Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938

1. Nostalgia, Modernism, and the Family Ideal

1 NOSTALGIA, MODERNISM, AND THE FAMILY IDEAL To study the American family is to conduct a rescue mission into the dreamland of our national self-concept. No subject is more closely bound up with our sense of a di≈cult present—and our nostalgia for a happier past. john demos, ‘‘Myths and Realities in the History of the American Family,’’ 1976 2 The Family Ideal The United States invested heavily in the reproduction of its citizenry during the early twentieth century. However, these investments did not take the form of legislated child allowances or baby bonuses. Instead, national campaigns for reclamation, conservation, country life, and eugenics became prominent expressions of American pronatalism. Recognizing them as such is not a matter of understanding how they altered the birthrate but a matter of understanding how reproduction was associated in each campaign with nostalgic ideals of the family, motherhood, or the home. In the United States, reproduction was regulated as much by social pressure and created conventions as by actual legislation. Feminist scholars grasped the importance of recognizing pronatalism in the early 1970s as they spoke out against the social pressure to bear children. Motivated by concerns regarding overpopulation and individual reproductive freedom, scholars such as Judith Blake argued that a new population policy could not be created until the existing pronatalist policy was recognized. Social and cultural messages regarding sex roles, family norms, and even feminism, Blake argued, carried implicit and explicit endorsements of women’s purported responsibility to reproduce. The relentless and pervasive nature of these messages led Blake to argue that American pronatalism was coercive, not because women were forced to act against their will, but because the decision to not reproduce was not presented to them as a reasonable alternative. As such, she saw pronatalism as a ‘‘barrier to self-determination for women.’’∞ Blake was reacting to cultural messages presented to women in the 1970s. Like Blake, I have found pronatalism in a set of cultural messages , but these messages were associated with an earlier array of Populist and Progressive e√orts. In the early twentieth century, coercive means of reproductive regulation as social control were created, articulated, and woven into cultural constructions such as the ‘‘home on the land’’ or the ‘‘fitter family.’’ These constructed ideals helped create social pressure by enrolling the cultural force of tradition and nostalgia to justify intrusions into what had been private deliberations concerning reproduction. In contrast to the United States, pronatalism in countries such as France and Germany has been much more overt.≤ With state-sponsored programs , subsidies, and even medals for mothers, countries such as Nazi Germany articulated their interest in promoting the reproduction of its The Family Ideal 3 citizenry explicitly and directly. Historians regard the United States as much more reserved in its policies, if indeed any such policies are recognized at all.≥ The U.S. government did not provide subsidies for large families; instead, reformers and politicians promoted pronatalism indirectly as part of public campaigns for land reclamation, playgrounds, or suburban development. These reformers knowingly promoted families, but their e√orts were not always explicitly framed in terms of reproduction —they promoted reproduction indirectly. The challenge for the historian of American pronatalism is to detect the often-indirect campaigns that promoted reproduction. Contemporary analysts of population policy recognize pronatalism in a range of e√orts including loans to start families; child allowances; child tax exemptions; guaranteed income for care-givers; parental leave and flex time; subsidized housing, child care, and playgrounds; restricted access to birth control and abortion; and the creation family-friendly civic environments, as well as pronatalist educational and propaganda campaigns.∂ Within the United States, reformers embraced some of these policies, but their implications for reproduction were seldom given voice. Rather than focus on individual decisions to have children on not, in this book, I focus on how ideological and cultural ideals influenced and shaped pronatalist policies and reform e√orts in the United States. I claim that from 1890 to the 1930s nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, the family, and home were used to construct and legitimate political agendas and social policies concerning reproduction. Ideologically, motherhood and childbearing in general have been understood as bearing on issues of nationalism, individualism, and feminism.∑ In the United States, pronatalism continued these associations even as it drew on particularly American ideas of agrarianism and scientific racism. By focusing on nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, the family...