modern visions of femininity through abortion and emphasized
the issue's liminality between public and private. These are themes
also reflected in recent historical studies of abortion in North
America and Europe. In work on post-1960 abortion in the United
States, for example, Celeste Michelle Condit notes the intersection
between changing discursive understandings of abortion and those
of femininity, "a negotiated transformation of women's own private
discourses" in public and private spheres, a view also adopted by
Jane Jenson in her examination of abortion in France.2
Other studies of abortion have emphasized its role in problematizing
the private female body in the context of the public sphere after
World War I.3
This is particularly true of work on the controversies surrounding
Article 218 in interwar Germany and the 1920 loi scélérate
in France, as Cornelie Usborne, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Louise
Roberts have shown.4
Abortion has also been used as a means of understanding the relationship
between public and private spheres in twentieth-century political
culture. Leslie Reagan's history of abortion law reform in the United
States illustrates how the "private invaded the public" in a dynamic
of "ambiguity and interaction," while Donna Harsch's examination
of the question in Communist East Germany reflects on the engagement
between the private behavior of the individual and the demands of
the state in a socialist society.5
|
2 |
| The
history of abortion law reform in Britain similarly offers a valuable
site for considering the place of femininity in the public sphere
during the twentieth century. The 1861 Offences Against the Person
Act made it illegal to procure an abortion under any circumstances.
The Infant Life (Preservation) Act of 1929 modified this somewhat,
allowing medically administered abortion "for the purpose only of
preserving the life of the mother."6
But the definition of "life" excluded social, economic, or psychological
considerations. With the exception of insanity, only physiological
conditions justified legal abortion. The successful parliamentary
and extraparliamentary campaign for the 1967 Abortion Act opened
up access to legal and safe abortion on a variety of grounds and
established freedom of choice as a cornerstone of "second wave"
feminism.7
|
3 |
| While
the debate on abortion is largely associated with the 1960s, the
issue had also elicited wide discussion thirty years before. In
1937, an official report on maternal mortality noted that the practice
of abortion was "common" and a significant contributing cause of
puerperal mortality.8
The 1930s saw the formation of a feminist pressure group dedicated
to the legalization of abortion (the Abortion Law Reform Association,
hereafter ALRA), the establishment of an official enquiry into the
question in 1937, and, in 1938, the well-publicized trial of a prominent
gynecologist for performing an illegal abortion. This interest in
abortion did not, however, extend into the political sphere. Unlike
in Germany in the same period, abortion was never the focus of a
popular campaign by parties of the British Left.9
Indeed, until decriminalization in 1967 (passed under a Labour government,
but by means of a private member's bill sponsored by a Liberal),
abortion was a divisive issue within the British Labour Party.10
|
4 |
| The
present article uses abortion law reform in Britain during the 1930s
to explore changing ideas of femininity in the early twentieth century
and the relationship of motherhood and female sexuality to distinctions
of public and private. These themes will be examined primarily through
the work of the official Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion
between 1937 and 1939, discussing, in particular, the testimony
and evidence presented to this committee by middle-class and working-class
abortion reformers. Two arguments run through this analysis: that
the discussion of motherhood and female sexuality in the abortion
debate demonstrated the instability of the distinction between public
and private, and that abortion reformers offered a radical, even
subversive, vision of femininity and women's rights through arguments
that drew on maternalism. We must first discuss the broader context
of abortion in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain
as it touched on three areas: the relationship between gender and
ideas of public and private, the role of motherhood as a social
category of femininity, and the place of class in these considerations. |
5 |
|
|
| With
the 1861 Offences Against the
Person Act, public law became more clearly involved
in the private sexual and reproductive practice of women, occluding
the distinction between public and private promoted by the separate
spheres ideology. It has become a truism that this distinction was
always powerful but illusory: whether as social or economic beings,
women never really absented themselves from the public sphere; within
the private sphere, women and femininity were the subject of often
unrelenting public scrutiny; and, lastly, notions of the private
determined and shaped categories of the public and vice versa.11
|
6 |
| The
criminalization of abortion in the late nineteenth century also
coincided with growing interest in motherhood as a public issue.
Between the 1870s and the end of World War I, concerns about national
strength increasingly brought motherhood within the ambit of state
and voluntary social reform.12
The recurring figure in this landscape was the working-class mother,
who had to be both supported and disciplined for the good of the
nation.13
As Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have suggested, this not only allowed
state and voluntary agencies to shape ideas of the private, it established
"women's public relationships to politics and the state, to community,
workplace, and marketplace."14
Motherhood became a valid social category of femininity, a borderland
between public and private spheres. Travelers through this territory
mapped it in disparate ways. Feminists deserve particular attention.
Susan Pedersen's work has shown how some feminists saw the new emphasis
given to motherhood as legitimating a "citizenship function" for
women. According "mothers the economic and social recognition they
deserved" would not only usher women into the public sphere as citizens
but improve their position within the home (with reforms such as
children's allowances, for example).15
This was a double-edged sword: while such feminist maternalists
cast women as citizens equal to men, the accent on their civic equality
through the role of motherhood perpetuated the "division of the
world's work along sex lines."16
As Carole Pateman has argued, the meaning of motherhood was often
fixed or constructed as subordinate and dependent.17
However paradoxical, even dangerous, this feminist maternalism might
be for promoting women's rights, it was an important legacy for
abortion reformers in the 1930s. |
7 |
| Concerns
about working-class femininity transected discussions about abortion.
Middle-class observers indeed often identified abortion as a specific
problem of working-class women. To some degree, abortion was accepted
within working-class communities. While all strata of society in
Britain witnessed a general trend toward family limitation in the
late nineteenth century, differences of income and access between
classes left an uneven pattern of contraceptive practice. Compared
to other forms of contraception, access to abortion was relatively
easy within working-class communities. Despite its potential physical
risk, it was seen by working-class women as an effective and economical
means of family limitation.18
But given that firm statistics about abortion were either elusive
or nonexistent, prejudice rather than empiricism also guided middle-class
perceptions of working-class abortion, a disposition that had other
biases about working-class women as its companion pieces. Doubts
about working-class women's maternal (and thus patriotic) abilities
were complemented, for example, by doubts about their sexual morality.19
|
8 |
| Well
before the 1930s, therefore, abortion helped bring sexual and reproductive
behavior into the public sphere, shaded by considerations of femininity
and class. In the interwar period, five factors complicated this
process: a falling birth rate, the problem of maternal mortality
and morbidity, the perception of sexual liberalization, the formalization
of women's status as public actors, and high unemployment. A consistent
theme was the nature of "modern" femininity, in particular, the
character of motherhood. |
9 |
| In
Britain, as in other European countries, the birth rate fell substantially
throughout the century, from nearly thirty births per thousand in
1900 to just over ten by the 1940s.20
Increased contraceptive practice accounted for this change. In 1949,
the Royal Commission on Population maintained that "the spread of
deliberate family limitation has certainly been the main cause,
and very probably the only cause," of the falling birth rate.21
During the interwar period, this prompted concern from a wide spectrum
of pronatalists, including eugenicists, imperialists, and supporters
of family allowances. |
10 |
| Part
of this disquiet arose from the problem of maternal mortality. Infant
mortality had steadily declined through the first quarter of the
twentieth century. But until the introduction of sulphonamide drugs
in the late 1930s, maternal mortality remained at approximately
five deaths in every thousand births, a figure that rose slightly
between 1923 and 1936.22
These trends excited much concern from women's groups and the government.
