Catherine Kevin

Maternity and freedom: Australian feminist encounters with the reproductive body

On 15 /16 December 2001, the opinion page of the Sydney Morning Herald featured a large cartoon by Ward O’Neill depicting Prime Minister John Howard pushing a pram packed with seven small white children. On the side and front of the pram appeared the inscriptions ‘The Liberals, Pregnant with Promise’ and ‘Father of the Nation’, while flower beds surrounding it displayed the signs ‘Policy with testosterone’ and ‘Finely crafted social and fiscal policy leading to successful procreation’. One child held up a carrot, signalling the government’s efforts to tempt women to give birth for the nation. This cartoon was produced in the wake of an election won by the Liberal /National Party Coalition in the context of fierce debates about Tampa and war against the al Qaeda network and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Western leaders wasted no time in conjuring up the Muslim, Arab Other and in Australia this only further exacerbated a fearful consciousness of borders and the possibility of the Other’s too dominant presence on Australian soil. The pronatalism being pilloried in O’Neill’s cartoon can be read in conjunction with Howard’s responses to asylum seekers as representing the federal government’s anxiety about the decline, in proportion to other subpopulations, of the white population in Australia. The image of the Prime Minister is striking for its evocation of the plethora of cartoons produced in and around 1901 showing Sir Henry Parkes, proclaimed father of federation, and Sir Edmund Barton, Australia’s first Prime Minister, wearing mob caps, dresses and aprons and pushing the pram of, or nursing, the infant human body of the newly federated Australia. The policies that O’Neill’s cartoon makes reference to indicate that the pronatalism so obviously present in the political rhetoric of federation, and the post-First World War and post-Second World War calls for repopulation, resurfaced in state discourses of pregnancy and motherhood at the turn into the twenty-first century. His cartoon also attests to the fact that this rhetoric was not without its critics. However, despite the feminist movement’s compelling, and in many ways effective, public critiques of this return to maternal citizenship, women’s bodies continue to be produced as both obstacles to, and insurers of, the future of the nation. Prior to the late 1960s, an intrinsic relationship between maternity and female citizenship was cultivated by Australian governments and feminist movements alike. It was as crucial to campaigns for the lowering of maternal mortality rates, forms of child endowment and safe contraception as it was to the rhetoric of pronatalism. In each case biological determinism played a critical role in women’s claims to rights and in the state’s Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, No. 46, March 2005

The ‘unwanteds’ and ‘non-compliants’: ‘unsupported mothers’ as ‘failures’ and agents in Australia’s migrant Holding Centres*

Abstract Ideas of assimilated citizenship are inherently gendered and during Australia’s post-World War Two migration boom they were deeply and explicitly invested in marriage, children and domesticity. In this period of social conservatism and economic boom, assimilation rhetoric functioned as a reassuring mirror for the host population, promoting the dream of prosperous family life as the ultimate aspiration for refugees and migrants. The role of immigration Holding Centres within this vision was to provide a context in which migrants and refugees could take their first steps towards accomplishing this dream. These Centres of necessary temporary residence were designed as sites of transition towards autonomous, assimilated family life. However, those families headed by single mothers, often referred to in government records as ‘unsupported mothers’, had limited opportunities to live up to such images of assimilation, or even to comply with the economic imperatives of the migration scheme that had brought them to Australia. Based mainly on Department of Immigration records, this article demonstrates that despite recognising the long-term economic and social prospects their children represented, government agencies viewed many unsupported mothers as system failures. They attempted to remedy the situation by turning these women into live-in domestic workers, at times placing pressure on them to institutionalise their children in order to facilitate this, thereby prioritising their compliance with economic imperatives over support for their parenting. Within the limited scope of their agency, unsupported mothers responded by attempting to negotiate the terms of their compliance or simply refusing to comply. For the latter group, Holding Centres became a more permanent home. This permanence is read here as a gendered form of resistance to a system that struggled to foster their economic self-reliance without compromising their capacity to be mothers.

Failing ‘Abyan’, ‘Golestan’ and ‘the Estonian Mother’: Refugee Women, Reproductive Coercion and the Australian State

Abstract In September and October 2015, the story of detained Somali refugee ‘Abyan’ unfolded in the Australian media. A victim of rape on Nauru and seeking an abortion that could not be obtained on the island nation, Abyan was escorted to Sydney where she was to attend an abortion clinic. She was ultimately returned to Nauru without having had an abortion. This paper situates Abyan’s story alongside other stories from Nauru and in a longer history of reproductive coercion in Australian Immigration Department accommodation since the Second World War.

