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

Surely there was no more quixotic campaign in Third Republic France than the one undertaken by Nelly Roussel (1878-1922)-the subject of Elinor Accampo's sensitive new biography-for "freedom of motherhood" (more colloquially translated as "voluntary motherhood") through the use of birth control. Facing a declining birthrate and a powerful, populous new Germany on its eastern border, France's obsessive concern with the size of its population steadily mounted in the decades before 1914, only to peak after the heavy losses of the First World War. Before and after the war, even French feminists did not deny the need for France to repopulate, articulating their demands for women's rights in the language of motherhood and sacrifice. A small neo-Malthusian movement that originated in the 1890s was completely shut down by a 1920 law that outlawed not only all female methods of contraception but also the distribution of any advertising or propaganda encouraging birth control. Despite this hostile climate, however, Roussel's public speeches on reproductive rights regularly drew hundreds of sympathetic spectators, riveted as much by her charismatic speaking ability as the substance of her message: that women should be able to free themselves from the pain of childbirth and the duty of motherhood.

Given this popularity, it is surprising that Accampo's book should be the first full-length biography of Roussel to be published in either English or French. It relies on copious documentation of Roussel's life, ranging from her writings and speeches to private correspondence to police records. Methodologically, Accampo stays well within the genre of traditional cradle-to-grave biography but one informed by feminist scholarship as well as postmodern conceptions of performance and self-fashioning. In this biography, as in Roussel's life, the personal and the political are intimately interwoven. Throughout, Accampo analyzes Roussel's personal experiences with marriage (generally happy), childbirth (three pregnancies, two of which compromised her health), and motherhood (care of her two surviving children was delegated mainly to her husband, parents, and sister). Indeed, Roussel's difficult pregnancies and her ambivalence as a mother appear to have strengthened her political beliefs. But equally important were her own thwarted ambitions-her parents stopped her (Catholic) education at age fifteen and steadfastly opposed her becoming an actress-as well as the freethinking milieu she discovered after marriage to sculptor Henri Godet, whose political sympathies were anticlerical and leftist and whose support for his wife's causes was unstinting. Roussel became an early contributor to Marguerite Durand's feminist newspaper La Fronde and joined the feminist Union fraternelle des femmes (Fraternal Union of Women, UFF). Here Roussel found a group of ambitious, activist, "new" women who served as friends, educators, and role models. But she diverged from them in also becoming a disciple of Paul Robin, the founder of the Ligue de la régénération humaine (League of Human Regeneration), a pro-birth control association that promoted female sexual autonomy. In the pronatalist atmosphere of fin-de-siècle France, most feminists rejected Robin, his league, and his message, fearing-rightly-that it would condemn them by association. Roussel became one of the few links between the French feminist and birth control movements, which, as Accampo points out, did not really find common ground until the 1960s, a good forty years after Roussel's death.

Championing reproductive rights for women also gave Roussel the opportunity to exercise her considerable gifts for public speaking and acting. In 1903 she wrote a short play, Par la révolte (Through Revolution), that recast the biblical story of Eve as an allegory in which Eve revolts against the demands of church, state, and society to bear children in repentance for her original sin. In Roussel's lecture tours she combined several hours of fiery speech making with selected scenes from this play. By all accounts...