by Sabine Toppe

In the late Enlightenment, the state and the police set themselves the task of educating middle-class women to be mothers. With their definition of the citizen as a "good mother", they made a significant contribution to establishing and disseminating the modern role of the mother and current notions of femininity, thereby maintaining the hierarchical order of gender relations.

In the last third of the 18th century, the philosophy professor and police theorist Carl Gottlob Rößig formulated the task of the authorities as follows: "An important object is the education of the female sex. They too must be brought up according to their destiny and to become sensible and domestic wives, intelligent and wise mothers."

What Rößig and his police colleagues wrote in a veritable flood of literature on education in accordance with the "ultimate purpose of the state", "civic social duties" and the "destiny of the sexes" represents a hitherto largely unknown area in pedagogy and in the gender discourses of the German Enlightenment. The police of the Enlightenment acted as educators of the female sex and took an active part in the extensive campaign to educate the "mothers of the civilised and educated classes" that began in the German states in the middle of the 18th century. Educators, physicians, philosophers, theologians, writers and political scientists criticised the care and upbringing of middle-class children and set themselves the task of establishing and spreading motherhood as a new norm. Here, motherhood, as it is still defined today, was historically characterised and specifically modernised as a social pattern and cultural norm.

The police of the 18th and early 19th centuries differed from today's police not only in the way they were written. The police were not only responsible for surveillance and punishment, but also for legislation and private and general "happiness". It was derived from the Greek "politeia" - state, constitution - and was concerned with the public welfare of individuals and the community as a whole. The police thus embodied the entire internal administration of the state, and its scope became almost limitless. Thus there was a "moral police" alongside the "cultural or educational police", there was the "medical police" as well as the "poor police" or the "population police", the "police of morality", the "police of education" and many more. The whole complex of education and training, religion and moral behaviour was included in the area of policing.

In the broad field of the police's remit, the education of women for motherhood took up a great deal of space. In the emerging modern bourgeois state, motherhood defined the role of women as citizens, and general happiness demanded that they were excluded from political rights and offices. The state needed them as the mothers and educators of "good, happy, hard-working and healthy people", and the care of pregnancy, birth, care and education of children was elevated to a primary interest of the enlightened absolutist authorities. Within the framework of its theoretical manifestation, police science, the police took on the task of formulating the state's concept of the mother's role with reference to female "nature".

The forum for the state education of women was not so much the "Erziehungs- or pädagogische Polizey", as one might expect, but another specific part of police science, the "medizinische Polizey". Here, state scientists and academically educated doctors elevated the "good mother", maternal care, love and education to a state programme. With a unique interweaving of medicine, political science, philosophy and pedagogy, they translated the absolutist population policy for the enlightened authorities into sophisticated instructions for the policing, care and control of women in an extensive body of literature. The idea of medical policing was rooted in the special political, economic and social system of enlightened absolutism. There is no contemporary equivalent in other European countries, which makes this form of state education and control of femininity unique.

The most famous representative of the medical police was Johann Peter Frank (1745-1821), whose many years of professional experience included working as a municipal physicist, university professor, imperial physician and hospital director. His nine-volume System einer kompletten medicinischen Polizey (1779-1819) represents the most comprehensive and, for the time, the most authoritative formulation of the content, method and aim of state population care. The first two volumes of this "system" alone deal exclusively with the "procreation of human beings and marriage institutions, the preservation and care of pregnant mothers, their wombs and the mothers of children in every community" as well as "extramarital procreation, the deliberate miscarriage and other mistreatment of illegitimate children, from the physical education of newborns to adult citizens".

Like the majority of police science authors, Johann Peter Frank saw women as potential objectors in the area of childcare and education. The state did not have to complain about a lack of childbearing among its female subjects at the time. A woman gave birth to around six to eight children, but on average only every second child survived the critical first years of life. In Frank's opinion, the medical or "physical education" of women was urgently needed, because: "It is not the nature of women, but their way of life that has changed: The much tea and coffee-drinking, the exaggerated tendency to play daily and late into the night, the strange dress costumes, the new-found ways of dancing to the point of dizziness and sinking, the neglected nursing of one's own children, the much reading of special books that heats the imagination and the blood ... Wherever one looks, one finds in all urban societies, small pale faces with broad blue rings around both eyes, and either bloated or emaciated bodies; which can certainly make the procreation of their kind nothing less than desirable."

The comments on the role of the mother in the police literature included suggestions for the selection of spouses as a basis for good child rearing, commands to prevent inappropriate marriages of infertile or "poorly endowed" women, extensive care for pregnant women, the stipulation of the maternal duty to breastfeed, the inculcation of wifely and maternal duties through public sermons or appropriately worded literature, instructions for the education of daughters, protection and control of unmarried mothers and their social environment, measures to prevent infanticide, the establishment of maternity and foundling homes and the training of midwives.

The police image of the "good" mother - which in this case meant the dutiful and self-forgetful mother - focussed primarily on married women from the educated upper classes. Women from the lower classes were mainly considered in connection with the Enlightenment debate on infanticide and the problem of illegitimate births. The main concern of the representatives of police science was to ensure that children were conceived, born and brought up within the framework of functioning marriages.

