Lisa Featherstone

BECOMING A BABY?: The Foetus in Late Nineteenth-century Australia

The image of the foetus has become, in the twenty-first century, a particularly potent force. This is the foetus at a particular historical moment: a thumb-sucking, wriggling, engrossing little body. The foetus has become unequivocally childlike, an in utero performer: somersaulting, crying, yawning, actively engaging with an external audience. With actions that are viewed as resolutely ‘human’, the foetus has become more infant than embryo. This paper is an attempt to trace and historicise this shift in embodiment, to rethink the beginnings of the ‘making’ of the foetus as a baby. Feminist theorists have rightly suggested that the new technologies of the twentieth century, including X-rays, photography and ultrasound imaging, have changed our social, legal and medical relationship to the foetus (Oakley 1987; Duden 1993; Petchesky 1987; Hartouni 1997; Franklin 1991; Rapp 1999; Kevin 2003). In particular, the widespread use of ultrasound imaging has focused attention on the foetus, rather than the mother, as the object of the gaze. The visual depiction of the foetus allows it to be perceived as individual and concrete, while the mother forms merely a backdrop, if indeed she is viewed at all (Petchesky 1987; Savell 2002). From this, new technology has increasingly posited the foetus with personhood, more specifically as a baby, with a physicality and even a personality, distinct from the woman who enfolds it. This article, however, will suggest that changing conceptualisations of the foetus are not only dependent on technologies but rather on complex social, cultural, political and economic interactions, grounded in distinct times and places. Specifically, I will consider changing understandings of the foetus in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Australia, where the demand for white babies to populate the new nation was intense. Such a focus on the white child had important implications for the idea of the foetus. During this period, the foetus was re-examined and rethought, emerging not necessarily as the infant figure of 100 years later but certainly as more childlike than it had been previously. Here, I trace the small steps towards a renegotiation of the foetal body and examine how it was imagined and re-imagined during this period. To do so, I consider a number of case studies, beginning with the paradigmatic trope of abortion. I move beyond this, however, to include a consideration of the foetus during a newly medicalised pregnancy; the role of the caesarean section in childbirth, and finally to the emerging regime of antenatal care devised in the years before the First World War. Through such analysis, I will suggest that the making of a foetus into a baby, or even an ‘unborn’ baby, is not merely or solely about the visual but reflects the wider social and cultural landscape of fin de siècle Australia. This paper is grounded in an understanding that race matters. It will suggest that the changing conceptualisations of the foetus, from a relatively unproblematised part of

Sexy Mamas? women, sexuality and reproduction in Australia in the 1940s

World War II is frequently read as a turning point in the construction of femininity. According to Marilyn Lake and others, during this period women were increasingly defined in terms of glamour and allure, and there was a new emphasis on youth, beauty and heterosexual attractiveness. The present article will complicate this view with an examination of sexuality after marriage. Through a reading of letters written by women themselves, it will suggest that for many white women in this period, heterosexuality remained tied to reproduction, rather than to sexual freedom or even sexual pleasure.

Sexual and gender-based violence: definitions, contexts, meanings

Current global estimates of sexual and gender-based violence show its widespread and enduring prevalence. In 2013, the World Health Organization reported that one-third of women globally have experienced sexual and/or physical intimate partner violence (World Health Organization 2013). A systematic review of global estimates of sexual violence found that one in 13 women has been sexually assaulted by someone other than an intimate partner, with rates far higher in some regions (Abrahams et al. 2014). A recent global analysis of the prevalence of child sexual abuse showed that approximately one in 12 men and one in 5 women experience sexual abuse before the age of 15 (Pereda et al. 2009). A 2010 Australian study revealed the endemic nature of violence experienced by transgender people (Berman and Robinson 2010). Feminist perspectives are critical to understanding and responding to sexual and gender-based violence. Feminism has long been at the cutting edge of nuanced investigations of violence. In the nineteenth century, feminists pioneered examinations of the structural relationship between sex, gender and violence (Bland 2001). Women’s Liberation intensified analysis with second-wave feminism focusing on multiple forms of violence by men against women. Sexual violence became an important issue for feminist analysis and scholarship. Susan Brownmiller’s controversial text Against Our Will: Women, Men, and Rape (1975) is widely credited with sparking Western feminist scholars’ critical interrogations of the power relations inherent in sexual violence, examining the problem in fields as diverse as law, socio-legal studies, cultural studies, history and literature. At the same time, feminist activists staged campaigns highlighting the various forms of violence against women and the frequency of its perpetration. In the 1970s and 1980s, activists campaigned against sexual assault and domestic violence, and worked towards establishing safe spaces including women’s refuges and rape crisis centres. In Australia, many of these ideas were taken up by the state, and feminist agendas were enshrined in both legislation and public discourse (Eisenstein 1996). In law, feminist scholars worked towards reforming approaches to crimes against women, restructuring statutory definitions of sexual violence, including protections for female victims within the court, the recognition of rape within marriage and, most recently, putting forward alternatives to the adversarial criminal trial for prosecutions of sexual violence (McDonald and Tinsley 2011). In many Western nations, activism, pressure for law reform and scholarly analysis were intertwined, and a growing body of scholarship focused attention on women’s experiences of violence in the home and in public space, and the state’s responses to this violence. Feminism, feminist studies, feminist legal studies and gender studies remained at the forefront of scholarly responses to sexual and gender-based violence (Estrich 1988; Genovese 1992; Easteal 1998). Though disparate, these approaches tend to emphasise the systemic nature of gendered power in structuring legal, political and social responses to violence. Such power structures influence the perpetration of violence and determine

