Margot Hillel

Ignorance Is Not Innocence: Sex Education in Australia, 1890–1939

The campaign against AIDS brought a new frankness to sex education in Australia, the argument being that only an informed population could protect itself from disease. This chapter is concerned with an earlier transformation, also inspired by the perceived threat of sexually transmitted disease, the debate surrounding the introduction of sex education during the fifty years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. It documents a period in which the older moral discourse, which rested on concepts of abstinence and self-control, was displaced by a scientific one that aimed to show that public health education was as relevant for venereal diseases as it was for other feared maladies such as tuberculosis. But this new discourse was, we argue, equally conservative. Those organizations and individuals who favored extensive public education on the dangers of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases were determined to devise ways to spread public health messages without referring to complex aspects of both adult and juvenile sexuality that could have opened the way to a more liberal approach. The discursive shift that we trace here was not unique to Australia, but while Australian reformers drew freely on debates and materials developed overseas, they were applied to a self-consciously new nation, in which anxieties about race and morality were never far from the surface.

“Being Thankful for their Birth in a Christian Land”: Interrogating Intersections between Whiteness and Child Rescue

Reading whiteness into texts that are not overtly about race,” Ruth Frankenberg writes, “is essential if we are to disrupt whiteness as the unchallenged racial norm.” The sources that provide the basis for this chapter, the literary and journalistic output of the nineteenth-century child rescue movement, were certainly not overtly about race. They were, however, engaged in constructing and consolidating whiteness in both Britain and its settler colonies. It is the central role of such literature in the imperial dissemination of ideas about whiteness that we aim to investigate.

'She faded and drooped as a flower' : Constructing the Child in the Child-Rescue Literature of Late Victorian England

Poetry was a powerful component of the nineteenth-century child rescuers’ tools for raising the consciousness — and opening the wallets — of the middle class to the plight of the poverty-stricken child. The models of childhood and children conveyed in literature for children are devised by adults, as children usually lack the power and voice to construct their own images (Holland 19). The lack of power and voice was particularly true for nineteenth-century ‘street Arabs,’ the homeless waif children, and other children of the poor living outside any kind of social structure and support (Swain 212). The child-rescue movement was especially conscious of the need to speak on behalf of these children and to construct them in particular ways in the literature designed to raise public awareness of their plight. The Evangelical founders of the various child-rescue organizations saw their work as a kind of Christian crusade — Benjamin Waugh, founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, described it to one of the inspectors of the Society as ‘the most religious work in the world — the protection of suffering children’ (Hobhouse 24) — and as a way of purifying and strengthening the nation. If the children the rescue organizations targeted could be rescued in time, the writers argued, their childhood could be restored.