Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France (review)

Accampo's biography of Roussel, an unorthodox feminist of the French Third Republic, is first-rate. Roussel has international significance as the first feminist to make birth control an issue and arguably the only one since her era to attempt integrating the issue with feminism rather than positioning it as a matter of public health or pragmatic family economics. Roussel's campaign was not simply to spread the word about birth control in a nation that already had a notoriously low birth rate and a powerful pronatalist movement accustomed to invoking patriotism for public support. Accampo keenly analyzes the deeper moral positions that made Roussel a controversial figure even among progressive reformers.

Roussel's campaign was partly defensive, aimed at countering the pronatalist propaganda encouraging women to have large families. Her proposals were often troubling because they challenged fundamental, Catholic assumptions about the natural ordering of the world—including the connection of women's sexual intercourse to reproduction and of reproduction to the pain of childbirth. Moreover, for Republicans having children was a patriotic duty; the pain of childbirth was what women owed to la patrie. Feminists, too, were often shocked by Roussel's emphasis on women's control over their bodies. They founded their demands for women's rights on motherhood, which they viewed as thoroughly compatible with the most perfect execution of wifely duties, not on sexual freedom. Hence, Roussel's insistence on individualism for women was an unwelcome message.

This biography is a notable success from a political perspective. Accampo gives considerable attention to the reception of Roussel's ideas by the public. Roussel was a popular lecturer as well as an author of plays and pamphlets. She had the courage to tour the provinces and to bring her message even to working women in the small towns of France. She was usually the first female lecturer whom these women had ever seen, let alone the first feminist. Skilled at communicating her passion about "the eternally sacrificed woman," she often aroused sympathy among them for her controversial ideas. But when she was attacked in the press for these convictions, her seemingly natural allies on the left in the war against tradition rarely came to her defense.

Accampo is able to draw upon Roussel's personal life to deepen the meaning of her public activism. Roussel's radical approach to motherhood emerged from the disillusionment that she suffered during her first pregnancy. Ironically, she had two more children, neither of them much-wanted, despite her public stance on a woman's right to control her own body. Henry Godet, her progressive husband—a sculptor—was supportive of her ideas but wary of the enmity that they would attract.

Accampo concludes the book with a worthy analysis of Roussel's place in the French culture of maternity as well as in the international birth-control movement. This discussion drives home the primordial orthodoxies that Roussel hoped to dispel by invoking reason and human rights.