‘The one single primary cause’: divorce, the family and heterosexual pleasure in postwar Australia

Abstract In the late 1940s, the popular Australian journal Smiths Weekly boldly announced that “the one single primary cause” of divorce was “physical maladjustment between man and wife through ignorance of sex.” By the 1950s, the links between sex and divorce were omnipresent. Regardless of the traumas of World War II and the difficulties faced by both men and women in re-acclimatising to “normal” civilian life, rising divorce rates were commonly linked to sexual dissatisfaction within the marital bed. The new model of heterosexual pleasure demanded a certain kind of sexual life: regular, penetrative, and completed by the simultaneous orgasm. Anything else was troubling and probably unsatisfactory. Given that various sex writers suggested that at least half of all married women were sexually frustrated, the potential for divorce hence social disaster was clear. The sexual lives of citizens, then, were ripe for a raft of public commentaries—for marital sex could undermine postwar population, the nuclear family, and the very foundations of 1950s Australian citizenship. This article will explore the twin concepts of divorce and heterosex and the multiple ways sexual dissatisfaction was linked to social and sexual disorder.

‘That's what being a woman is for’: opposition to marital rape law reform in late twentieth century Australia

From 1976 until 1994, Australian states and territories introduced a raft of reforms to sexual assault laws. Most of these were welcomed, and were seen to reflect womens changing status within a modernising society. One reform, however, was especially contentious. The British law had proclaimed that a woman could not be raped within marriage: the marital bond included a husbands right to sexual access to his wife. Following South Australias lead, all Australian jurisdictions introduced changes to this law, making it a crime to rape a woman within marriage, either before or after separation. It was a fundamental challenge to the way familial authority was conceptualised, established and policed. In a period where feminism had infiltrated many layers of political and social life, we might expect that this change to the law would have been greeted with relief and even celebration. The response to changes to marital rape laws was, however, both muted and ambivalent. Even feminist groups did not offer unequivocal support, and in general public opinion was at best reserved. Further, many conservative groups understood the new laws as an assault on the sanctity of the family itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources in the mainstream and alternative media, as well as parliamentary debates, government enquiries, academic studies and legal reports, this paper will explore the multifarious responses to legislative change. It uncovers the complex ways sexual violence and female bodily autonomy were understood within and beyond the borders and boundaries of the home and family.

Hierarchies of Harm and Violence

Abstract This article interrogates the prosecution of familial sexual crimes in 1950s Australia, a decade where the family was considered the bedrock of society. Using criminal trial transcripts from the period, we analyse how offenders, victims, families, lawyers and judges understood familial sexual abuse. We examine the contours of cases heard by New South Wales (NSW) higher courts in the 1950s, analysing three important themes: conceptualisations of the harm and violence in familial abuse; the relationship between offenders’ explanations of familial abuse and the gender dynamics of the family and how financial constraints on women in the family impeded reporting of sexual abuse.This article interrogates the prosecution of familial sexual crimes in 1950s Australia, a decade where the family was considered the bedrock of society. Using criminal trial transcripts from the period, we analyse how offenders, victims, families, lawyers and judges understood familial sexual abuse. We examine the contours of cases heard by New South Wales (NSW) higher courts in the 1950s, analysing three important themes: conceptualisations of the harm and violence in familial abuse; the relationship between offenders’ explanations of familial abuse and the gender dynamics of the family and how financial constraints on women in the family impeded reporting of sexual abuse.

