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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France Gay L. Gullickson Elinor Accampo . Blessed Motherhood, Bitter Fruit: Nelly Roussel and the Politics of Female Pain in Third Republic France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xii + 312 pp. Ill. $50.00 (ISBN: 0-8018-8404-7). Alone among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French feminists, Nelly Roussel (1878–1922) advocated women's right to determine the size of their families through the use of birth control and to avoid pain in childbirth. In turn-of-the-century France, where bourgeois thinkers identified femininity with self-sacrifice and believed that the use of mechanical means to prevent conception (e.g., sponges, spermicides, condoms) was unnatural, these neo-Malthusian views were both heretical and threatening, as Elinor Accampo demonstrates in this meticulously researched and carefully argued book. In school, Roussel was taught, as all girls were, to serve others and to bear hardship with "joyous resignation" (p. 19). It was a message she would spend her life resisting, although she would marry and bear two children. She married very well, and her husband—the sculptor, Freemason, and political radical Henri Godet—became her soul mate, business manager, confidant, political consultant, and strongest supporter. Godet made no demands that she spend her time at home as a self-sacrificing wife and mother; he organized her speaking tours, endured her many absences without complaint, and was bereft when she died at age forty-four. Roussel's commitment to feminism, neo-Malthusianism, and a woman's right to bear children without pain was partially rooted in her personality and experiences. [End Page 216] She was not what we would identify as a deeply maternal woman—her children grew up in the nearby households of relatives (her mother and her sister), where she visited them. She suffered greatly during the birth of her first child in1899, and was filled with dread when she found she was pregnant again four years later. Always an activist, Roussel sought out information about doctors and put herself under the care of a Dr. Lucas who was experimenting with anesthesia in childbirth. His experiments resulted in the deaths of many women, but that was unknown to Roussel and Godet at the time, and she was delighted to have found a way to give birth without the pain of her first experience. Roussel's political positions were founded on more than personal experience, however. Her critique of women's lives was multifaceted: she did not believe that pain was a natural component of womanhood; she attacked the church's belief in female martyrdom; she argued that motherhood was a kind of animal slavery rather than a source of human joy; and she believed that science could free women from repeated pregnancies and the pain of childbirth. She was widely liked and admired by both men and women, including feminists, but found little support for her positions: feminists believed that their quest for political rights would be harmed if they spoke publicly about such a taboo subject as childbirth; the Catholic Church believed that pain in childbirth was a means of salvation for women; and doctors believed that the use of anesthesia would interfere with labor. As was unfortunately common, Roussel's life was hampered and shortened by chronic and untreatable illnesses. In the long run, her faith in the ability of science to improve women's lives was well founded—but in the short run, science could do nothing for her. Using the correspondence between Roussel and other members of her family, Accampo chronicles her long and losing struggle against acute intestinal pain and pulmonary tuberculosis. Roussel and Godet borrowed money (mainly from Roussel's wealthy stepfather) for increasingly frequent and costly treatments at clinics and spas. In keeping with gender convictions, some believed that her frequent travels and lectures were the source of her intestinal illness—but Roussel knew she felt better when she was on a speaking tour than she did at any other time, and resumed her travels whenever she could. There is no way to analyze her illnesses unequivocably. Accampo suggests that she may have suffered from abdominal...