Wives and mothers like ourselves? Exploring white women's intervention in the politics of race, 1920s‐1940s

Abstract

This paper takes the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children, and the broader white anxiety over the 'half-caste problem' which underpinned the policy, to explore white women reformers' intervention in the politics of race in the years 1920-40. In these years middle-class women's citizenship was based on maternalism and the defence of motherhood. At the same time the national feminist lobby, the Australian Federation of Women Voters, joined the public debate about the 'Aboriginal problem'. In this context it is necessary to ask: What was the feminist view of Aboriginal women's status? Were they considered 'wives and mothers' like themselves, as Louisa Lawson suggested in the 1890s? What was their view of the 'half-caste problem' and the 'absorption proposal' formulated to solve it? By asking such questions I hope to modify the current feminist historiographical view of white women reformers as 'pro-Aboriginal' and 'radical' and their policies as challenging White Australia in these years.

‘Unhomely moments’: Civilising domestic worlds in colonial Australia

“…Within this context, feminist historians have led the way in investigating home and history as, in Burton's words, 'mutually constitutive sites of cultural knowledge and political desire' (Burton, 2003, pp 5-6). Their interventions have explored, for example, white women's complex relationship with Aboriginal domestic servants (Haskins, 2005;Cole, Haskins, & Paisley, 2005); white feminists' political interventions into the rights of Aboriginal mothers and children (Holland, 2001;Lake, 1999a;Paisley 2000); the experience and regulation of interracial marriage (Ellinghaus, 2006;Bagnall, 2008); the gendered configurations of the national polity and the complexities of 'maternal citizenship' (Lake, 1999b); and the regulation, surveillance and protection of children by the state (Kociumbas, 1997). Taken together, such histories show how intricately the home was enmeshed with colonial and national politics.…”

Hunger and the humanitarian frontier

“…104 Association for the Protection of Native Races, Annual Report, 1938. 105 Foxcroft 1941Biskup 1973;Reece 1974;Loos 1982;Markus 1990;Lake 1999;Paisley 2000;Holland 2001;Rowley 1970;Reynolds 1998;Attwood 2003;Elbourne 2002;Lester 2009;Laidlaw 2002. 106 See Everill 2011.…”