The Ministry of Health commissioned two enquiries into the problem
in 1932 and 1937. The second report noted illegal and unsafe abortions
as a significant cause of puerperal mortality. Even though the statistics
were understandably sketchy, the 1937 report suggested that the
number of abortions had risen between 1926 and 1934; mortality as
a result of unsafe abortion amounted to about 14 percent of all
puerperal deaths. This finding led directly to the establishment
in 1937 of an interdepartmental committee on abortion by the Home
Office and the Ministry of Health. |
11 |
| The
observations of the 1937 Maternal Mortality report were consciously
placed in the context of shifts in femininity and changes in sexual
mores. Its authors noted that women exhibited an "increased nervous
tension" in the modern age, shown by their "fashion of 'slimming'
and the habit of cigarette-smoking."23
As for sexual morality, they drew a clear distinction between the
pre-1914 period and the postwar era: "Since the Great War there
has been a loosening of the conventions which formerly governed
the relations between the sexes, an extended use of contraceptive
measures and a reputed increase in the practice of abortion."24
This apparent and lamented erosion of traditional values and sexual
mores was a common cultural touchstone during the 1920s and 1930s.
In T. S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" (1922), for example,
a young promiscuous typist and a working-class womanthe latter
prematurely aged by the abortifacient pills she took "to bring it
off"are particular and highly gendered symbols for a more
general loss of meaning and order in postwar society.25
|
12 |
| Whether
marked by the spread of family advice clinics or the success of
Marie Stopes's Married Love (1918), there can be little doubt
that the 1920s and 1930s were a period of moderate sexual liberalization.26
Popular culture helped create a freer sexual climate, especially
through the cult of glamour and romance in cinema and pictorial
magazines, while the strains placed on private life by the exigencies
of two world wars also forced a more open approach to sexuality.27
But the extent of this change should not be exaggerated. Ross McKibbin
has rightly noted that traditional mores and practices "gave way
only slowly," and other recent scholarship has emphasized a continuing
sexual conservatism and respectability, not least among working-class
women.28
Between the wars, there nonetheless remained much hand-wringing
about the decline of sexual standards. Once again, perceptions about
femininity and class imbued this anxiety. The new position of women
after World War I was sometimes taken as a causative factor in moral
decline. Writing on "sex-delinquency" (a category that included
all non-conjugal sexual activity from prostitution to premarital
or extramarital sex), one of the contributors to The New Survey
of London Life and Labour (1934) located the prevailing laxity
of moral standards in the post-1918 "liberated" woman: "The demand
for equality of status has been to some extent translated as an
equal right to extra-marital sex adventure."29
The younger working-class woman was often taken as a specific exemplar
of the new Gomorrah. The middle-class author of I Lived in a
Slum (1936) drew a clear contrast, for example, between the
sexual behavior of different generations of working-class women;
the younger woman was dismissed as "undoubtedly a baggage."30
It was testament to the prevailing assumption that working-class
women were the locus of a more general moral decay that pre-1939
advocates of legal abortion had to stress that "there is no deterioration
in the character of the young working-class woman of the present
day."31
But this impression persisted well into the 1940s and 1950s. The
evacuation of children and mothers in the first years of World War
II gave vent, for example, to much opprobrious indignation at the
"sluttishness" of some working-class mothers, while some sex surveys
of the late 1940s and 1950s regularly trooped out the sexually active
younger working-class woman (whose "promiscuity" was associated
with other vices such as gambling, heavy smoking and drinking, and
with the frivolities and corruption of popular culture) as a cipher
of modern immorality.32
|
13 |
| To
contemporary observers, the visibility of women in the public sphere
might have confirmed this link between the modern age and the ruin
of traditional sexual standards. It certainly bespoke a new awareness
of transformed gender roles. World War I formalized women's importance
as economic actors and left them (with the enfranchisements of 1918
and 1928) at least legally equal to men in the political realm.33
The interwar period also saw some progress toward female emancipation
in other ways, with, for example, legislation such as the Sex Disqualification
Act (1919), which freed up female access to the professions, public
offices, and postsecondary education, property acts in 1926 and
1935 that allowed single and married women to hold property as men
did, and divorce reform in 1923 and 1927. Jane Lewis has rightly
warned against seeing such reform as unqualified feminist progress
in interwar Britain. But these changes did enshrine a public place
for women and the discussion of femininity and female rights.34
This public place was nonetheless fraught with complexity. Most
political parties saw women as problematic political subjects.35
To some extent, this was rooted in the perceived nature of women
as exceptional political subjects, whose interests (as mothers,
for example) derived from sexual difference. But the complexity
of the relationship of femininity to the public after 1918 lay in
the stutter of such difference within increasing synonymity. Developments
such as the equal franchise, wartime mobilization, and shifts in
the labor market contributed to a sense of the diffusion of clear
borders between men and women as social actors. However, the maintenance
of the marriage bar for women in local government and the civil
service represented one backlash against this blurring of sexual
difference. |
14 |
| If
a stagnant birth rate, maternal mortality, sexual liberalization,
and the emancipation of women affected considerations of femininity
and domesticity, the specter of high unemployment among the working
classes in the 1920s and 1930s haunted motherhood and family life.
Between the beginning of the postwar slump in 1921 and the outbreak
of World War II, no less than one million people were out of work
in any given year. At the trough of the Great Depression in 1932,
the unemployed comprised 23 percent of the manual labor force. Skilled
male workers suffered disproportionately from unemployment, a fact
that did much to undercut the viability of the male breadwinner
ideal. What little growth there was in the interwar work force occurred
largely within the ranks of young single women, only deepening the
threat to working-class masculinity.36
It is hardly surprising that a palpable sense of emasculation animated
images of unemployment. Faced with the taunts of his sister, the
unemployed hero of Walter Greenwood's famous proletarian novel Love
on the Dole (1933) feels the shame of his "miserable muscles,"
for example.37
|
15 |
| A
less obvious victim of unemployment was the working-class mother
or wife. If the male worker suffered the shame of joblessness, it
was the mother or wife who bore the brunt of its poverty, attempting
to manage the family on a reduced standard of living. At the dusk
of the 1930s, Margery Spring Rice noted the damage to women's physical
health such deprivation had caused and the "intolerable burden"
it placed on such women in other ways: "[She is] faced not only
with the lack of sufficient income to buy for her family what is
needed, but with the constant strain of uneasiness caused by the
shadow of unemployment, with the the fear of a reduction in an already
insufficient wage, and with the fear of running into debt while
endeavouring to meet such unvarying obligations as rent, hire-purchase,
insurance, etc."38
George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is striking
for its valorization of male labor, but the author's own epiphany
is triggered by the sight of a working-class housewife, vainly trying
to maintain a respectable domesticity against the ravages of poverty:
"At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on
the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from
the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked . . .
