- Hicks , Neville . 1978 . ‘This Sin and Scandal’: Australia's Population Debate 1891–1911 , 18 – 18 . Canberra : Australian National University Press .
- Hicks . xvii – xvii .
- Alter , Robert . 1991 . Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem , 113 – 16 . Cambridge : Harvard University Press . I am thinking of Walter Benjamin's image of the ‘angel of history’, whose face is turned back to Eden even as he is sucked towards the future by the winds of modernity. See
- Showalter , Elaine . 1991 . Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle , London : Bloomsbury .
- Mackinnon , Alison . 1997 . Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life , 1 – 46 . New York : Cambridge University Press . Anxieties about modernity often coalesced around women and the advance of feminism, with the declining birth rate and its perceived basis in female ‘selfishness’ and ‘unnaturalness’ playing a central role in these concerns. For an examination of these characteristically fin de siècle anxieties in the Australian context, see, chapters 1 and 2
- Walker , David . 1999 . Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 , Brisbane : University of Queensland Press . David Walker, ‘Modern Nerves, Nervous Moderns: Notes on Male Neurasthenia’, in Australian Cultural History, ed. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 123-37
- Rowley , Sue . 1989 . ‘Inside the Deserted Hut: the Representation of Motherhood in Bush Mythology’ . Westerly , 34 ( 4 ) December : 88 – 88 .
- Pringle , Rosemary . 1973 . ‘Octavius Beale and the Ideology of the Birth-Rate. The Royal Commissions of 1904 and 1905’ . Refractory Girl , 3 : 26 – 26 .
- Sharlin , Allan . 1986 . “ ‘Urban-Rural Differences in Fertility in Europe during the Demographic Transition’ ” . In The Decline of Fertility in Europe: the Revised Proceedings of a Conference on the Princeton European Fertility Project , Edited by: Coale , Ansley and Watkins , Susan Cotts . 234 – 60 . Princeton : Princeton University Press . The shift of populations from rural to urban areas in Europe occurred at roughly the same time as the decline in fertility. The theory of demographic transition, influential in the early twentieth century, assumed a crucial causal role for urbanisation in this decline. See, in, More recently, demographers have adopted a view of fertility decline as a much more complex process, abandoning urbanisation as a simple causal factor. On the role of perceptions of biological decline in anti-urbanism, see Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)
- 1995 . Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and the Future in Elizabeth , 16 – 16 . Melbourne : Melbourne University Press . As Mark Peel put it in the case of Australian urban planners, this ‘song’ was sung to a ‘British tune’: see his
- Schaffer , Kay . 1988 . Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition , 22 – 22 . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press .
- Powell , J. M. 1978 . Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process , Canberra : Australian National University Press . Such a ‘unique’ relationship was of course also celebrated in the United States, though with very different emphases: see
- 1904 . Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth Rate and on the Mortality of Infants in New South Wales , Vol. 1 , 53 – 53 . Sydney : Government Printer .
- 1980 . ‘The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia 1900–1914’ . Historical Studies , 19 ( 75 ) : 199 – 212 . Carol Bacchi's observation of ‘environmental optimism’, or the faith in the capacity of the Australian environment to mould from British raw product a healthier, more vigorous [hu] man, was based in a conception of an Australian life as one lived on the land, in wide open spaces. See her, Also see Walker, ‘Modern Nerves’
- Grimshaw , Patricia , Lake , Marilyn , McGrath , Ann and Quartly , Marian . 1994 . Creating a Nation , 207 – 207 . Melbourne : McPhee Gribble Publishers . See
- Schneider , William . 1990 . Quality and Quality: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth Century France , 15 – 15 . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . See, for instance, and Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop 5 (1978): 9-65. Michel Foucault identified the emergence of demography, the evaluation of the relationship between resources and inhabitants, and the construction of tables analysing wealth and its circulation—in other words, the growth of statistical thinking—as aspects of population control in his era of ‘bio-power’. See his The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1, tran. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), 140
- Barrett , James . January 1901, 1918 . “ presidential address to the Medical Association of Victoria on the Decline of the Birth Rate ” . In The Twin Ideals: An Educated Commonwealth , January , 346 – 346 . London : H. K. Lewis . in his
- Hollingworth , Leta . 2000 . ‘Leta S. Hollingworth on Coercive Pronatalism’ . Population and Development Review , 26 ( 2 ) : 353 – 63 . Hollingworth's comments first appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 1916. Taking E. A. Ross' theories regarding forms of social control, she argued that the notion of ‘maternal instinct’, although having some basis in biology, was used to control women by impelling them to bear and raise children. The wielding of so many forms of social control to this effect, she argued, proved that the ‘social guardians’ charged with their operation did not believe that maternal instinct alone could ensure population growth
- Garton , Stephen . 1986 . ‘Sir Charles Mackellar: Psychiatry, Eugenics and Child Welfare in New South Wales, 1900–1914’ . Historical Studies , 22 ( 86 ) April : 21 – 34 .
