Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century.

Rachel Fuchs's excellent new study of poor, primarily unmarried, pregnant women and new mothers in nineteenth-century Paris is a sequel (or perhaps prequel) to her Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (1984). Fuchs argues that the options open to these women were largely set by institutions and laws, which were in turn based on changing conceptions of morality and the national interest held by social, political and professional elites.

Fuchs makes use of the records of La Maternite, the major public maternity hospital in Paris, and those of the Public Assistance, as well as other archival materials, to plot a demographic profile of her subjects and their contacts with private and public institutions from late in their pregnancy through birth (or abortion/infanticide) and the first years of motherhood. Not surprisingly, domestic servants are over-represented among the pregnant poor with respect to the total female lower-class population. And while four-fifths of La Maternites clients came from outside Paris, only 20-25% had conceived their children elsewhere and come to Paris. The percentage of married women entering La Maternite doubled over the course of the century as legislation and medical advances made this option more acceptable. Yet in the final decades of the century, municipal welfare bureaus recognized that the mortality rate of infants delivered by midwives was lower than that for hospital deliveries and supplied midwives to increasing numbers of pregnant women who gave birth in their homes.

Until the Third Republic, private, religious institutions provided much of the aid available to poor pregnant women and new mothers, and therefore religious and moral concerns predominated in the distribution of assistance. These institutions were primarily concerned with the immoral consequences and disorder attendant on undisciplined female sexuality (although upper-class women observers were more likely than their male counterparts to identify poor pregnant women as victims of male depredation). The charities' particular focus was illegitimacy and they sought to counter the widespread practice of consensual unions by making marriage among the poor easier. They reserved their aid to new mothers for married women, for fear of encouraging sexual relations outside of marriage.

After 1870, pro-natalism overcame earlier concerns about the presumed socially destabilizing effects of single motherhood. The Public Assistance, often in conjunction with private institutions, focused attention on the welfare of the child rather than on the mother's marital status. On the one hand, the Third Republic prosecuted abortion and infanticide cases more rigorously then its predecessors. On the other, republican institutions provided new material incentives for poor women to bear and keep their children. The Public Assistance established a variant of "workfare" which provided limited aid to new mothers with the understanding that they would work, generally at a form of homework which would allow them to breastfeed. Limited day-care facilities were also established. Such programs were woefully underfunded and large numbers of eligible women did not receive aid. The Public Assistance thoroughly investigated the moral and material status of any young mother requesting aid; two-thirds of those who applied were turned away. Yet, Fuchs concludes, with three out of four single mothers in the department of the Seine receiving some form of aid from Public Assistance by 1900, republican social policy did significantly alter the possibilities open to poor pregnant women in Paris even as it subjected them to greater medical and government supervision.

Both aid-givers and recipients constructed narratives to explain their actions. "The stories they heard were familiar," Fuchs writes of bourgeois women visitors to unwed mothers (88). Social Catholics at the end of the century justified support for aid to unwed mothers by saying it should go to those "who struggled on their own and only gave in to a lover after great resistance" (74); investigators from the Public Assistance sought evidence "that despite her so-called fault of having a baby even though single, she was essentially moral" (156). Poor women navigated an institutional and legal maze with complex scripts and gambits. For instance, at the end of the century, "Rather than merely demonstrating acute need, the key to obtaining assistance was to threaten child abandonment" (158). One also sees such performances in trials of women charged with abortion and infanticide; as a result, juries were far more lenient toward these women than Third Republic doctors and pro-natalist republican politicians would have liked. These cases turned on a subtle interpretation of motives. "One of the key ways of proving premeditation was demonstrating that a woman told no one about the pregnancy, that she made no preparations for the arrival of the baby, and that she had no plans for childbirth assistance and had prepared no layette" (211). Ultimately, however, we have limited access to how poor women interpreted and gave meaning to the experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Because we pick up the narrative of many of these women after they have become pregnant and often abandoned, whatever agency they do display can seem at odds with their previous roles as "victims." Given the available sources, however, perhaps the best we can do is to work backward, as Fuchs does, from various institutional alternatives women faced and analyze their behavior in the form of strategies.

Fuchs does an admirable job evoking crucial elements of the social environment of her subjects like poor families' support for daughters who had one out-of-wedlock child, but not a second (and these families' acceptance of money to look after that child). Some of Fuchs's most interesting evidence concerns the poor pregnant woman's family and neighbors who could not only be sources of information and assistance, but also could turn her in when they suspected she had aborted or committed infanticide. Fuchs speculates that families which were entirely dependent on charities were "perhaps pariahs in the community" (14) or that obtaining a "certificate of indigence" from the police caused "shame" (105), but does not pursue the implications of such delineations of working-class respectability.

While Fuchs frequently borrows from Foucauldian and feminist discourse a condemnation of Third Republic doctors and politicians for their increased regimentation and surveillance of poor pregnant women and new mothers, her reproaches are tempered by appreciation of a nascent welfare state which back-handledly recognized single motherhood and by a conception of women's agency at work in pregnant women's and mothers' interactions with public welfare agencies. Fuchs mentions that similar developments took place at the end of the nineteenth century in nations which did not share France's depopulationist anxieties, but does not dwell on this or on the particular legacies which different origins may have left in these nations. In conclusion, Fuchs's study makes valuable contributions on each of the three levels upon which it operates: it offers new statistical data about poor pregnant women and mothers in nineteenth-century France and their behavior; it argues for fairly direct connections between social philosophies, the programs of private and public institutions, and the actions of poor pregnant women and new mothers; and it suggests, but does not develop, a dialogic reading of contemporary American policies toward poor pregnant women and those in nineteenth-century France. Poor & Pregnant in Paris is a major contribution to the history of women in nineteenth-century France.

Donald Reid University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill