Sex Smells: Olfaction, Modernity and the Regulation of Women's Bodies 1880–1940 (Or How Women Came to Fear Their Own Smells)

ABSTRACT

This article analyses representations of deodorising products in Australian women's magazines from 1880 to 1940 to examine how women were encouraged to fear their own smells and mistrust their own bodies. I argue that the transition to modernity witnessed a reduction in olfactory tolerance that fell along class and gender lines. Smells were imbued with new cultural meanings that served to reinforce women's subordinate status and to pathologise women's bodies on the supposed eve of their emancipation. As public space was increasingly democratised, smell was invoked to police social divisions and to render them culturally intelligible. As such, this article brings feminist history and the history of sexuality into dialogue with the history of the senses to redirect scholarly attention to the politics of smell. It also challenges dominant interpretations of modernity that emphasise the primacy of the visual.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally generous feedback, as well as the editors of Australian Feminist Studies and Professor Penny Russell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alecia Simmonds is a lecturer in law at UTS and a sessional lecturer in Australian Cultural History at New York University, Sydney. Her book, Courting: A History of Love and Law in Australia will be published in 2019.

Notes

1 I have selected magazines that had both a wide circulation and were available in hard copy at Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, as I wanted to read the source in its original print format to understand its context in relation to the rest of the magazine, something that is more difficult to gauge when using digital databases. The New Idea (1902–1911), which became Everylady's Journal (1911–1928) before returning to New Idea, was published monthly from 1911 to 1938. It was selected for its popularity and because it was the first Australian made women's magazine (see “The New Idea for Australasian Women,” Evelyn Observer, and South and East Bourke Record, August 29, 1902). The Australian Women's Mirror (1924–1961) was selected because of its large circulation figures, reaching over 160,000 copies in the 1930s. Until the advent of the Australian Women's Weekly in 1933 it was the most popular women's magazine, in competition with New Idea. (see Perkins 2017). The Australian Town and Country Journal (1870–1907) was selected for understanding the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the main magazine for women before other women's magazines were formed. There were 52 issues each year. (see “Australian Town and Country Journal”, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspapers/title/52). Adam and Eve (1926–1941), a weekly Melbourne based publication was selected because it covers the period under study here and because, as stated in its 1926 edition, it addressed itself to ‘women's interests, and reviews of sport and entertainment’ (see Frank S Greenop 1947, History of Magazine Publishing in Australia, 244–246).