She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum
girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages
and drudgery; and it wore . . . the most desolate, hopeless
expression I have ever seen."39
For many, unemployment represented a crisis within the working-class
family. |
16 |
|
|
| It
was against this background that abortion was
discussed during the 1930s in the spheres of government policy,
the law, and feminist activism. These debates raised a number of
important issues about the distinctions between public and private
and about changing perceptions of femininity and sexuality. The
recurring theme was motherhood, not only as a category of femininity
but also as a threshold between private and public spheres.40
It was, for example, partly for this reason that abortion inflamed
the confusions already attending ideas of public and private in
the early twentieth century. |
17 |
| The
abortion issue also served as a forum for the generation of new
and radical visions of women's rights and femininity by a variety
of advocates of legalized abortion. Abortion and feminism have,
of course, become inextricably linked; Vicky Randall has suggested
that abortion became "almost the definitive issue of contemporary
feminism" in the 1960s and 1970s.41
In the words of a British pro-abortion organization of the 1970s,
abortion on demand ensured a woman's entitlement to control her
"body and her life . . . to control its reproduction function":
abortion was, simply put, a mark of ultimate autonomy.42
In the United States in particular, the argument for abortion has
also devolved from a liberal individualism centering on rights of
privacy.43
|
18 |
| Compared
to these approaches, abortion reform in interwar Britain had distinctive
qualities. It comprised a more complex language, bringing together
different vocabularies of femininity toward the aim of legalizing
abortion. Abortion advocacy did demand a public recognition of a
woman's private right to control her body. But it also drew on a
more established vocabulary of women's roles, specifically that
of maternalism. The campaign for abortion was also grounded in concerns
about equality of access between middle and working-class women
and the maintenance of living standards in working-class households
during a period of high unemployment. The skein of abortion rhetoric
was thus woven from strands of feminism, maternalism, and socialism. |
19 |
| Some
accounts of the abortion campaign of the 1930s have suggested that,
because it concentrated on the established social category of motherhood,
it had "little to do with feminism as such."44
In part, this judgment reflects the critical eye turned on maternity
by "second wave" feminists. Juliet Mitchell's influential work of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, delineated reproduction
as one of the four sites of female oppression, while maternity was
a "substitute for action and creativity" on the part of women; arguments
for reproductive control were thus placed in opposition to maternalism.45
By contrast, the interwar abortion movement saw maternalism and
reproductive control not in opposition but as complementary. It
might be argued, indeed, that abortion reform was a variant of feminist
maternalism. It was grounded in an interest in motherhood, particularly
working-class motherhood; in this, it was similar to the German
movement for reproductive rights before World War I.46
The maternalism of the British abortion reform movement did not,
however, dull the edge of its feminism. It still comprised a radical
challenge to established gender ideologies. There are two arguments
here, the first about the content of abortion reform, particularly
as it related to maternalism, the second about the working of the
language of abortion reform. |
20 |
| That
the abortion movement of the 1930s boasted a maternalist tinge is
hardly surprising, given its lineage and the social circumstances
that shaped it. Both highlighted the problem of maternal health
in the early twentieth century. As groups such as the Women's Cooperative
Guild and individuals like Maud Pember Reeves chronicled before
and during World War I, and the letters written in the 1920s by
working-class women to Marie Stopes bore poignant witness, working-class
women paid a heavy physical price for multiple pregnancies.47
Shocked by such evidence, feminists and working-class activists
within the Labour Party launched a campaign in the 1920s for wider
access to birth control and contraceptive information, determined
both to enlarge all women's rights and to narrow the gap between
middle and working-class women.48
In 1925, the socialist-feminist Frida Laski noted, "For twenty or
thirty years every middle class woman has had this information at
her disposal."49
Reticence about questions of women's health, what Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway could refer to as "that," might have been a
mark of respectability, but it was one only those with access to
private medical care could afford; those who could not risked potentially
fatal consequences.50
With abortion, there was a clear class divide between the availability
of safe, therapeutic abortion (curettage) and the more dangerous
use of abortifacient pills, nonsurgical implements such as crochet
hooks and knitting needles, and "folk" remedies such as slippery
elm bark.51
|
21 |
| The
definition of "maternal health" had social as well as medical boundaries,
particularly with respect to the economics of working-class domesticity
during the Depression. In their 1951 survey of four hundred urban
working-class subjects, Eliot Slater and Maya Woodside remarked
that "large families are firmly associated in their minds with poverty,
hardship and the lowering of standards."52
This was a class memory of long standing, but one that interwar
unemployment undoubtedly sharpened. Not all working-class families
suffered unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s, but all working people
felt its menace, the chill of which did not lift until the advent
of full employment and a comprehensive welfare state in the 1940s
and 1950s. Family limitation was one strategy against the threat
of poverty. Although there was greater access to contraceptive advice
in the 1930s, legal, effective contraception remained largely inaccessible
to many working-class women. It is worth noting that well into the
1950s coitus interruptus and abstention remained the principal
forms of birth control, a trend that only changed in the late 1960s.53
During the 1930s, the unreliability and inaccessibility of many
forms of legal contraception left abortion as a weapon, albeit a
dangerous one, against the threat of poverty. |
22 |
| Given
the crisis facing working-class women during the 1930s, therefore,
it would have been more surprising had feminists interested in abortion
not taken up maternalism. Whether safeguarding women's physical
health or helping strengthen the hand of working women in maintaining
an adequate standard of living for their families, abortion was
seen as a means of protecting motherhood rather than abandoning
it. |
23 |
| This
rationale might seem tepid compared with the defiant rejection of
the traditional family structure found in "second wave" feminist
arguments for abortion. But maternalism is not necessarily a conservative
strategy even if it has, at its core, what is seen as a traditionally
feminine role. As Lisa Brush has suggested, although motherhood
might be associated with subordination and exploitation, maternalism
can be a language of empowerment and rights: "To protect, nurture,
and train children, mothers must have access to the conditions that
will allow them to flourish as persons: bodily integrity, moral
autonomy, material security, relational integrity, and political
efficacy."54
The maternalism of 1930s abortion reformers brought out these assertive
qualities, rather than promoting a fixed maternalism of dependence
and subordination. |
24 |
| The
radicalism of the abortion campaign of the 1930s can also be seen
in the question of control and autonomy. In 1922, Stella Browne
wrote, "Birth control is woman's crucial effort at self-determination
and at control of her own person and her own environment."55
The argument for abortion might have been rooted in maternalism,
but abortion was also about the limitation of motherhood. Legalized
abortion would enable women to have power over sexual and reproductive
practice. This was what Browne termed "intimate liberation."56
Most abortion reformers assumed that the ultimate arbitrer of whether
a pregnancy would proceed would be the individual woman, not the
state or any other mediating body. Once granted, the right of choice
would be inalienable, regardless of changes in social circumstances.