< While extramarital sex and "unchastity" were strongly condemned and fought against, police scientists granted protection and rights to women who became pregnant out of wedlock. The men were less concerned about the women and more about the expected children. An important concern for them was the prevention of the frequent infanticide of unmarried women and they demanded: waiver of church fines and public dishonour for illegitimate pregnancy, alimony in sufficient amounts, accommodation with birthing houses for the time before and after birth, whereby in the maternity clinics the pregnant women should not be required to make themselves available for lessons in the "art of childbirth".

As breastfeeding was considered to be of crucial importance for the survival of children in the first year of life, the Polizey representatives focussed much of their efforts on obliging mothers to fulfil their "most natural" maternal duty. According to Johann Peter Frank, the denial of self-breastfeeding made it the state's duty to "protect by law the violated rights of nature and those of the minors whose guardians it is". He drafted a comprehensive breastfeeding ordinance that required women who were "fit" to breastfeed to do so by law. He also labelled non-breastfeeding mothers as "half-mothers" and predicted that they would suffer more frequent illnesses and higher maternal mortality than "true mothers". In the political science literature, breastfeeding is not only an activity that had the most decisive influence on the level of infant mortality, but the breastfeeding mother was conceived as the starting point of a good society and used decisively to valorise motherhood and bourgeois domesticity.

While the content is very similar, the police-scientists took different paths in realising the commandments for mothers, depending on their attitude towards enlightenment and absolutism. Depending on their convictions, they were predominantly in favour of public institutions, laws, instruction or teaching of female citizens.

Johann Peter Frank was committed to the view that the people, and especially women, were completely immature. They could not know what was necessary for a healthy and useful life. Just as in the family the father has the duty to educate his children and does so with prohibitions, orders and instructions, so in the state the monarch has the duty to educate his female citizens and also to control and sanction them. Carl Gottlob Rößig, on the other hand, doubted that the police could do more "than nature itself does through motherly love". However, the police must "guide" this motherly love, "instruct it and endeavour to show it the ways" in which it can develop its effectiveness most effectively. In order to turn women into useful mothers, he recommended that Sunday sermons should deal with "the rules of a sensible upbringing" and that mothers should be instructed through "reading sheets for common life".

What the representatives of police science had in common was that they wanted to realise the Enlightenment as a reform movement for mothers encompassing all areas of life, not in emancipatory acts, but in pedagogical and moral appeals and social reforms. Enlightenment principles such as freedom and equality were superimposed here by the female, "other nature" and the fixation of women on the role of mother. In relation to women, the Enlightenment concept of nature did not serve to justify maturity and freedom, but rather marked the boundaries of bourgeois female behaviour.

The bourgeois role of mother was to be propagated and realised, but it also prevailed. It was accepted, initially by middle-class women, who later passed this mission statement on to all other classes. However, the success of police education in motherhood did not necessarily lie in influencing maternal practice, but rather in the ideals and living spaces of women. For example, the obligation of women to breastfeed themselves was enshrined in law in the "General Land Law for the Prussian States" of 1794, maternity clinics and foundling hospitals were established and laws were passed to prevent infanticide and to improve the status of unmarried mothers. More significant, however, was the valorisation of motherhood and bourgeois domesticity in police discourse.

In contemporary letters and descriptions of their lives, middle-class women painted a divergent picture to the police assumptions of selfish, dutiful mothers: they were very concerned about the care and upbringing of their children. There are very frequent passages in the testimonies in which the women describe the pleasures and naturalness of breastfeeding, thus contradicting the police attributions. So was there no difference at all between the aspired and propagated female role and lived femininity?

The image of the "good mother" offered women a fixed definition with which they could come to terms. Not only domestic happiness, but also the public good was placed in their hands and the woman as mother was elevated to a state-supporting moment. Women were given responsibility; as educators, they actively participated in the optimism of the Enlightenment and were able to actively promote the "civic improvement of mankind". The restriction to "female nature" was thus contrasted with the authority and power over the souls of the children that accrued to women through their new role. However, this power was clearly limited by the lack of formal equality.

In the police literature, the imparting of concrete behavioural commandments and rules of life to mothers appears to be a secondary intention. The motherhood programme must be seen primarily as a response to the Enlightenment problem of equality and as a state contribution to the legitimisation of gender relations in the emerging bourgeois society. With its scientifically founded, philosophically backed and more or less pedagogically implemented efforts to postulate motherliness as the most intrinsic quality in women and motherhood as the natural destiny of women, police science legitimised the social and political subordination that continued to be demanded of women in the newly emerging bourgeois society and which actually contradicted the bourgeois principles of freedom and equality.

The "adaptation" and "fitting in" of women into the emerging bourgeois society, and not the improvement of child rearing, is the central feature of the discourse on motherhood in the police and the entire Enlightenment discourse in general. In the further course of history, motherliness was not limited to women who were biological mothers, but the discursive universalisation that turned women into mothers led significantly to the consolidation of the social division of labour and the exclusion of women from the public sphere.

The author

Dr Sabine Toppe, lecturer at the Institute of Educational Sciences 1, studied German Studies, Politics and Education at the University of Oldenburg. She was awarded the Gerhard Wachsmann Prize for her Diplom thesis in 1990. The topic of her doctoral thesis "Police and gender: the discourse on motherhood in the Enlightenment" is also the subject of her EINBLICKE contribution.