The Flapper and 'chill-mindedness': The urban woman and fertility in the 1920s.

The first chapter of this study is concerned with how this natalist climate fostered an aversion to female individualism. Women's social duty, it was stressed, was to bear children for the nation. Anti-individualism is detected in discourse on the population problem, which rarely concerned itself with female individuals; in demographic and scientific/ medical discourse; and in legislation which revealed masculinist assumptions about woman's social role. The needs of the national community obliterated any question of female agency in matters pertaining to their own reproductive capacity. Moves to check depopulation were moves to bring women's fertility under state control.