Ironically, though some socialists and feminists found much inspiration
in the Soviet Union's legalization of abortion between 1920 and
1936, it was a faulty model for the British campaign. Contraceptive
rights in the USSR derived not from the rights of women or the rights
of the individual but from the needs of the state; when the state
decided that abortion was no longer desirable, that right was revoked.57
It is also worth noting a comparison with the campaign to abolish
Article 218 in Germany. Atina Grossmann has suggested that, "[d]espite
the slippage into rights rhetoric, for most sex reformers, the right
to choice in sexual and reproductive matters was never inalienable";
at least in the case of the German Communist Party (KPD), it was
believed that the advent of a socialist state would eliminate the
need for legal abortion.58
While British abortion reformers shared with their German counterparts
a belief that abortion was a class issue, they did not allow gender
to be subsumed in this analysis: women's inalienable claim to the
right of choice remained a centerpiece of their arguments. |
25 |
| In
these ways, advocates of abortion not only pursued the recognition
of and support for women in their roles as mothers but also expanded
the idea of maternity to include a public recognition of women's
right to reproductive control and autonomy. This argument drew from
a maternalist language, but it assumed a modern vision of independence
for women, of which the most fundamental quality was freedom from
motherhood itself. The determination to formalize private choice
for womento choose or reject motherhoodand to invest
that choice with public legitimacy lies at the heart of abortion's
radicalism. Motherhood would take on a new meaning, implying not
dependence or subordination but autonomy and empowerment, recognized
in the public sphere. In her work on the origins of the British
welfare state, Pedersen has argued that the sexual difference of
women in the category of motherhood was "encoded in policy as dependence."59
In the abortion debate, by contrast, such difference was encoded
as independence. |
26 |
| The
concern for the social context of abortion also lent its arguments
a practical radicalism. In an important critique of the contemporary
American abortion debate, Mary Poovey has offered the vista of a
"nonindividualistic" politics of abortion, which situates the question
not only within individual rights but in a context of greater private
scope and social complexity.60
With its attempt to place abortion in the social category of motherhood
and the specific category of working-class motherhood and domesticity,
the abortion campaign in interwar Britain effaces some of what Poovey
proposes, without completely displacing a belief in female autonomy.
Indeed, the radicalism and realism of the campaign is found in its
vision of female autonomy within the landscape of working-class
domesticity between the wars. |
27 |
| Poovey's
arguments rest on her reconceptualization of the individual as a
"heterogeneous rather than homogeneous entity."61
This line of argument has some importance in considering the workings
of abortion reform language in the 1930s. I have suggested that
the radicalism of abortion advocacy lay in the manner in which maternalism
was invested with other meanings, such as citizenship, control,
and autonomy. This helped destabilize set ideas of motherhood, making
it a more ambiguous category of femininity. The dynamic of abortion
rhetoric did not rest with a particular meaning of femininity as
motherhood but instead moved between disparate meanings. In terms
of the working of abortion reform language, this dynamic was itself
radical, resisting a crucial element in the construction of gender
ideologies: the reliance on reductive categorization. |
28 |
| To
expand on this, one might borrow a theoretical analogy from another
sphere. The postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha has written of the radical
potential of "in-between spaces," borderlands between cultures or
races, between colonizer and colonized, in which discourses are
left "wavering between vocabularies," particularly with the "mimic
man" of the colonial relationship.62
It is in these spaces that, Bhabha argues, "newness enters the world"
through the ambivalent identity ("almost the same, but not quite")
of the colonized subject, expressed in the very wavering of his
or her vocabulary, always escaping certain categorization by the
colonizer, creating room for the "emergence of new historical subjects."63
|
29 |
| Without
conflating women in interwar Britain with colonial subjects, this
dynamic might also be seen as applicable to the workings of gender
in the abortion debate. During the 1930s, arguments for abortion
melded traditional and innovative languages of femininity; these
arguments moved between established ideas of femininity, such as
woman as mother (both in the private and public spheres) and newer
ones, such as woman as autonomous agent (again, both in the public
and private spheres). In part, such rhetoric simply reflected or
described the interstitial position of women in the interwar period,
poised between public and private, and between similarity and difference
as public actors. But playing on this ambivalence served to create
a new vision of femininity by eluding a simple characterization
of motherhood. To adopt Judith Butler's phrase, it rendered the
feminine as "a site of subversive multiplicity."64
The degree of the subversiveness and radicalism of this challenge
can be seen, as will be discussed, in the response of those who
opposed it. In these ways, abortion brought the discussion of femininity
and feminism to a new threshold. This was especially clear in the
work of the Abortion Law Reform Association and in the 1938 trial
of Dr. Aleck Bourne. |
30 |
|
|
| In
1935, Joan Malleson, a doctor
with an office in London's prestigious Harley Street, called an
informal meeting on abortion with Janet Chance, Stella Browne, and
Alice Jenkins.65
All were London-based, middle-class, socialist-feminist women interested
in the welfare of working-class women and the broader problems of
contraception and sex reform. All had been involved in the Workers
Birth Control Group, part of the wider campaign within the Labour
Party for birth control in the 1920s. Early in 1936, joined by other
socialist-feminists such as Frida Laski and Bertha Lorsignol, they
formed the Abortion Law Reform Association at a small café
off Piccadilly.66
For over thirty years, ALRA was the principal locus of the pro-abortion
movement in Britain, playing a critical role in the campaign for
the 1967 Abortion Act. |
31 |
| The
association was formally nonpartisan, but it saw its political fortunes
linked with the Labour Party. While never approaching the Conservatives
or Liberals, ALRA worked through spheres of the Labour movement
and left-wing politics, such as the Women's Cooperative Guild, Labour
Party Women's Sections, and publications such as Tribune
and New Statesman. One of its early aims was persuading "six
'key' women" in the Labour Party and Co-operative Society to sponsor
a resolution at a Labour women's conference.67
Much of ALRA's local or provincial activity was conducted in affiliation
with or even through Labour women's sections.68
By the outbreak of war in 1939, sixty-nine groups had affiliated
with ALRA, mostly Labour women's sections and Women's Cooperative
Guilds. The association's class composition is more difficult to
ascertain. The leadership was metropolitan and middle-class. Nonetheless,
the existence of a "penny" membership, which numbered 734 by 1939,
does suggest some working-class participation. |
32 |
| Despite
the role played by Labour women in ALRA, the association's formal
relationship to the party was ambivalent. Although many early twentieth-century
British feminists hoped that Labour would be "the leader of women's
thought in this country," and Labour itself often boasted of being
the "women's party," it remained stubbornly inert on most feminist
issues in the interwar period.69
Birth control was one example. The debate within the party over
the question in the 1920s was for many feminists a painful revelation
of Labour's limitations as a vehicle of women's issues. As has already
been noted, in the 1920s, socialist-feminists and female activists
within the party pursued birth control as a reaction to the plight
of working-class women, even though they were careful to distance
themselves from eugenicist and Malthusian arguments. There were
a few victories in the struggle. Labour women's conferences consistently
supported wider access to birth control, and, in 1926, the Independent
Labour Party (still affiliated to Labour at this point) adopted
a sympathetic policy. Four years later, the second Labour government
lifted a ban on local health authorities giving out contraceptive
information. But more generally, the Labour hierarchy (both male
and female) refused to accept birth control as official party policy.