Lost in translation: managing medicalised motherhood in post-World War Two Australian migrant accommodation centres

ABSTRACT Women who began their lives as ‘New Australians’ in migrant centres, arriving from refugee camps and war-ravaged homelands, brought with them a range of interpretations of good health and its management. In post-WWII Australia, the medicalisation of maternity and infant welfare intensified in the context of a renewed anxiety about population and recent medical developments. This article investigates the systems and quality of care given to pregnant women, infants and new mothers in government funded accommodation centres. This care was delivered in the highly politicised context of a mass migration scheme sold to the host population as coming at minimum social and economic cost. We assess the impact of this political context on the care that was provided and reveal health care settings to be crucial sites for the examination of the complex biopolitics of gendered citizenship within the mass migration scheme.

Maternal Responsibility and Traceable Loss: medicine and miscarriage in twentieth-century Australia

ABSTRACT This article historicises the meaning of miscarriage in twentieth century Australia. It identifies a number of crucial turning points in scientific interpretations of the causes and treatments of miscarriage that produced shifts in the communication of responsibility to women for their own pregnancy losses. It also describes the changes that a number of medical technologies, including pregnancy detection, foetal visualisation and assisted conception, have brought to bear on the pregnant and pre-pregnant body. These technologies proliferated a variety of forms of reproductive loss during a period in which women experienced enhanced prospects of conception, as well as foetal, infant and maternal survival.

Histories of constrained compassion: the idealised refugee family and the Australian nation, 1947–1975

Abstract By way of introduction to this special issue, I examine the idealised family as a technology of Australia’s white nation-building project in a period of growing internationalism. I place the articles in this context, highlighting their contributions to a history of compassion propelled by Australia’s emerging sense of itself as a global citizen and constrained by a nationalist agenda defined by economic and social aims and informed by a history of racial anxiety. Racialised and gendered productions of the family have been deployed by the Australian nation to embrace, regulate and reject refugees in the period since 1947. This special issue contributes to historicising these techniques and their effects, which remain with us in reconfigured forms in the present.

Dangerous Ideas: Women’s Liberation – Women’s Studies – Around the World

ofWomen (ICW) in 1888 inWashington gave the impetus for the creation of an Australia-wide National Council of Women. At this early stage, the only National Council of Women that existed in Australia was in New South Wales, which had affiliated with the ICW. This fact gives rise to an enduring issue within the book and for the history of the NCWA: how would various women’s groups cooperate to create a ‘National’ Council of Women of Australia? What states, regions, or councils should represent Australian women? The book details a tumultuous process through which various councils struggled to bridge political divides, geographic distance, communication breakdowns, and power struggles to create networks through which Australian women may cooperate, collaborate, and participate in public life. The ICW looms large as an organising influence on the NCWA. The International Council was the blueprint for the formation of national councils in other countries, and such countries generally adopted the ICW’s constitution as their own, which dedicated the councils to inclusivity, political bipartisanship, and non-sectarianism. By 1911, the ICW had foregrounded specific causes, a number of which had aligned with the national and international interests of emerging national councils in Australia: national and international cooperation, equal moral standards for men and women, legal equality for women, public health, and education. The creation of the NCWA was not successfully accomplished until 1931 and it was not an easy or simple task. Such national federation required cooperation, collaboration, and communication. The ‘Council Idea’, as expressed by its various advocates, stresses women’s capacities for creating spaces in public life for their participation. Which council was going to be the representative council for Australian women? How could Australian women participate in an international council with any authority if they did not represent a large majority of their nation’s women? Affiliation with the International Council required that only one national council represent the country. More than three decades were necessary for the various councils in Australia to form a ‘representative’ national council. Respectable Radicals meticulously addresses some of the tensions that exist between Australian states and how they shaped the formation of a national council. Additionally, the book sets out to address some of the thorny issues surrounding Australian women’s representative status, nationalism, patriotism, and the role women could play in discussing and arbitrating the emergent issues that would face the young nation. Quartly and Smart, through rigorous research and analysis, detail how these ‘respectable radicals’ and their activism necessarily travelled between the local and the global, the national and the international, Australia and the world. This international affiliation also leads to an increasing ‘professionalisation’ of the NCWA throughout its many decades of existence. Once a loosely aligned formation of state councils in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the 1950s to the 1970s the NCWA solidified its presence as one of the most important women’s organisations in Australia. However, by the 1980s to the 2000s, the National Council’s influence and access to government consultations and international initiatives had begun to wane in favour of other women’s organisations. Respectable Radicals belongs to the tradition of documenting women’s contributions to history. This volume is commendable for its precise attention to the details of the formation of the various councils and for the publication of the biographies of many of the women involved in the councils. Respectable Radicals makes an important contribution not only to Australian women’s history, as evidenced by the web-based archive Stirrers with Style!, but also to the history of the ‘Council Idea’, and women’s historic emergence as political agents.