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From Cradle to Grave: The Politics of Peace and Reproduction in the Anti-Fascist Campaigns of British Women's Organisations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2022
Abstract
This article examines the activism of British women's organisations to establish peaceful internationalism built on women's roles as mothers, while simultaneously opposing the rise of European fascism in the interwar period. It considers the maternalist arguments made by women's organisations in their work for disarmament, which coincided with the increasing militarism of fascist governments and their promotion of the idea that women's roles were primarily as mothers to create future soldiers for the state. These campaigns were also connected to debates about the birth rate, and women's organisations promoted the idea that women were actively refusing biological motherhood until policy makers heeded women's demands. This article demonstrates how feminist activists in interwar Britain fought to claim and mobilise their own gendered and politicised understandings of women's roles as mothers at a time when they feared fascism would strip women of the political rights they had worked for decades to achieve.
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- The Contemporary European History Prize
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
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94 Ibid.
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96 Kean and Oram, ‘“Men Must Be Educated and Women Must Do It”’, 159.
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99 ‘The Annual Conference’, The Woman Teacher, 20 Jan. 1933; Kean and Oram, ‘“Men Must Be Educated and Women Must Do It”’.
100 Ethel Stead, ‘A Call to Action’, The Woman Teacher, 16 June 1933.
101 Florence Key, ‘From the Editor's Desk’, The Woman Teacher, 18 Feb. 1938.
102 Open Door Council, Twelfth Annual Report, 29.
103 Ibid., 10–11, 26.
104 ‘Women in the New Germany’, Woman's Outlook, 2 July 1938.
105 ‘Editorial Chat: Children of the Future’, Woman's Outlook, 30 July 1938.
106 ‘Editorial Chat: What Makes Cities Grow and Decline?’, Woman's Outlook, 10 June 1939.
107 Ibid. Other feminists made similar arguments about economic security and the birth rate, for instance see Mitchison, Naomi, Comments on Birth Control (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), 25–6Google Scholar.
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