Some of this opposition was rooted in fear of a backlash from Catholic
voters.70
Some arose from suspicions of eugenics and Malthusianism. Some represented
prudishness and distaste; one Labour MP remarked that contraception
was "the knowledge of the prostitute."71
|
33 |
| Debates
about contraception and abortion also revealed broad discomfort
in Labour circles over the place of the sexual and the female in
the public realm of politics. As Denise Riley has noted, the Labour
Party was a primary site of the tension between public and private
concerns.72
With birth control, this was translated into a conflict between
what was configured as a legitimate "public" interest, such as class,
and unacceptable "private" ones, such as sexuality and gender. Although
Labour had shown interest in the problem of motherhood, contraception
was perceived as being about sexuality, not maternalism. The party's
Chief Woman Officer rejected any birth control policy being taken
up by the party, believing that "[s]ex should not be dragged into
politics."73
In 1924, Labour Woman, the official publication of the party's
women's sections, pleaded that "this subject of relations of husband
and wife should not be treated as a political issue at all."74
The following year, Labour's National Executive Committee and its
annual conference agreed that "the subject of Birth Control is in
its nature not one which should be made a political party issue."75
This rejection offers a clear contrast with the German Social Democratic
Party (SPD) and KPD, which attempted to use contraception as a means
of mobilizing working-class women.76
For British Labour, sex was a private subject and deemed inappropriate
for the public sphere of politics. |
34 |
| But
birth control was spurned as a valid issue not only because it was
about sex but also because it was about the female gender. This
is not to say that Labour was gender-blind in its outlook, far from
it. The firmly articulated opposition between "sex" and "class"
and "public" and "private" issues taken up by the party in the interwar
period obscured a deeply gendered understanding of what constituted
"public" and "class." A central question for the Labour Party between
the wars was poverty among working-class people, particularly that
caused by high levels of unemployment. In the 1920s and 1930s, Labour's
solution was found primarily in three areas: the redistribution
of wealth; the restoration of trade union strength in collective
bargaining, a position eroded by both unemployment and the debacle
of the 1926 General Strike; and, after 1931, the espousal of central
economic planning as an alternative to capitalism. Throughout, the
interests of the "nation," the "people," or the "working class"
were equated with those of the male wage-earner.77
Proposals such as family allowances and contraception not only addressed
material issues in the lives of working-class women but were also
attempts to dislodge the masculinist cast of terms such as the "public"
and "class" and invest these categories with the feminine. Labour
rejected family allowances and contraception as either being irrelevant
to its goals or even as detrimental to them.78
Setting the legitimacy of "public" issues (such as wage levels and
planning) against the illegitimacy of "private" issues (such as
birth control) and playing on a polar tension between "class" and
"sex" belied a choice that had been made between the sexes, one
that valorized the interests of working-class men and diminished
those of working-class women. The rejection of birth control as
a legitimate issue for political consideration was not only the
rejection of a specific question but, more broadly, saw Labour turning
aside a feminine claim on "class" and the "public." |
35 |
| This
can be briefly illustrated by contrasting remarks made at the 1928
Labour women's conference. Defending the party's refusal to take
up abortion and contraception as political issues, the most prominent
female MP in the party, Ellen Wilkinson, denied their value as class
questions: "the issues between one class and another must be planks
in our programme, but this was quite a different matter." Against
this, the socialist-feminist Dora Russell had unsuccessfully tried
to appropriate the language of class to press for Labour's commitment
to contraception: "Mothers had a trade union interest in this matter,
which needed safeguarding by political action."79
|
36 |
| In
the 1930s, the party (including its women's sections) remained officially
hostile to the consideration of abortion law reform.80
In 1935, the annual conference of Labour women only discussed abortion
in the context of mental illness during a pregnancy; the same year,
the Standing Joint Committee of Women's Industrial Organisations
refused to deal with the issue.81
Labour Woman's coverage of the official report on Maternal
Mortality did not even mention abortion; it completely ignored the
Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion.82
Party loyalty and the intensity of the dual crises of the 1930sfascism
abroad and unemployment at homeundoubtedly did much to damp
down potential opposition to the party's official stance on abortion.
But this silence was also due to Labour's gendered conception of
"public" and "private." |
37 |
| ALRA's
natural home may thus have been within the Labour Party's latticework
of socialist, feminist, and working women's organizations, but the
possibility of securing a place for its aspirations within Labour's
politics remained very slight. What made this prospect more daunting
by the 1930s was the marginalization of abortion within the broader
birth control movement. In the 1920s, abortion had been discussed,
but more attention was given to the general question of birth control.
In the 1930s, there was greater separation between the two problems;
abortion became a frontier across which only a few women's and feminist
groups ventured. Nonetheless, the maternal mortality reports of
1932 and 1937 and the severity of the Depression in the early years
of the decade kept up interest in the problem of abortion, particularly
as it affected working-class women. In 1934, the Women's Cooperative
Guild passed a resolution at its annual congress advocating abortion
law reform: "making of abortion a legal operation that can be carried
under the same conditions as any other surgical operation."83
|
38 |
| ALRA
became the most important organization promoting abortion law reform
in the 1930s. Its original aim was "to repeal the present law and
substitute one freeing the medical profession from all restrictions,
except those required by medical and humanitarian considerations."84
ALRA emphasized the improvement of access to contraception, women's
rights to abortion, and maternal health, particularly for working-class
women.85
|
39 |
| Within
ALRA, Stella Browne was the most vocal advocate of abortion as an
"absolute right" for women to achieve both sexual liberation and
personal emancipation. As Sheila Rowbotham has noted, in this regard,
Browne was a link between the sex reformers of the early twentieth
century and "second wave" feminists.86
The defiant and chiliastic tone to her writing on abortion does
set her apart from other socialist-feminists of the 1930s. Browne
saw legal abortion as an acknowledgement of a new or modern category
of femininity, in which freedom from reproduction and physical and
political autonomy were central elements of women's subjectivity:
"women are really human beings and . . . freedom of choice
and deliberate intention are necessary for them in their sexual
relations and their maternity, if they are to make anything of their
status and opportunities." It was also crucial to the broader aim
of sexual liberation, not just for women but for society as a whole;
Browne envisioned "economic justice and international peace . . .
