Reforming Marriage

Reformers thought that improving conditions within marriage would raise both the quality and quantity of children born. Many educated Europeans believed in eugenics—a set of ideas about producing “superior” people through selective breeding. A famed Italian criminologist declared that “lower” types of people were not humans but “orangutans.” Eugenicists wanted increased childbearing for “the fittest” and decreased childbearing—even sterilization—for “degenerates,” that is, those deemed inferior. Women of the “better” classes, reformers also believed, would have more children if marriage were made more equal. One step would be to allow married women to keep their wages and to own property, both of which in most legal systems belonged to their husbands. Another step would be to allow women guardianship of their own children.

Reformers worked to improve marriage laws to boost the birthrate, while feminists sought to better the lot of mothers and their children. Sweden made men’s and women’s control over property equal in marriage and allowed married women to work without their husband’s permission. Other countries, among them France (1884), legalized divorce and made it less complicated to obtain. Reformers reasoned that divorce would allow unhappy couples to separate and undertake more loving and thus more fertile marriages. By the early twentieth century, several countries had passed legislation that provided government subsidies for medical care and child support as concerns about population partially laid the foundations for the welfare state—that is, a nation-state whose policies addressed not just military defense, foreign policy, and political processes but also the social and economic well-being of its people.

The conditions of women’s lives varied across Europe. For example, a greater number of legal reforms occurred in western versus eastern Europe, but women could get university degrees in Austria-Hungary long before they could at Oxford or Cambridge in England. However, in much of rural eastern Europe, the father’s power over the extended family remained almost dictatorial. According to a survey of family life in eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fathers married off their children so young that 25 percent of women in their early forties had been pregnant more than ten times. Yet reform of everyday customs did occur: for instance, among the middle and upper classes of Europe, many grown children were coming to believe that they had a right to select a marriage partner instead of accepting the spouse their parents chose for them.