Brooke Sales-Lee

Flappers and Mothers

The years following the First World War brought a long and awkward period of growth
for Britons. After years of fighting for the vote, women over 30 were finally granted that right in
1918.1 Women had entered the workforce during the war, yet now they were urged to return
home.2 With millions dead or invalid, women were disproportionately affected by the war; not
only did they lose husbands, fiancs, and suitors, these unwed womenwhose chances of
finding a husband seemed slimwere left independent to decide what to do with their lives.
Many women, having experienced life without husbands and fathers guiding each decision,
turned to new ideals for dress and behavior far from the rigidity of their Victorian mothers.
However, this stereotype does not accurately reflect life for vast numbers of women in the
interwar period. Now armed with the ability to vote, women previously involved in the fight for
women's suffrage turned the Women's Movement to a new focus on women's issues, such as
child welfare, family allowances, and birth control3. These topics largely assumed that the role of
woman was to be wife and mother, part of the trend toward showing women as not perfectly
equal to men, but special and different from them, with different needs and concerns.
In response to wartime changes, gender relations became a place of challenge at both the
micro and macro level, as individuals at both the everyday level and in the upper echelons of
power asked: Should men and women plan their family? Who should make the final decision and
who would be responsible for implementing plans? Should a woman work outside the home? Are
the sexes equal or inherently different? Do women have a higher or different calling from men?
While men were prominent in the discussion, acting as authorities in the realm of womens
1
2

Lesley A. Hall. Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000), 98.
James Vernon. Rebuilding Middle England. (lecture, A Peculiar Modernity: Britain, 1848-2000, University
of California Berkeley, Berkeley. 9 March 2010).
Rebuilding 'Middle England.'

rights and appropriate societal roles, women increasingly occupied the field.
Two female authors of the age make for useful case studies of two sides of the developing
Women's Movement. The movement reflected not a myopic progression of greater liberty for
women, but rather multiple perspectives both predating the Great War and foreseeing future
gender equality. The first author examined here, Marie Stopes, was an advocate not only of
family planning and birth control, but of equality in marriage and sexual gratification. The
second author, anti-feminist Arabella Kenealy, interpreted the unique needs and biological
functions of women as evidence of the necessity of traditional gender roles and the requirement
of maternity. Both of these women had ties to the earlier struggles of the Women's Movement in
Britain, but with their new developments demonstrated the conflicts between past and future and
emerging modernity in postwar Britain.
Marie Stopes, one of the most famous and influential authors of books on sex and family
planning during the interwar period, can be construed as representing an early feminist ideal
through her writing, calling for equality in marriage. In 1918, her book entitled Married Love
asserted that women have sexual needs similar to men, and that marital sex ought to be mutually
desired and satisfying.4 In a letter accompanying a copy of the book sent to Queen Mary in 1920,
she revealed how she hoped to make better marriages and, thus, a happier, healthier Britain.5
In response to her book, Stopes received numerous letters of appraisal of Married Love
as well as later books on marriage, sex, parenthood, and family planning. In 1924, a man
identified as "Mr TJ" wrote that as he was "getting old" he was beginning to have trouble
maintaining an erection and thus pleasing his younger wife, who was not interested in sex at the
same time as he.6 In another letter from 1926, "Lady KM" wrote that her first husband was so
4
5
6

L. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change 97.

Ruth Hall. Dear Dr Stopes: Sex in the 1920s (London: Cox and Wyman Ltd., 1978), 50.
Ibid., 27, 28.

elderly that he never consummated the marriage, and her second husband was unable to give her,
at age 61, any sexual satisfaction.7 A 1923 letter came from a woman who had been married for
over two years and had yet to have sex with her husband.8 Yet another letter the next year came
from a woman who had never been satisfied by her husband on or after their wedding night; a
"tragedy" which had led to both she and her husband taking on younger lovers.9 Clearly the
words of Stopes reached welcoming eyes. Married Love helped ordinary Britons recognize the
possibility of a more equal, satisfying married life. Women did not have to merely submit to the
lust of their husbands, but could enjoy sexual relations according to their own natural, healthy
desire and cycles. However, in her discussion of sexual equality in marriage, the issue of
pleasurable sexual relations without the risk of pregnancy quickly became important to Stopes'
writing.
Stopes was an advocate of birth control, and eagerly tried to gain public support for it and
the clinics she founded to help women for ethical and social reasons. Stopes felt that the
suffering of the lower classes could be alleviated by educating them about how to limit family
size, as is suggested by her letter accompanying her book of letters from lower class women,
Mother England, which was sent to the King of England.10 In her 1921 book Radiant
Motherhood, Stopes stated that the first right of the baby is to be wanted.11 "Mrs MCM" sent a
letter to Stopes in 1926 that described the abuses Mrs. MCM had suffered in childhood; her
husband's demands for sex days after she gave birth; having cancer removed while pregnant; and
finally becoming addicted to pain killers.12 Womanhood was exceedingly difficult for many
7
8
9
10
11

