Fertile expectations

The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France

By: Margaret Cook Andersen

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Hardcover | 13 May 2025

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Hardcover
344 Pages

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21.6 x 13.8 x 13.8

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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.

Industry Reviews

'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.

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