Jane L Carey

The Racial Imperatives of Sex: birth control and eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the interwar years

While most historical studies position Western birth control campaigns as arising out of the womens movement, this article suggests they were primarily eugenic, rather than feminist, even if many of the leading figures were women. Birth control gained support largely through its representation as a tool for (white) racial progress and population control, rather than as an issue of womens rights. Indeed, in the interwar years birth control and eugenics were so intertwined as to be synonymous. The article explores the Malthusian writings of Annie Besant; the remarkably similarly ways that Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger promoted birth control as a eugenic tool; the support for birth control within both British and American eugenics organisations; and finally Australias largest eugenic organisation, the Racial Hygiene Association, which founded the countrys first birth control clinic in 1933 and later reinvented itself as the Family Planning Association. Recovering these links allows us to see how birth control was fundamentally linked to broader, transnational discussions of race and reproduction, and of how sex should be harnessed for racial purposes.

A Transnational Project? Women and Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia, 1890–1945

This article presents a broad overview of the gendered regimes which shaped the development of social scientific knowledge in Australia, and the position of women within the field, from 1890 to 1945. It particularly explores the local desire to emulate developments in Europe and the United States. Australian women were prominent in early ‘amateur’ social science, which was strongly linked to social reforming activities. However, the social sciences developed exceedingly slowly within the Australian academy and rather continued to be sustained largely by the social reform movement. The continuing lack of formal institutionalisation, well into the twentieth century, provided considerable scope for some (privileged) women to create themselves as social scientific experts. Indeed, it was largely the interests of women social reformers who eventually drove professionalisation of the social sciences from the 1930s. Nevertheless, when professionalisation and institutionalisation did finally come in the 1940s, Australia followed remarkably similar patterns to those seen in the United States and United Kingdom nearly 50 years earlier. Women were largely regulated to the lower‐status, applied, feminine field of social work while men took over the new and more prestigious academic arena.

'Women's Objective - A Perfect Race': Whiteness, eugenics and the articulation of race

Writing in 1930 for Herself, a magazine published by Sydney’s women’s organizations with a strongly eugenic focus, Irene Longman, Queensland’s first woman member of parliament and sometime president of that state’s National Council of Women, reflected on the topic “Women’s Objective—A Perfect Race.” She argued that: Many of our most pressing difficulties … could be relieved by the scientific and courageous tackling of such problems as mental deficiency and other questions concerning the health of the race … We women must seriously consider this terrible problem of the unfit … The women of our day and generation are more fitted than those of any other period to continue the great traditions of the race from which we have sprung.2

Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field

Since whiteness studies made its dramatic entrance into the U.S. academy in the early 1990s it has generated tremendous scholarly output. Monographs and edited collections have proliferated across and between numerous disciplines. Amongst all this intellectual activity, however, the question of whiteness and colonialism remains a significant and curious absence. As its Saidian-inspired title signals, Re-Orienting Whiteness emerges from our desire to address this gap by pushing “whiteness studies” toward a more sustained engagement with critical postcolonial thought and the history of colonialism. Despite their many obvious synergies, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization between these approaches to understanding the modalities of race, past and present. There is a clear need for this radical separation to be addressed. This collection offers an explicit challenge both to work on race in the United States (which has tended to elide the foundational significance of its settler-colonial origins), and to historical scholarship on British empire-building (which remains deeply conflicted over the significance of race)3. Our work is based on the conviction that the construction of whiteness and the phenomena of European colonialism are fundamentally interconnected, and that whiteness studies must be “Re-Oriented” to take this into account. Equally, a greater and more rigorous focus on whiteness as a racial category has much to offer to our understandings of the historical operations of colonialism and its ongoing effects.

Introduction: on the critical importance of colonial formations

In 1921 the National Geographic Magazine published a special issue on ‘The Islands of the Pacific’. Richly illustrated with photographs, as was the hallmark of the magazine, the issue also featured a map produced as a special colour supplement (see Figure 1). In his introductory essay for the edition, J.P. Thomson, C.B.E., LL.D., who was the Honorary Secretary and Treasurer of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, referred readers directly to this map, so they might situate themselves within what he assumed would be an unfamiliar geography for most. He also included a detailed written description of ‘this Polynesian Empire, if I may so call it’ which ‘extends across the Pacific from the eastern waters of Australia and New Guinea for a hundred degrees of longitude to Easter Island’, listing all of the major island groups and ‘numerous clusters of islands, reefs, and lagoons scattered over wide expanses of tropical ocean’. The map supplement also emphasised empire, but from a quite different perspective. It, too, included all of the ‘Islands of the Pacific’, but these were overlaid with ‘Sovereignty and Mandate Lines in 1921’. Indeed, these lines dominated the map. Assigning a different colour to each of the imperial powers in the Pacific (Japan, the US, France, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia and New Zealand), thick borders partitioned islands and sea. In this representation, the land mass of Australia looms large (although depicted at an atypical angle, as if acted on by the ‘weight’ of the Pacific) and New Zealand particularly assumes a new prominence, exceeding the conventional mapping of its three main islands. Great Britain’s possessions are centrally positioned, but it is not especially dominant in the region, with Australia and New Zealand mapped as distinct and equivalent imperial powers, rather than encompassed within the British Empire as a whole (as typically identified by the same shade of red on world maps at the time). China and the mainland United States are relegated to either side of the top corners of the map just peeping into view, almost as afterthoughts, belying their continental proportions. If the thick sovereignty and mandate boundary lines implied clear divisions of territory and authority, a series of fainter lines indicated something different. They represented the various cable lines of the region. These cut across the partitioned Pacific, creating numerous connections that defied these seemingly solid borders.

‘A walk for our race’: colonial modernity, Indigenous mobility and the origins of the Young Māori Party

Abstract This article argues that concepts of colonial modernity, originally developed for India and East Asia, and attention to micro-mobilities can provide new understandings of the emergence of Indigenous modernity in settler societies. Using previously unexplored sources, it examines a (seemingly small and local) walking tour by three Māori schoolboys in 1892 to ‘save their race from extinction’. An exemplary expression of Māori modernity, this walk is frequently cited as marking the earliest origins of the Young Māori Party, one of the most significant Māori organisations of the early twentieth century. Prior work on this group has been almost entirely confined within New Zealand historiography where it has been the subject of significant critique as a force for assimilation. Connecting this ‘walking tour’ with colonial and Indigenous histories elsewhere provides new ways of conceiving its significance, both locally and in its wider implications, that avoid such tropes. It demonstrates the possibilities of keeping both the local and the global in view, and indeed how this can amplify the importance of local histories.