stretching out from the bodies and beds of human lovers."87
It is clear that Browne was more advanced than other abortion reformers,
or at least less cautious about associating abortion with a revolution
in sexual mores. At the same time, she did not reject maternalismmaternity
was accepted as an aspect of modern femininityshe simply valorized
choice about motherhood, reconciling it with active sexuality. |
40 |
| Other
statements emanating from ALRA members eschewed any link between
abortion and sexual liberation. Given the concerns about the decline
of morality in the 1920s and 1930s, this is unsurprising: abortion
was already sufficiently impolitic. Janet Chance instead appropriated
the language of sexual propriety in order to make an argument for
legal abortion: "This Association deplores irresponsible behaviour
with its consequences in shallow experience, illegitimacy and venereal
disease, and it holds that one of the first ways of promoting responsible
sexual behaviour of fine and enduring quality is to make marriage
more tolerable."88
It was not a preoccupation with sex that produced abortion but the
strains of working-class domesticity: "The women who ask for abortion
are not obsessed: the large majority are working-class women who
for good reason consider the birth of a child at a given time a
threat to the welfare of the home, a burden too heavy for their
own strengths or their husband's earnings, and a disaster for the
children already born."89
The key to making this situation more tolerable was not the rejection
of sexuality but the reconciliation of conjugal sexuality with the
protection of the health of working-class wives and the economic
position of working-class households. Legalizing abortion on social
or economic grounds would effect this reconciliation. ALRA members
often made the point that the reconciliation between conjugal sexuality
and domesticity was already enjoyed by women of the middle and upper
classes. One contrasted "women who have money" with the "women who
still appear in the press cuttings" in the legal treatment of abortion;
another argued that "abortion was given to wealthy women every day
in Harley-street and that knowledge and service should be available
to all classes."90
|
41 |
| The
argument for abortion in the 1930s also evinced a clear feminist
strain, concerned with advancing women's rights. In part, this emerged
from the articulation of motherhood as a form of citizenship deserving
recognition. In 1936, after Joseph Stalin had outlawed abortion
in the Soviet Union, Janet Chance and Alice Jenkins pointed out
the civic virtues and rationality of mothers in Russia and Britain: |
42 |
neither the Russian
nor the English mothers are irresponsible and selfish persons
unconcerned with communal issues. The devotion of the working
woman to her family in both countries under conditions of personal
sacrifice is plain proof to the contrary. And it is they who,
in the interests of decency of life, ask that abortion be available
should their case be desperate. Their judgement of the wisdom
or folly of permitting any particular birth would appear to have
some value. But the present English and Russian laws do not treat
the woman as a responsible person whose judgement deserves careful
consideration.91
|
| Jenkins and Chance
wanted an acknowledgement of mothers as rational citizens, due public
rights and obligations to protect the private sphere. Sometimes,
this was suffused by a condescending view of the working-class mothers,
but it remained an argument for public citizenship through maternalism:
"They are our fellow citizens, ignorant no doubt of much, but as
fit as others are, in many cases far fitter, to judge whether in
the interests of the race or the home, another birth is a benefit
or a crime."92
ALRA suggested in its published aims that illegal abortion "cannot
be adequately solved until the reasons for the refusal of motherhood
are given the attention that they deserve," demanding, again, that
the public recognition of motherhood include a consideration of
mothers as rational citizens.93
In this context, ALRA often used the term "voluntary" or "responsible"
parenthood. Arguments for reform of the abortion law also contained
an argument for women's inalienable right over her body in the sphere
of reproduction. It would be the woman's decision to exercise this
right: "The facts of abortion . . . make it primarily
a woman's question . . . The woman for these reasons claims
that, should there be a diversity of opinion in any particular case,
she should have the casting vote."94
|
|
| ALRA's
language of abortion reform thus imbricated arguments for individual
rights and female citizenship within a framework of maternalist
and class concerns. This multivalencetaking account of the
context of working-class life between the wars, the state of motherhood
within that context, and the claims of women's social citizenshipreflected
the transitional or ambiguous quality of femininity in the 1930s
in its description of women in established and newer roles. |
43 |
| It
was only after World War II that ALRA chose a parliamentary strategy
to fulfil its aims. In the 1930s, it relied on educative efforts
within the Labour movement and women's organizations, while seeking
sympathizers from those within the medical and legal professions
frustrated at either the injustice or ambiguity of the existing
abortion law. Despite the provisions of the 1929 Infant Life Preservation
Act allowing abortions to protect the mother's life, doctors were
only too aware, as the medical journal The Lancet stated
in 1936, that "the present state of the law renders a doctor liable
to indictment."95
There was a series of criminal cases in Britain in the 1920s and
1930s that underlined this indeterminacy. In 1931, while finding
a woman guilty of procuring an abortion and causing the death of
another woman, Justice McCardie attacked the state of the abortion
law: "many of those who seek to uphold and administer [the] present
law of abortion are wholly ignorant of the social problems which
not only persist in our midst, but which menace the nation at the
present time . . . I cannot think it is right that a woman
should be forced to bear a child against her will."96
But the law remained unchanged. Even though many of the convictions
for abortion involved those outside the medical professions, doctors
who performed abortions also faced the prospect of prosecution;
in 1936, for example, a female doctor, Laura Sanders-Bliss, was
sentenced to three years' imprisonment for performing five abortions.97
|
44 |
| An
opportunity to challenge the law came in 1938. In April, a soldier
raped a fourteen-year-old girl in the West End of London. The girl
became pregnant. Her parents took her to Joan Malleson, who contacted
Aleck Bourne. He was one of Britain's leading gynecologists, the
consulting obstetrical surgeon at St. Mary's Hospital in London,
and, between 1938 and 1939, the president of the Obstetrical and
Gynecological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Hoping to
flout the existing laws, Malleson requested that Bourne perform
an abortion on the girl: |
45 |
I gather that everybody
connected with the case, the police surgeon, the doctor at her
work, and the school doctor, all feel that curettage should
be allowed her. I understand that some psychiatrist might be prepared
to sponsor the operation.
|
| All
of this, of course, gets us nowhere unless someone of your standing
is prepared to undertake the operation. Many people hold the view
that the best means of correcting the abortion law is to let the
medical profession extend the grounds in suitable cases until the
law becomes obsolete as far as practice goes.98
|
46 |
| Bourne agreed. He
also made clear that he would write to the attorney general and
"'invit[e] him to take action.'"99
The abortion was performed on June 14, 1938. Bourne was charged
soon afterward. |
|
| The
Bourne trial became a public spectacle about abortion. That the
attorney general, Sir Donald Somervell, prosecuted the case underscored
the gravity of this spectacle. Bourne entered a plea of not guilty,
arguing that he performed the abortion to save her life from "mental
collapse" rather than physical danger.100
Somervell adhered to the letter of the 1929 Infant Life Preservation
Act, rejecting any psychological basis for legal abortion. Crucial
to Bourne's defense was his belief that the girl was "normal" and
"moral"; she did not have what he called a "'prostitute mind,'"
proved to him by her "complete breakdown" during a gynecological
examination.101
Other witnesses, such as Joan Malleson, similarly stressed the girl's
morality and respectability; in her original letter to Bourne, read
before the court, Malleson had remarked that "the girl's parents
are so respectable that they do not know the address of any abortionist."102
|
47 |
| Bourne
was acquitted. Superficially, the outcome seemed to offer a "wide
and liberal view of the meaning of 'preservation of the life of
the mother,'" one that included social or psychological reasons.103
But ALRA activists realized the limited scope of the victory, criticizing
those "who think that, especially after the Bourne case, all is
well."104
The Bourne case brought attention to the ambiguities of abortion
law, but it did so under exceptional circumstances and with arguments
that had very little reference to the central concerns of abortion
reformers in the 1930s. The Bourne case came to trial because a
prominent, middle-class male doctor had made a public spectacle
of the case of a "respectable" (and thus probably middle-class)
young girl. The abortion had been performed safely, within the precincts
of a major hospital. Bourne's professionalism had been continually
emphasized. This was the framework of middle-class access to abortion,
whether in its environment, its actors, or even in the network of
contacts between a girl, her parents, a Harley Street doctor, and
a leading gynecologist. It was a network unavailable to working-class
women. It should also be remarked that the Bourne trial tended to
legitimate rather than challenge dominant views of femininity, particularly
as they related to sexual mores. The central character in the trial
was a girl rather than a woman. She was a victim of rape. Most important,
she was deemed "moral" and "normal," which meant not sexually active.