- Deacon , Desley . 1989 . Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830–1930 , Melbourne : Oxford University Press . The term ‘elite’ refers to the fact that these men represented a certain powerful section of the society in which they lived, hence their self-perceived role as ‘social guardians’ or protectors of the ‘national interest’. Conservative social meliorists, they occupied elite space by virtue of their ‘expertise’ and so can be viewed as members of the ‘new middle class’ as described by, in her, Deacon used Coghlan, a prominent member of the Commission, as an illustrative example of this group. Following Reiger, she described how the managing of the birth rate and infant mortality question by new middle-class medical ‘experts’ represented an ‘elitist’ approach to mothering, which was seen as no longer an instinct, but a skilled task to be managed by experts (210-14). The approach I take is influenced by these considerations regarding the ‘management’ of gender by this influential grouping, with my main concern lying with how their approach betrayed a particular view of modernity and women as the bearers of its more adverse trends. As it was the agenda of these men that determined the particular emphases and momentum of the Commission, the focus of this paper is on ‘elite responses’. See Hicks 5-9, on the particular social positions occupied by the individual Commissioners
- Hicks . 23 – 23 . Ibid., 17-18. See, on the ruling
- Ryan , Edna and Conlon , Anne . 1989 . Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work , Melbourne : Penguin . Although my reading focuses on gender, the ‘problem’ of the presence of women in the public sphere can of course be read purely as a matter of labour hostility to the competition that low-paid female workers presented. See
- 2000 . ‘Bringing the Unclothed Immigrant into the World’: Population Policies and Gender in Twentieth Century Australia’ . Journal of Population Research , 17 ( 2 ) November : 109 – 23 . Mackinnon drew on Mitchell Dean's discernment of a fear of pathology (symptoms of ‘disease’) in populations in the administration of what Foucault termed ‘bio-power’. She argues that Australian post-settlement history depicted the decline in the birth rate as a continuing ‘pathology’. See her
- 1985 . The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernising the Australian Family 1880–1940 , Melbourne : Oxford University Press . Reiger argued that the efforts of middle-class technical ‘experts’ to ‘modernise’ and ‘rationalise’ the domestic sphere, as well as sexuality and the reproductive process, represented a structural contradiction within industrial capitalist societies that retained a vision of women as symbols of nature, and of the domestic sphere as a haven from the world of capitalist process. The bourgeois model of a womanhood defined by maternal feeling was particularly undermined by emergent efforts to ‘supervise’ mothering practice. See her
- Davison , Graeme . 1983 . “ ‘The City-Bred Child and Urban Reform in Melbourne 1900–1940’ ” . In Social Process and the City: Urban Studies Yearbook 1 , Edited by: Williams , Peter . 143 – 74 . Sydney : George Allen and Unwin . See, in
- 2000 . ‘Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913’ . Australian Historical Studies , 31 ( 115 ) April : 201 – 21 . Rowley argued for the existence of a bush mythology based on a strict differentiation of spheres for men and women, with motherhood serving as the linchpin of a spatially-defined (domestic) vision of bush womanhood. A number of historians interested in gender in the rural setting, including most recently Richard Waterhouse in his, have argued that notions of ‘separate spheres’ were not strictly enforced in rural areas. However, their accounts, in rejecting in reality an essentialist vision of bush women as more ‘natural’ (maternal) women, fail to acknowledge that such visions did exist and were promulgated, especially in urban imagery of Australian country life, but also in visions of rural gender relations emanating from the country itself: see, for instance, Heather Gunn, ‘“For the Man on the Land”: Issues of Gender and Identity in the Formation of the Victorian Farmer's Union Women's Section, 1918–1922’, Journal of Australian Studies 42 (September 1994): 32-42
- Cole , J. H. 1996 . ‘“There Are Only Good Mothers”: The Ideological Work of Women's Fertility in France before World War 1’ . French Historical Studies , 19 ( 3 ) : 641 – 641 . Spring
- Lake , Marilyn . 1993 . “ ‘A Revolution in the Family: The Challenge and Contradictions of Maternal Citizenship’ ” . In Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States , Edited by: Coven , Seth and Michel , Sonya . 378 – 95 . New York : Routledge . See, for example, in
- Allen , Judith . 1990 . Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 , Melbourne : Oxford University Press .
- Rich , Adrienne . 1977 . Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution , London : Virago . See
- Bacchi and Hyslop , Anthea . 1980 . ‘The Social Reform Movement in Melbourne 1890–1941 , La Trobe University . See, PhD thesis, esp. chapter 11
- Berman , Marshall . 1983 . All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity , 15 – 15 . London : Verso .
- Wilson , Elizabeth . 1992 . The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women , California : University of California Press . See, for instance, and Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
- Berman . 19 – 19 .
- Spengler , Joseph . 1938 . France Faces Depopulation , 156 – 64 . Durham, North Carolina : Duke University Press . See
Australian Historical Studies
Volume 36, 2005 - Issue 126