Search Results

The introduction sets out the contexts for understanding the early modern French state's decision to intervene proactively in its subjects' reproductive lives. It defines pronatalism, a terms that refers to policies intended that promote both population growth and the extension of the gendered identities associated with procreation and childrearing. The adoption of pronatalist policies in early modern France coincides with some of the earliest statistical evidence for the practice of contraception; both contraception and pronatalism demonstrate the spread of attitudes accepting human intervention to shape fertility. Pronatalist policy also extended the early modern French state's growing interest in regulating the domain of marriage and family.

The government of Louis XIV extended pronatalist policy to New France, hoping to use marriage and prolific procreation to implant settled, French‐style civilization in North America. This chapter reviews attempts to promote marriage and population growth in New France. The first part examines the role of marriage in French Jesuits' quest to convert the indigenous population from about 1630 to 1660. Strict Catholic Reformation standards for monogamous, indissoluble marriage proved difficult to maintain in the colonial environment. The chapter then surveys the royal government's investments to promote population growth in the period from 1663 to 1690, including its export of French females to Canada for marriage, financial support for the formation of settler households and use of censuses to monitor population movement. Settler households were marked by high fertility, but the active promotion of settled domesticity failed to “civilize” New France in the ways that royal officials had anticipated.

Louis XIV's 1666 pronatalist policy offered tax privileges to fathers of ten or more children in order to encourage marriage and abundant procreation. This chapter offers a picture of the day‐to‐day functioning of the Old Regime system for collecting the main direct tax, the taille, and traces the conflicts that ensued between heads‐of‐household seeking to claim the awards and the local tax collectors, élection officers, judges of the Cour des aides, intendants and controller‐general who managed tax repartition and collection. Communities had a strong financial incentive to resist new privileges, but they also had an interest in supporting the integrity of households with many children if threatened by poverty. The government's inability to control the boundaries of pronatalist privilege led to a partial revocation of the 1666 edict in 1683, a failure that illustrates the fundamental limits of royal power in the seventeenth century.

Wartime publicity frequently described Britain as a family and later images of the Blitz also stress the courage and endurance of families as a key institution that enabled the nation to surmount the crisis. While acknowledging positive representations of family, this chapter examines the equally widespread alarm among government officials, journalists and social work groups about wartime dislocation of family life—as measured by rising statistics for divorce, delinquency and illegitimacy, press stories about ‘good time girls’, and claims that sexual immorality was a pervasive problem. The chapter argues that to a striking degree these anxieties centred upon women from poor and working-class families. Family became a point of intersection for a range of public debates about child welfare, crime, sexual morality, and eugenic concerns about the nation's low birth rate—all of which shaped debates both about post-war reconstruction and social welfare reform.

Postwar Americans concurrently supported marriage as the cornerstone of personal fulfillment and believed it to be in crisis. They endorsed the institution in unprecedented numbers, as the vast majority of the population chose wedlock over single life, and marriage became increasingly central to national ideology. Kinsey's studies reported that less than half of Americans' sexual activity took place between spouses, and observers imparted the prevalence and devastating effects of premarital sex, infidelity, divorce, and other ills. The marital relationship meant many things to postwar observers. At a moment of intense pronatalism, it was the necessary setting for the birth and rearing of legitimate children. Generally understood as an intensely private realm based on an emotional bond between unique individuals, marriage promised personal happiness and fulfillment. In addition, it was the central, and to some the only, proper setting for sexual expression.

This chapter examines the Russian government's attempts to graft a pronatalist agenda onto housing policy and how the pronatalist turn acquired specific meanings in the context of market transition, a cultural logic it terms “maternity capitalism.” Maternity capital provided starting capital for women and their families; investment capital for the housing market; and human capital for the nation. The state, by determining who deserved this capital and how it could be invested, claimed for itself the right to manage the macroeconomy of reproduction. If citizens endorsed the policy, the state could accrue symbolic capital, that is, legitimacy. This chapter places Russian pronatalism in comparative perspective before discussing maternity capital within the context of civic nationalism. It then considers the cultural logic of Russian pronatalism as well as the state's objectives in disbursing maternity capital. It also explores official discourses on the link between housing and fertility and concludes by highlighting how maternity capital fosters inequality in housing markets.

This chapter examines how Russia's young people have reacted to government policies that seek to stimulate birth by investing in the housing sector. Housing-based baby bonuses could potentially influence birthrates through two mechanisms. First, if maternity capital improves housing conditions, and housing conditions determine reproductive behavior, then maternity capital should lead to higher fertility. Second, if maternity capital helps to legitimize the transition to a housing market, this could improve women's confidence in the future, which would incline them to have more children. Maternity capital is likely to fail on both counts, whether as housing policy or a legitimation strategy. This chapter draws on the results of a Kaluga study conducted in 2002 to discuss the attitudes of Russians toward reproduction, maternity capital, and pronatalism as part of housing policy. It shows that maternity capital has undermined the government's legitimacy and backfired as a civic-nationalist project.

