Fertile expectations by Margaret Cook Andersen

Fertile expectations by Margaret Cook Andersen

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.

'This book explores where and how infertility featured in mid-twentieth-century pronatalist thought and actionIn 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 Professor of History at the University of Tennessee

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781807072841
ISBN 10	1807072843
Title	Fertile expectations
Author	Margaret Cook Andersen
Series	Studies In Modern French And Francophone History
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Manchester University Press
Year published	2027-01-19
Number of pages	344
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.