12

Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 176.
Ibid., 179-80.
Ibid., 54.
Marie Stopes, Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who Are Creating the Future (New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons, 1921), 199.
R. Hall, Dear Doctor Stopes, 32-33.

lower class women, who had to contend with large families, small budgets, no hired help, and
husbands who worked long hours. One such woman wrote in 1923 that if the men criticizing
Marie Stopes, who had been accused of experimenting on the poor, had to run a household while
pregnant, Stopes would have no detractors, since they would all commit suicide.13 In her book
The First Five Thousandan account of the women and issues seen in the first five-thousand
women to visit Stopes' birth control clinicsStopes argued, based on the collected evidence
from the clinics, not only that a greater number of pregnancies meant a higher rate of infant
mortality, but that there was a disproportional rate of pregnancies amongst the slum woman.14
Furthermore, Stopes wrote that women should not be part of an endless chain of fruitless lives,
all looking ever to some supreme future consummation of the race, but be able to use [their]
intellect for [their] own individual gain. Stopes asserted that women should have the right to
work in some stimulating way outside the home rather than constantly being tied to children,
thus providing a useful legacy to their children and the race.15 Stopes extended her argument,
stating that wanted children who were born under healthful conditions were more likely to
become the greatest members of society; they would be leaders and geniuses who would
advance the British people.16 Thus birth control was of great importance not only for workingclass women and men, but for the middle- and upper-class women of Britain as well. In her
work, Stopes coupled old and new ideas of race and eugenics, welfare and morality. All the
while, she assumed that the pain of working-class women was naturally a moral concern of the
nation in her struggle to make birth control readily understood and used.
It is clear that Stopes was not looking to the sort of sexual revolution that would come
about later in the century, as she tied her advice to ideas of morality and responsibility to the
13
14
15
16

Ibid., 21.
Marie Stopes, The First Five Thousand (London: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, Ltd., 1925), 24.
Stopes, Radiant Motherhood. 176-77.
Ibid., 174.

nation. Sternly recommending that sexual relations without marriage were wrong, Stopes
wrote in 1920 to a concerned mother of a fifteen-year old boy, suggesting he take healthy
exercise and plenty of cold water cleanliness to avoid sexual indulgence and thus keep him
a well bred man clean for his wife.17 Stopes also advocated teaching children their racial
power or duties, which were to produce healthy, well-endowed future citizens.18 These views
have caused some debate amongst contemporary scholars. Lesley A. Hall sees Stopes as not
about 'preventative restraint,' but a gateway into a new world of healthy wanted babies and erotic
joy, while Lucy Burke, echoing Margaret Jackson in Burke's 2003 essay In Pursuit of an
Erogamic Life, sees Stopes as basically hetero-normative, classist, and preoccupied with her
perception of sexuality as dirty.19 Both authors have valid points. Stope's feminism was a product
of her era, demanding equal and happy partnerships in marriage and doing away with shyness
regarding sexual topics following the brief liberation of women into the public sphere during the
war while retaining many of the trappings of turn of the century morality and science. Although
she may seem at first glance a feminist of her day in advocating equal marriage and sexual
pleasure, women taking on jobs outside the home, and family planning, that Stopes also
advocated eugenics, preservation of youthful purity, and even avoidance of masturbation all
point to her being a figure of her time. Clearly, she supported many pre-war social mores and
ideals even while she encouraged greater sexual and social equality.
As much as Marie Stopes retained her semi-Victorian views, it was Arabella Kenealy who
actively opposed feminism out of her advocacy for stricter eugenics, reflecting greater fears
about evolving gender roles. Kenealy wrote a scathing criticism of the dangers of feminism in
her 1920 book, Feminism and Sex-Extinction. There, she asserted that women who adopted
17
18
19

