"A New World for Women"? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s

Abstract

ABORTION MUST BE THE KEY TO 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 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, 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 1.3 This is particularly true of work on the controversies surrounding Article 218 in interwar Germany and the 1920 loi sce'Mrate in France, as Cornelie Usborne, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Louise Roberts have shown.4