Marriage, Family Planning, and Birth Control Discourses in Latvia during the Wars, 1914–1920

Abstract

In the territories of the Russian Empire populated by the Latvians, the years of the First World War (1914–1918) and the ensuing Latvian War of Independence (1918–1920) witnessed a significant transformation in the discourse on family planning and birth control. Because men were mobilized, there was a marked fall in the number of registered marriages, which meant that women had only a slim chance of marrying and planning a family. The nation's ideologues faced a challenge: how to restrain Latvian women from marriages and casual relationships with soldiers of the multi-ethnic Russian army and the occupying German army, who had been stationed in the Latvian-populated provinces since 1915, these having been separated by the battlefront. Women's demographic behavior was changing, with sexual life beginning before marriage, giving rise to a phenomenon of casual liaisons. Latvian nationalists, seeking to prevent such casual relationships in the name of the future they imagined for their people, promoted sexual restraint, which became at this time one of the strategies of the nation-building process. This article examines the wartime possibilities for marriage and the family planning associated with it and investigates the discourse of the propaganda of sexual restraint that was maintained and developed by Latvian nationalists, looking at their assessment of the situation and the principles they formulated for the appropriate (non-) use of sexuality, which in that context acted as a birth control instrument. The article looks at the role of abortion as a traditional means of birth control, and how the wartime conditions affected the number of children born outside of marriage. The research is based mainly on analyses of press materials, statistical data, and archival documents.