R. Hall, Dear Doctor Stopes, 165.

Stopes, Radiant Motherhood, 211, 237.
L. Hall, 98. Lucy Burke. In Pursuit of an Erogamic Life, in Women's Experience of Modernity 1875-1945, Ed.
Ann L. Ardis and Leslie W. Lewis (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 259.

masculine traits would grow hardened and ugly in appearance, and thus be unable to find a
mate.20 Furthermore, Kenealy claimed it was both overtly masculine and overtly feminine
women that brought about the fall of Rome, an undisguised reference to modern-day feminists.21
According to Kenealy, masculine women married repeatedly and become over-sexed, while the
feminine women became so enamored with silly ideas of Utopia that they failed to procreate
successfully.22 Greece had a similar downfall, according to Kenealy; there, as in Rome, women
were guilty of greedily appropriating and exploiting to their own purposes the nation's beauty
and the nation's talent, its aspirations, potence, passionwithout transmitting any of these racial
attainments to a later generation.23 Kenealy saw no contradiction in charging early Roman and
Greeks, as well as her contemporary English feminists, of being both too masculine and too
feminine and over-sexed. Clearly Kenealy was referencing contemporary women, and she
suggested that the best women of her era were abandoning their roles as wives and mothers,
just as the Greeks and Romans before them.24
This criticism of the new and decadent lifestyles of post-war women was not held by
Kenealy alone, and could apply both to women leaving the home for a job or for social
engagements. The women's magazine Eve, which ran from 1919 to 1929, frequently published
women-authored stories featuring unhappy marriages. One such story published in the March 11,
1920 edition is about a young couple who, in their high society decadence and attempts to escape
the pain of the war years, only see each other at meal time and usually at other people's
houses.25 The modern couple drifted from one another once the war with its crimson
flecked horrors of the front ended, and once people had to start their lives as ordinary civilians
20
21
22
23
24
25

Arabella Kenealy. Feminism and Sex-Extinction (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1920), 85.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 99, 102.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 101.
Jean Anderson, Incidental Music, Eve, 11 March 1920, 14.

again.26 When workers go on strike and London is unable to carry on, the couple is left alone and
utterly forget that their nurse has gone off, discovering later to their horror that they have
neglected their child who is now "dying of starvation in its lace trimmed, ribbon-decked
cradle.27 After caring for the child all day and rediscovering the joy of being together and
playing with their child, the couple resolve to settle down and be with one another and the child
more often. This story clearly critiqued several aspects of post-war life, from the estrangement
and alienation between returned soldiers and women to the perceived or actual decadence of
young people as they attempted to distance themselves from their memories of war. It was very
much in support of family and pre-war, intimate family roles, even for those who were wealthy
enough to have a nurse look after their children, and, though published in an otherwise forwardthinking women's magazine, reflected societal concerns about the pull between women's
newfound freedom from the home and the call to maintain their pre-war domestic roles. In this
case, the author agreed with Kenealy that the best path for Britain was to heal the wounds of war
by returning to the traditions in place before the war began, not to forge into brave new gender
and societal roles marked by neglect of family and duty.
Kenealy constantly praised women and their perfection for their role as nurturer, taking
the idea of difference between the sexes and women's issues to mean Darwinist, evolutionary
imperative. As always, Kenealy broke down her arguments into pseudo-scientific, eugenicsdriven premises. In her chapter on the human brain, Kenealy ascertained that while men's brains
were well suited to Science and the Arts and Dominance and [C]oncrete [P]ower, women's
brains grew intelligently sympathetic and practically helpful in response to men.28 Her ideas
being so deeply couched in eugenics, Kenealy praised pregnant women as a living Testament of
26
27
28

Ibid.
Ibid., 15.
Kenealy, 165.

Evolution and pregnant with the destiny of the Races, and decried the feminists who call
pregnancy passive.29 Kenealy stated that women store energy in adolescence so as to pass on
higher evolutionary values to their unborn children.30 According to her, one of the dangers of
feminism was that it robbed young girls of their natural reserve and modesty and turned them
into shameless, sex-driven flappers.31 Unlike Stopes' conception of controlled eugenics through
birth control, Kenealy suggested that evolution without tampering was the only way to achieve
Fitness for Survival.32 Victorian mothers were Kenealy's ideal, since they were able to raise
healthy children and to do so with the qualities we pride ourselves upon as triumphs of
Feminism, namely strength and courage and resource and fortitude.33 Feminists, then, were
not merely a danger to society but the body of the nation. For every so-called masculine trait,
Kenealy supplies a feminine, explaining it as a natural and vital part of maintaining humanity
and more specifically the nation and race. Science, or science as Kenealy explained it, gave
reason and purpose to societal roles.
However, just as Stopes was not purely interested in women's sexual freedom, Kenealy
was not simply an anti-feminist, as she often edged close to modern ideas about gender. Kenealy
called for women to have their own House in Parliament, one that was purely female in
composition and would deal with issues of women and children, areas that Kenealy assumed
men were unqualified to deal with.34 She wished for women to retain the spirit and pride of
[their] sex, with the obvious meaning that women should embrace their great role as childbearers and feminine beings, not taking on what Kenealy viewed as masculine traits.35 Kenealy
29
30
31
32
33
34
35

