Abstract
While eugenists responded to the social disruption unleashed by the Depression by opening a clinic for poor white women in Johannesburg, elsewhere in the country birth-control advocates with a different ideology emerged. They were maternal feminists, and during and immediately after the Depression they opened birth-control clinics in urban centers located in the Transvaal, Natal, and the Cape. Unlike the Race Welfare Society (RWS) that wanted to reign in the fertility of poor white women, the maternal feminists wished to assist women of all races who were visibly struggling under the harsh economic conditions to be better mothers. Doing so would stabilize families and, by extension, the nation as a whole. By promoting birth control as a motherhood issue, maternalists would prove to be more effective than the eugenists in shaping the central Government’s position on contraceptive services and serving women who sought contraceptives from their clinics.
It is the right of poor and struggling women to receive instruction in spacing and limiting their families so as to try to obtain health, strength and economic independence for their children and themselves, thereby contributing to the welfare of the race. The Mothers’ Clinic Committee, 19331
It should be noted that not only do [the clinics] endeavour to restrict births by diseased or otherwise unfit parents, but they impress on suitable parents the duty of bearing and rearing healthy children.
South African National Council of Maternal and Family Welfare, c. 19402
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Notes
Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (London: Hurst and Company, 2003), p. 412.
See R. First and A. Scott, Olive Schreiner (New York: Schocken Books, 1980)
and Cherry Clayton, ed., Olive Schreiner (Johannesburg and New York: McGraw Hill, 1983).
C. Owen, The South African Medal Roll of the 1935 Jubilee Medal and the 1937 and 1953 Coronation Medals as Issued to South Africans (Somerset West: Chimperie Pubs., 1982).
WFAVS was formed in Washington in 1974 by the US International Project of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization (IPAVS), an organization established to promote voluntary sterilization throughout the world. IPAVSsponsored Woodrow to attend the meeting in Washington. Upon her return to South Africa she founded CAVS and was elected chair. In 1976 she attended the Third International Conference on Voluntary Sterilization in Tunis. In 1980 she was key to forming the Association for Voluntary Sterilization of South Africa. Sources: Sallie Woodrow, “Family Planning in South Africa: A Review,” South African Medical Journal, 50 (1976), pp. 2102–3; PPASA, CT, “Citation at the Presentation of the Salus Medal (Bronze) to Dr. Sallie Woodrow,” unpublished document.
The term “The Domestication of Politics” is from P. Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” in V.L. Ruiz and E. C. Dubois (eds), Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in US History, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–110.
The second term, “social housekeeping” was found in V. Bickford-Smith, E. van Heyningen, and N. Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), p. 32.
See also S. Koven and S. Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993);
and G. Bock and P. Thane (eds), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (New York: Routledge, 1991);
M. Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994);
N. Cott, “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’: or Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History,” Journal of American History, 76 (1989), pp. 809–29.
P. Scully, “White Maternity and Black Infancy: The Rhetoric of Race in the South African Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1895–1930,” in C. Fletcher, L.E. Nym Mayhall, and P. Levine (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 68.
E. Woodrow, “Contraception: Its Justification and Practice,” South African Medical Journal, 6 (1932), p. 654.
M. Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (London: Putnam, 1918).
R. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 212.
R. Hall, Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977);
J. Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1992); Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England;
A. Geppert, “Divine Sex, Happy Marriage, Regenerated Nation: Marie Stopes’s Marital Manual Married Love and the Making of a Best Seller, 1918–1955,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8, 3 (1998), pp. 389–433;
J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
C. Walker, “The Women’s Suffrage Movement: The Politics of Gender, Race and Class,” in C. Walker (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1990), pp. 313–45.
The following discussion about the relationship between Marie Stopes and the South African birth-control movement was first published as: S. Klausen, “The Imperial Mother of Birth Control: Marie Stopes and the South African Birth-Control Movement, 1930–1950,” in Greg Blue, Martin Bunton, and Ralph Crozier (eds), Colonialism and the Modern World (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 182–99. Reprinted here with permission from M.E. Sharpe.
Deborah Cohen argues that, in spite of her eugenic rhetoric, Stopes provided high quality, respectful care of women. D. Cohen, “Private Lives in Public Spaces: Marie Stopes, the Mothers’ Clinics and the Practice of Contraception,” History Workshop, 35 (1993), pp. 95–116.
A.L. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” The Journal of American History, 88, 3 (2001), p. 12.
Stoler applies to the colonial context the insights of Mary P. Ryan regarding gender in nineteenth-century urban America. M.P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Cited in J. Western, Outcast Cape Town (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 57.
O.J.M. Wagner, “Poverty and Dependency in Cape Town: A Sociological Study of 3300 Dependents receiving assistance from the Cape Town General Board of Aid,” (PhD thesis, University of Stellenbosch, 1936), p. 134.
The Divisional Council system was created in the Cape Colony in 1855. Divisions were divided into six districts, each of which elected one member to the Divisional Council. In 1910 all the Councils were placed under the direct control of the Provincial Administration of the Cape Province. The initial role of the system was to construct and maintain roads and to control district schools. Powers of the Councils were extended by 1917 to include the authority to appoint special committees and health officers, and to donate grants to schools and organizations. M. Potgieter and M. Mannann, “The Historical and Administrative Development of Divisional Councils in General,” (Cape Town: Archives of the Cape Province, 1971), pp. 1–3.
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See A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
M. Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
PPASA, JHB, SANCMFW, Minutes of the Second Meeting of the South African National Council for Birth Control, October 6–7, 1936, p. 3. On the Congress’s Declaration in favor of birth control see P.W. Laidler, “The Organisation of a Health Programme in Urban Areas,” Report of the National Conference on Birth Control (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1936), p. 152.
J. Lambert, “Keeping English-Speaking South Africans British, 1934–1947,” unpublished paper presented at The Burden of Race? “Whiteness” and “Blackness” in Modern South Africa, Conference held at Wits in July 2001; S. Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of ‘South Africanism’: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe,” South African Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 99–142.
W. Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 109–10.
G.H. Calpin, There are no South Africans (London: Thomas Nelson, 1941), pp. 12–13. Cited in Lambert, “Keeping the English-Speaking South Africans British, 1934–1947,” p. 2.
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© 2004 Susanne M. Klausen
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Klausen, S.M. (2004). Strengthening the Nation’s Mothers through Birth Control. In: Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_4
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