Doctors and Motherhood at the Beginning of the 20th Century in France

Through their legitimate scientific supremacy and their acquired social and cultural capital, male French doctors throughout the ages have held the monopoly of medical knowledge over women, who have been considered only in the role of nature’s ‘mothers’, and reduced to this reproductive capacity. At the beginning of the 20th century, this vision of women was firmly entrenched in medical circles, steadfastly determined to address the problem of the drop in the birth rate and to alleviate the venereal threat through a drive to incite women to acknowledge and embrace maternity. Therefore doctors, based on the legitimacy of their discoveries and who often sounded like anthropologic philosophers, would moralise about women’s reproductive and sexual lives whilst glorifying by all available means motherhood. By doing this, they contributed to the definition and the normalization of their fertility and also to the stigmatization of those who doubted their capacity to give birth.