Pronatalism, Eugenics, and the Politics of State Health in Weimar Germany

Abstract

During the Weimar Republic years, the public sphere gobbled up a great deal of previously private territory. Decisions that had been matters of religious doctrine and intra-familial economics became subjects of loud, vigorous, and public debate. Family size decreased, the birthrate dropped, and popular wisdom proposed that women were to blame. Women's choices regarding marriage, childbearing, birth control, work, style, and personal habits were considered legitimate targets of public intervention. Childbearing, particularly, became the conceptual nexus of multiple social and moral concerns. Highly charged arguments about motherhood and the declining birthrate emblematized deep anxieties: many people feared liberalization of sexual behavior and morality, and struggled to re-envision women's roles amid the tumult of rapid industrialization and economic upheaval. Against a backdrop of accelerating modernization, the pronatalist movement was born, from complex factors and comprised of unlikely allies, with the stated aim of increasing population and elevating the status of motherhood.I will argue that, far from being an exclusively right-wing or anti-feminist phenomenon, pronatalism was expressed across the political spectrum. While the declining birth rate provided a focal point for the energies of the pronatalist movement, its efforts were deeply entwined with subtler ideological elements, such as the construction of womanhood and modernizing identity. Pronatalist policy debates were exploited by female activists on the left and right as one of the few areas where their political activity could be effective. In matters of motherhood, if nowhere else, women seemed to possess natural expertise and innate moral superiority, and they used the privileging of their perspectives to claim authority in the public arena.