This chapter examines two recent surges in pronatalism that aligned elite white women’s fertility with national security. It first discusses the “opt-out revolution” of the early twenty-first century, which profiled an exodus of professional women from prestigious careers in favor of full-time domesticity. It turns then to the proliferation of fertility campaigns that targeted young professional women in the latter part of the decade, offering lifestyle directives and encouraging the use of assisted reproductive technologies to secure the possibility of pregnancy later in life. The chapter highlights how these pronatalist campaigns are usefully understood in concert; they highlight the valorization of elite motherhood as a critical dimension of homeland security culture.

This book explores the ideological and cultural ideals that shaped pronatalist policies and reform efforts in the United States from 1890 to the 1930s. Using nostalgic modernism as an interpretative framework, it discusses how political agendas and social policies concerning reproduction were constructed and legitimized using nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, the family, and home. The book also shows how pronatalism linked motherhood and childbearing to issues of nationalism, individualism, and feminism, as well as pronatalism's own relationship with American ideas of agrarianism and scientific racism. It examines the ideologies and practices of American pronatalism by focusing on five major historical figures and their respective social agendas or policies: Mary Elizabeth Lease and her maternalist agenda; Florence Sherbon and her eugenics campaign for fitter families; George H. Maxwell and his promotion of land reclamation and irrigation as a means to reconstruct society through home building; Theodore Roosevelt and his campaign for conservation and country life; and Edward Alsworth Ross and his sociological theory of race suicide and social control.

From Mary Elizabeth Lease's maternalist agenda and George H. Maxwell's homecroft movement, to Edward Alsworth Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control, Florence Sherbon's eugenics campaign for “fitter families” and Theodore Roosevelt's advocacy of country life and the conservation of race, American pronatalism appealed to the nostalgic ideal of the farmer and the redemptive value of the rural family. This chapter explores the ideological and cultural ideals that shaped pronatalism in the United States between the 1890s and the 1930s. It also discusses the articulation of the mother and the home in the campaign for agrarianism, and in invoking the modernist promise of reform, racism, and reproduction.

This chapter examines how toxic waste issues have triggered anxieties over fertility and family health in Tokyo. It first considers the disconnect between community ideals such as close-knit family ties, warmth, fertility, and a cooperative ethic, and the urban lives of many Tokyo residents. It then explores Japanese pronatalism from pre–World War II colonialist designs, which intensified during wartime, through to the high-speed growth period and its own impact on state priorities and state control. In addition to specific anxieties surrounding infertility, sex, reproduction, the decline in birth rates, family, virility, and manhood, the chapter also discusses the “geography of blame” that arose from birth defects and miscarriages suffered by those living in proximity to waste facilities. Finally, it analyzes government efforts to stimulate economic growth alongside population growth and how such objectives were complicated by the issue of toxic waste.

This chapter will show how métis protection societies appropriated World War I-era metropolitan rhetoric on depopulation to make the case that fatherless métis children of French (or other European) fathers should be considered French.

As the victory over the Nazis came into sight and the demographic disaster became apparent, the Soviet leadership keenly felt the need to strengthen pronatalist policy. Several proposals submitted in 1943–1944 expanded existing pronatalist measures without a fundamental change in the vision of population growth. However, Khrushchev, proconsul of devastated Ukraine, submitted the most comprehensive overhaul based on a new vision for population and pronatalism. The government policy reveals a two-faced practice of Bolshevik language, claiming to “protect motherhood” when addressing the masses, and non-Bolshevik discourse, population engineering language, among the top leadership. In the final law, policymakers prioritized giving men the incentive to father extramarital children over assuring the overall well-being of unmarried mothers and their children. This chapter traces the creation of the 1944 Family Law, legislation that definitively shaped the postwar generation in a deeply gendered manner.

This second case study chapter examines the use of gender norms and sexualization as political tools in Russia. It analyzes the use of gender norms in political activism on patriotism and two policy issues typically linked to patriotism: military conscription and pro-natalism. The chapter provides an in-depth look at the gendering of the debate over conscription, including the perspective of both pro- and anti-regime youth movements. Activism by these liberal Russian opposition groups and pro-Putin groups is analyzed, including activities at the annual pro-Kremlin youth camp, Seliger. Seliger in particular provides a unique perspective on the gendering of the debate over the state’s demographic policy.

This chapter explores the Save the Babies campaign, a pronatal campaign spearheaded by the Office of Indian Affairs during the Progressive Era to combat Indian infant mortality. The chapter addresses each of the campaign’s three basic components—home visits conducted by field matrons; annual baby shows, where medical staff evaluated infants; and the promotion of hospital childbirth—while dedicating particular attention to the latter. The chapter further considers the choices Native women made regarding where and with whom they delivered and finds that a minority of women accepted hospital childbirth almost immediately. As maternity patients, Native women disrupted the OIA’s vision of how a hospital should look, sound, and function.

This chapter discusses how Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ARTs) affected women’s agency. Mothering and experiencing motherhood are the ultimate forms of woman’s agency. Yet with the emergence of ARTs, patriarchal norms are reinforced and woman’s desire to undergo biological motherhood is undermined. Some argue, however, that ARTs improve the freedom of a woman to whether or not to engage in another pregnancy; to simply put it, freedom to practice the sense of economic practicality. This chapter explores how ARTs somehow promote women’s agency within the context of pronatalism, a movement that encourages childbearing, through citing the works of sociology experts in the field of womanhood, reproduction, and motherhood.