Female sexuality was associated, indeed, with the "prostitute class"
of women. In this regard, the presiding judge, Justice McNaghten,
portentously alluded to Swinburne's poem "Dolores" as an evocation
of such promiscuity: "the cruel/Red mouth like a venomous flower
. . . lips full of lust and laughter . . . marked
cross from the womb and perverse."105
Finally, it is important to note that during the Bourne trial it
was two upper-middle-class professional men of high social standingBourne
and McNaghtenwho judged femininity and drew its boundaries.
Not only did the trial limit abortion to exceptional cases, ones
that were blind to the class aspects of the problem, but the acquittal
did little to reflect the complexities of femininity in the interwar
period. The Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion of 1937 to 1939
gave the issue's supporters a more genuine opportunity to present
their arguments. |
48 |
|
|
| Following
the concerns set out in the 1937 report on maternal
mortality, the Home Office and the Ministry of Health established
the Interdepartmental Committee on Abortion. The committee was chaired
by Sir Norman Birkett. Within its membership, only Dorothy Thurtle,
the daughter of former Labour leader George Lansbury and later a
member of ALRA, was openly sympathetic to the cause of abortion
law reform. The committee met for two years, receiving written and
oral evidence from a variety of groups such as ALRA, the Joint Council
of Midwifery, the British Medical Association, and the National
Council for Equal Citizenship. It published its final report in
1939. Although the Majority Report of the committee acknowledged
that "economic and financial reasons" were the leading causes of
abortion and admitted that "the law relating to abortion is freely
disregarded among women of all types and classes," it rejected the
legalization of abortion for "social, economic and personal reasons."106
|
49 |
| The
work, deliberations, and final report of the committee demonstrated,
first of all, the ambiguity of abortion as a political issue and
its liminal quality with respect to divisions between "public" and
"private," ultimately calling these categories into question. We
can see this partly in the nature of political participation in
the committee's deliberations. On the surface, there was none. But,
by guise and stealth, Labour women's groups did participate. The
best example is the East Midlands Working Women's Association, the
only working-class group to present evidence to the committee. The
EMWWA was, in fact, the 1,300-strong Women's Section of the East
Midlands Regional organization of the Labour Party (based in the
provincial English cities of Nottingham and Derby), whose desire
for official representation had been turned down by party headquarters,
forcing the women to form "this non-political Association . . .
out of the political body."107
Abjuring a formal political affiliation and structure (and thus
existing in a borderland of politics) was the only means left to
these Labour women to politicize what their party had dismissed
as merely private. The discussions of the committee also revealed
a restless slippage between "public" and "private." This hinged
on abortion's perceived role in shaping public morality. The committee's
final report stated unequivocally that any laws legalizing abortion
threatened "the fundamental principles on which society is based,
and we believe that, if given effect, they would have serious consequences."108
The committee itself linked the private to the public through abortion.
Abortion could thus be played both ways: marginalized by political
parties like Labour because it was private and controlled by the
criminal law because it was public. |
50 |
| The
committee's work also underscored the centrality of class in the
consideration of abortion. The working-class woman, with her double
burden as wage earner and mother, was the common subject of concern
among all parties in these deliberations. In its testimony, the
ALRA delegation, including Janet Chance, Joan Malleson, and Stella
Browne, emphasized illegal and unsafe abortions as principally a
problem of working-class women: "The safer abortion is always done
by the medical profession, and the unsafer is occasionally done
by themselves, but rarely in the middle and upper classes of society."109
In particular, it was tied to the maintenance of living standards
among the working classes during the Depression: "The reasons most
often given for desiring abortion is the maintenance of an adequate
standard of life for the family as a whole; whether this be judged
financially, or in terms of health, house room, ambition in education,
or general well-being."110
In Chance's words, "the working woman needs this relief more than
her sisters."111
From other sources, the bias toward abortion as a problem of working-class
women was explicit. The Midwives Institute, drawing on a questionnaire
of 1,111 of their members, stated that "[a]bortionists will flourish
in any industrial area where financial and housing conditions are
so bad."112
Dr. Violet Russell, the assistant medical officer for the London
borough of Kensington, conducted a survey of 500 women in the spring
and summer of 1937.113
Russell had not concerned herself with the problem of abortions
or attitudes toward sexuality in the richer areas of the borough.
Instead, she concentrated on its northern half, where there were
cramped accommodations and a low average weekly income of £2
19s 8d, to "ascertain the attitude of the working-class parents
in Kensington towards childbirth and the bringing-up of children."114
Ivy Roche of the EMWWA put her association's bias in blunt terms:
"We have only taken the cases of women who are working, whose husbands
are out of work, and of working class people generally. We have
not bothered about anybody else."115
The comments of Roche and her colleague, Elizabeth Oakes, were,
in this regard, haunted by the shadow of male unemployment and the
economic crisis facing the interwar working family. |
51 |
| Changes
in modern femininity (particularly with respect to motherhood) and
sexual morality were also themes running through the committee's
deliberations. These perspectives were cleanly divided between the
pessimism about sexual mores of those opposing abortion and the
reassuring tone adopted by abortion reformers. Committee members
were particularly alarmist in this regard. Some felt that legal
abortion would merely contribute to an existing welter of sin, increasing
"the number of people who were having promiscuous intercourse."
They were especially concerned that the modern age had brought with
it an antagonism to motherhood: "the fashion of having children
has gone out, and people think it stupid to have them." At some
points, this anxiety strained credulity. Roche and Oakes were asked,
for example, "Would there be any children?" if abortion were legalized.
