An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, this book explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an “ideal” family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France’s birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to counter declining fertility. Situating infertility within this history, the author details innovations in fertility medicine, cultural awareness of artificial insemination, and changing laws on child adoption. These practices offered new ways of responding to infertility and formed part of a growing expectation of being able to control one’s fertility and family size. This book presents the political and cultural context for understanding why private questions about when to start a family, how many children to have, and how to cope with involuntary childlessness, evolved and became part of state demographic policies.
Price: $130.00
Pages: 344
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Studies in Modern French and Francophone History
Publication Date:
13 May 2025
ISBN: 9781526177360
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
Gender studies: women and girls, Birth control, contraception, family planning, Social and cultural history
'This book explores where and how infertility featured in mid-twentieth-century pronatalist thought and action. In combining histories of medicine, women and gender, as well as public administration, this study will be of interest to specialists in these areas. It pursues the usually neglected question of how far these actors paid attention to the fact that not all French men and women were childless voluntarily.'
Joan Tumblety, European History Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1.
Margaret Andersen is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee
Introduction
1: Influencing Population trends: motherhood and demographic thinking
2: Infertility in a pronatalist age: medical research and advice in the interwar period
3: Recovering Births for France: Infertility as a Pronatalist Issue
4: Adoption law reform: building families and promoting population growth
5: Gender, Nation, and the Family in the Post-War Era: Artificial Insemination in Question
6: Population growth with family planning? Demographic policy in the baby boom era
Epilogue and conclusion
