Sex, the state and the ‘scarlet scourge’: gender, citizenship and venereal diseases regulation in Australia during the great war [1]

Abstract

Venereal diseases policy in Australia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran parallel to the changing assessment of the defence needs of the colonies and nation and, with those needs, developing ideas about the specifically gendered duties and requirements of citizenship. This article argues that the coalescence of these three discourses was only possible in the context of the first total war. Because defence needs and the duties of citizenship made the conscription of young men's bodies possible, the same requirements of total war for involvement by the whole society made the control of young women's bodies seem equally necessary because their unconstrained sexuality – signified by the figure of the ‘amateur’ – was represented as being dangerous to the fighting strength of the armed forces and to the reproducibility of the nation