Birth Control as a National Challenge: Nationalizing Concepts of Families in Eastern Europe, 1914–1939

Abstract

Providing the conceptional framework of the special issue and discussing its main hypotheses, the introductory article points out that extraordinary vivid discourses on birth control in journalism emerged during East Central Europe's interwar period. They fought for more liberal attitudes towards birth control, but were combined with a peculiar emphasis on the nation, since they were more intensively colored by and integrated in nationalizing discourses. Thus, they became an essential part of the question of how the society should like, so that they were only partly a reflection of female self-empowerment. Thus, birth control as a core method of family planning at that time had become an issue of national survival.