One committee member seemed surprised to hear that there were women
who still wanted to have families and babies, "and all the rest
of it."116
|
52 |
| Given
the gravity of this point with the committee, it is not surprising
that advocates of abortion emphasized women's morality and commitment
to motherhood. Single women were, for example, rarely mentioned
in this regard. Russell stated that her control group of 500 working-class
women were "respectable young citizens of the working class," without
the usual stigmata of working-class immorality: "Most of the women
were clean and careful with their dress and there was very little
evidence of drunkenness."117
Russell explicitly addressed the question of moral decay among working-class
women: |
53 |
there is no deterioration
in the character of the young working-class woman of the present
day, who possesses all the devotion and affection for her husband
and her children which was shown by her predecessors. What is
now developed in these young parents, which was often absent in
the past, is a sense of responsibility for the future of their
children shown by the frequently repeated phrase that "it is not
fair to bring children into the world in poverty." A change of
attitude of these working-class parents has developed as a result
of their realisation that it is possible to control conception;
but there appeared little evidence of selfishness on their part
in their wish to limit the number of their children, although
it is obvious that a higher standard of living now exists than
was present thirty years ago.118
|
| If anything, Russell
felt that attitudes had become more moral with respect to
children and families: |
|
The important fact
is that so many young parents feel that it is right to limit their
families, and feel guilty at their failure to do so, whereas in
the past a large family was a source of legitimate pride. On the
other hand, speaking generally, the individual children seem more
valued by their parents than they were in the past, and the mother
is beginning to regard the death of a child both as a catastrophe
and as a reproach to her mothercraft; one no longer hears any
woman volunteer that she has "buried ten." Moreover, the child
is regarded less as the future support of their parents in their
old age and more as an individual to whom these parents wish to
give the best possible start in life.119
|
| In this context,
Russell assured the committee that "[t]he maternal instinct is strong."120
Working-class women continued to be good mothers and good citizens:
their use of abortion did not detract from these qualities. |
|
| The
representatives of the EMWWA similarly emphasized that they were
defending rather than challenging motherhood and domesticity. "Women
in the main are just as anxious to have children as ever they were,"
Roche and Oakes stated, but unemployment and poverty had made multiple
pregnancies an untenable economic prospect for working-class women:
"they are frightened of the present insecurity of their position."121
In its written memorandum to the committee, the association asked
that abortion be legalized not only in cases of rape, incest, or
criminal assault but, most controversially, on what could be seen
as social or economic grounds: "where [the] mother is a wage earner
and/or another child would be a burden."122
This language addressed the double meaning of women's work. Against
the threat of high unemployment among men and strictly circumscribed
public assistance, abortion would support women in both roles: |
54 |
In places like Nottingham,
Derby, Mansfield, where the bulk of the industries are light,
women and juveniles are the wage-earners. The women feel that
so long as their wages are necessary for keeping the home going,
a pregnancy would be a disaster and an abortion is resorted to.
Even when the mother does not go out to work, she contends that
the extra two shillings a week allowed under the Means Test is
not enough to keep another child. Other reasons given for "not
wanting another child" were increased cost of living, rent for
Council house, fares, etc. Mothers who were prepared to "space"
their children could not afford the continued cost of birth control
appliances.123
|
| The Means Test (the
assessment of family income to qualify for public assistance) was
a particular problem for the protection of the family. With the
Means Test, childbirth had to be calculated in shillings, as one
of the EMWWA representatives made clear: "May I point out to you
that under the Means Tests under which so many of our people live,
you are allowed 2s. for each child . . . A mother may
feel that 2s. is not enough to justify another child."124
Whether women were wage earners or non-working mothers, abortion
was one strategy to shore up the family against the collapse of
the male breadwinner ideal. |
|
| The
argument for abortion was thus framed as a means of protecting the
social condition of maternity, particularly working-class maternity.
At the same time, this maternalist argument was indicted with other
languages, ones that invoked more radical visions of femininity
and women's rights. According women respect as citizens, for example,
ran through ALRA's evidence. When it presented its memorandum and
evidence to the committee, ALRA stressed that illegal abortion was
not the choice of selfish, irrational, and promiscuous women but
of "parents who loyally serve the best interests of the family,
as they see them."125
Chance held that "voluntary parenthood" was the result of rational
reflection, not the symptom of an immoral society: "It means in
principle that the considered judgement of serious citizens on this
question must be taken into account . . . [I]n broad principle
we must consider that our fellow citizens' reasons are sound and
serious and worthy ones, when they consider birth would be a disaster.
I think we are taking a great responsibility on ourselves when we
conscript unwilling thoughtful people into parenthood."126
Chance's insistent use of "citizen" to describe women is noteworthy,
inscribing femininity within a clearly public space. This had resonances
with the emphasis on motherhood as citizenship made by feminist
maternalism earlier in the century. |
55 |
| The
right of choice for which ALRA argued was not only couched in terms
of membership as citizens within the public sphere, it carried with
it an argument for female autonomy in both public and private spheres.
One version of this came with Browne's testimony (as an individual,
rather than a member of ALRA), in which she called for women's sexual
liberation.127
But Browne's comments were admittedly outside a maternalist context.
Within that framework, the delegates of the EMWWA were particularly
emphatic in their belief that abortion be an unchallengeable right
for women. When it was suggested by the committee that family allowances,
full employment, or more generous housing and health benefits might
be better ways to preserve families than the legalization of abortion,
the representatives of the EMWWA insisted that, whatever social
and economic reform had been attempted, abortion and birth control
remained crucial to that aim.128
This implied that, once granted, abortion would became an inalienable
right. Roche and Oakes also insisted that, as a choice, abortion
had to be left solely in the hands of individual women, not those
of the state, the medical profession, or even husbands. This was
particularly true of "social" or "economic" abortions. Only the
woman affected, Roche stated, could be the judge of "economic circumstances";
if she saw those economic circumstances put at risk by the birth
of another child, she had a right to an abortion: "if a woman goes
and asks for it on economic grounds, then it does seem to me that
she should have it."129
At one point, this insistence on the autonomy of individual women
led to a clear moment of frisson in the proceedings: |
56 |
Q. What it really comes
to is this: that the woman can go to a doctor and say: "Please
give me an abortion"? That is really what it comes to, if she
is to be the judge. There is to be no appeal from it. It is universal,
legalised abortion. That is what Mrs Roche is advocating?
A. Yes.
Q. If the mother is
to be the judge of the economic circumstances, it really means
that you have complete universal, legalised abortion, does not
it?
A. Well, what I want
is this
Q. Is that so? Is that
really the point of view which you desire to put?
A. May I answer it
in this way?
Q. You most certainly
answer in any way you like; but the question is capable of an
answer Yes or No. That is really your point of view, I take it,
is not it?
A. Then may I say Yes?
. . .
Q. That is perfectly logical
and perfectly right: but what you are really saying is this,
is not it: I do advocate universal, legalized abortion, because
the existing situation is very much worse in its evils than
legalised abortion would bring about?
A. Yes, I think that is so.130
|
|
|
| As Lara Marks has
suggested, this determination may have been rooted in the experience
of World War I and higher expectations held by women for the quality
of their lives and the ambit of their own actions: "While most of
the women employed in large factories left once they were married,
many of them carried the experience they had learned in the workplace
into their married lives. For many of these women, the factory had
raised their expectations of what a home should contain, what role
their husband should play, and what they were entitled to as citizens
in the provision of housing, welfare and maternity care."131
The subjects of Ferdynand Zweig's study Women's Life and Labour
(1952) similarly felt "the | |