Ibid., 196-197.
Ibid., 119.
Ibid., 232-233.
Ibid., 90.
Ibid., 237.
Ibid., 269.
Ibid., 276.

saw feminists as trying to equalize inherently different and separate sexes, while she wished to
protect what is womanly and fundamentally different from men.36 In this way she greatly
resembled the Latin Feminists of Fascist Italy in the 1920s, who proposed a woman was truly
fulfilling herself by fulfilling her spiritual call to bear children for the nation.37 Kenealy herself
did not seem to realize was that she was connected to a contemporary feminist, or at least
feminist in name, movement. Perhaps more importantly, she did not see that in her attempt to
elevate women to a sphere of sanctified motherhood apart from men, in which women might
even create parallel government offices to deal with the problems of womanhood and family, she
was intimately tied to the redefining of gender roles and the creation of a new, modern Britain.
Though she was anti-feminist, Kenealy was not anti-woman; she merely placed the importance
of biological difference between the sexes as the greatest social divide. Her appeals to the
scientific value of gender roles were used both to refute feminists and to define the appropriate
places in society for women, men, and children. The call for new structures within government
was not a call to the pre-war status quo, but the creation, as the fascist women of Italy then
sought, of a new modernity guided by the traditions of the past. Kenealy perhaps represents the
conservative side of the Women's Movement between the wars, but she did not wish to render
women powerless; rather, she saw the finest empowerment being the feminine protection of the
state and race through maternity. Certainly Kenealy echoed the infamous Cult of Domesticity of
the nineteenth century, but she, like Stopes, was a product of her age. Kenealy's answer to the
direction British society should go is different from that of Stopes, but it was shaped by the same
conflict between past and future.
The Women's Movement cannot be thought of as a unified force or as having one
36
37

Ibid., 169, 179.

Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992,) 236.

overarching ideology. The call for change and the call for a return to the past intermingled, as in
the case of Arabella Kenealy, while newly granted sexual openness, equality and rights were
accorded to women by Marie Stopes even as she chastised pre-marital sexual relations and other
turn of the century sexual taboos such as masturbation. The past and present commingled
constantly, a reflection of larger sociopolitical issues of the day. The Women's Movement did not
exist within a vacuum. It had members who firmly believed eugenics via unhindered Darwinism
was the utmost ideal, and thus that women must take care to spend more time procreating,
nurturing, and protecting the right to procreate and nurture. It had members who felt choosing
personally and individually when to have children was the best way to let women and the nation
reach their full potential. Both camps explored here, though, would agree that women were vital
to the success of their nation. Both focused, importantly, on the needs of women. Yet one
connection may have eluded both Stopes and Kenealy while they were writing. Stopes, though
perceived as almost shamelessly modern, could not escape the past that shaped her world.
Kenealy, while fighting against feminism and calling for tradition, used and proposed modern
advantages for the state and society. Though neither woman could have foreseen the coming of
the Second World War, their place in history remains somewhat between eras. Victorian morality
and tradition influenced each author's ideas, while the mysterious, modern future called to be
shaped into something new and better. As men in power worried about whether the social
emergency state of the war could be viable in peace or if a return to liberalism would be wise, the
women of the Women's Movement had to stake a claim in their future. Would women take on
male roles and work outside the home? Would they choose when to have children and how
many? With the vote, would they gain more political power? Women, unsurprisingly, came to
different conclusions and held different ideals. But without first asking these questions and

fighting to show that they were a vital part of the human race, the women of the Women's
Movement in 1920s Britain could not have helped shape their daughters' and granddaughters'
struggles in the 1960s and onward. Without these pioneers of women in the political sphere,
women would not have the answers they have today.

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