Hierarchies of Harm and Violence: Historicising Familial Sexual Violence in Australia

Abstract This article interrogates the prosecution of familial sexual crimes in 1950s Australia, a decade where the family was considered the bedrock of society. Using criminal trial transcripts from the period, we analyse how offenders, victims, families, lawyers and judges understood familial sexual abuse. We examine the contours of cases heard by New South Wales (NSW) higher courts in the 1950s, analysing three important themes: conceptualisations of the harm and violence in familial abuse; the relationship between offenders’ explanations of familial abuse and the gender dynamics of the family and how financial constraints on women in the family impeded reporting of sexual abuse.This article interrogates the prosecution of familial sexual crimes in 1950s Australia, a decade where the family was considered the bedrock of society. Using criminal trial transcripts from the period, we analyse how offenders, victims, families, lawyers and judges understood familial sexual abuse. We examine the contours of cases heard by New South Wales (NSW) higher courts in the 1950s, analysing three important themes: conceptualisations of the harm and violence in familial abuse; the relationship between offenders’ explanations of familial abuse and the gender dynamics of the family and how financial constraints on women in the family impeded reporting of sexual abuse.

The family in Australia

As Australia enters the first decades of the twenty-first century, ideas about the family, its role, and how we define it remain firmly on the public agenda. If in the 1950s, the nation had an unquestioned idea about what a family looked liked and what being part of a family meant, the same can no longer be said for contemporary Australia. The older idealisation of the nuclear family no longer holds true for the experience of most Australians today, and families now come in myriad forms. They are not, however, uncontested. In politics, law, media, and, of course, in the home itself, the precise meaning of our most intimate relationships*our kinship*is defined and redefined according to a range of political and personal intersections. Missing from these public discussions, however, is an appreciation of the historicised nature of the family. Like other phenomena, the family is socially and culturally contingent, subject to a range of factors in time and place. As historians, our awareness of this is heightened. Nonetheless, the ‘‘family’’ is a space rarely specifically interrogated in Australian history. Over the past forty years, there has been crucial historical scholarship on domesticity and home, and on women and children’s history in both public and private spheres. Yet the concept of the ‘‘family’’ itself has not necessarily been at the centre of these works. While families were understood to be historical constructs rather than natural or transhistorical, the scholarly focus was more clearly on gender and class negotiations within the home, and the concept of ‘‘the family’’ itself was rarely deconstructed in detail. Interest in the history of the family began more broadly in the 1960s, with increasing attempts to chart the formations and structures of many layers of society, including private life. Stimulated by Philippe Ariès, who viewed the ‘‘the idea of the family’’ as ‘‘one of the great forces of our time’’, others began to examine the role of the family in wider social, political, and economic frameworks. By the 1970s, historians, such as Lawrence Stone, Jean Louis Flandrin, and Edward Shorter, began to look more intently at the home, the family, domesticity, and familial relations. Some of this work was primarily demographic, tracing the establishment of the nuclear family through population trends. Drawing on sociology, psychology, and anthropology, others attempted an analysis of the cultural and philosophical meanings of childhood and the family. Into the next decades, feminism had profound impacts on studies of the family, leading to detailed investigations into the life of women as girls, wives, lovers, and mothers. Many of these ideas were taken up by Australian historians, especially in the 1980s, when aspects of family life and structure were considered in a range of historical and sociological studies. In the 1990s, historians Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly drew attention to the multiple Journal of Australian Studies, 2013 Vol. 37, No. 3, 279 284, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2013.815574

Sex educating the modern girl: the formation of new knowledge in interwar Australia

Abstract This article explores the development of sex education for Australian girls in the 1920s. It shows that a new belief in the importance of informing girls about sex arose in this decade, both in Australia and elsewhere in the West. This belief marked a shift away from the Victorian notion that girlhood should be untainted by sexual knowledge. It was also allied to a growing faith in expert knowledge and modern rationality as a cure-all for social problems – including those associated with unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease. In spite of this, the actual sexual information imparted to girls was at best incomplete and at worst deliberately baffling. Ultimately sex education for girls in this period aimed to teach them how to control masculine sexual urges and the dangers of pre-marital sex. For all its rhetoric about the need for rational knowledge, it thus served a primarily moral agenda of little practical use to the girls concerned.

Pathologising White Male Sexuality in late Nineteenth-Century Australia through the medical prism of excess and constraint

Abstract This paper will explore the constructions of white male sexuality in late nineteenth-century Australia by the medical profession. In a period where female sexuality was always suspect, male sexuality, too, was brought into question, and the male body was increasingly constructed as vulnerable to sexual excess and sexual pathology. If male sexuality was to be active and dynamic, this could readily go too far, rendering men merely a slip away from deviance. Here, I will consider these notions of excess and constraint through an examination of sexual norms and perceived perversions, including sexual excess, sodomy and masturbation.