Abstract
While mothers, ideas about motherhood and practices of mothering have existed in every time period and culture, maternal studies as a distinct field has only emerged in the past few decades, symptomatic of the ways in which mothers are so often the taken-for-granted. This chapter charts the historical context within which Australian women have experienced mothering over the past century, explaining that alongside profound changes, significant continuities persist. Governments have consistently sought to use financial levers such as welfare payments and taxation policies to influence women’s choices in relation to fertility and employment; women’s reproductive decisions have continued to be constrained by moral judgements and cultural discourses; and the ‘optimal’ mother has been persistently defined as married, white, middle-class and heterosexual. Recording and interrogating these historical trends, a rich body of maternal studies literature has emerged at the interstices of a range of disciplines including anthropology, education, history, literary analysis, psychoanalysis, public policy, sociology and history. Chapter 1 outlines the contributions that each chapter in this volume makes to Australian maternal studies and teases out a unifying framework for the collection, drawing upon maternal and matricentric feminisms.
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Notes
- 1.
www.iamas.com. The organisation was previously known as the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) (1997–2019).
- 2.
Australian Mothering in Historical and Contemporary Perspective Symposium, the University of Melbourne, 15–16 February 2018.
- 3.
N. Hicks, ‘This Sin and Scandal’: Australia’s Population Debate 1891–1911 (Canberra: Australian National Press, 1978), xvi.
- 4.
Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16–46. See also Chap. 4 in this volume.
- 5.
While the motivations and consequences of this policy have been debated by historians, in her chapter in this volume, Marilyn Lake reads this as a radical socialist act recognising women’s newfound political status (Chap. 3).
- 6.
Patricia Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation 1788–1990 (Ringwood, VIC: McPhee Gribble, 1994), 206. See also Chap. 6 in this volume.
- 7.
John Murphy, ‘Work in a Time of Plenty: Narratives of Men’s Work in Post-War Australia,’ Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 88 (2005): 215.
- 8.
Grimshaw et al., Creating a Nation 1788–1990, 208–209. See also Raelene Frances, The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria, 1880–1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Kathryn M. Hunter, Father’s Right-Hand Man: Women on Australia’s Family Farms in the Age of Federation, 1880s–1920s (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004).
- 9.
Desley Deacon, ‘Taylorism in the Home: The Medical Profession, the Infant Welfare Movement and the Deskilling of Women,’ Journal of Sociology 21, no. 2 (1985): 165.
- 10.
Janet McCalman, Sex and Suffering: Women’s Health and a Women’s Hospital (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998); Lisa Featherstone, ‘Breeding and Feeding: A Social History of Mothers and Medicine in Australia, 1880–1925’ (PhD, Macquarie University, 2003); Kerreen Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernising the Australian Family 1880–1940 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985).
- 11.
Catherine Kevin, ‘Maternal Responsibility and Traceable Loss: Medicine and Miscarriage in Twentieth-Century Australia,’ Women’s History Review, 2016, 6.
- 12.
Deacon, ‘Taylorism in the Home,’ 165.
- 13.
Philippa Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby: Infant Survival and Welfare in an Imperial World 1880–1950 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997); W. Selby, ‘“Raising an Interrogatory Eyebrow”: Women’s Responses to the Infant Welfare Movement in Queensland, 1918–1939,’ in On the Edge: Women’s Experiences of Queensland, ed. Gail Reekie (St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 80–96; Virginia Thorley, ‘Accounts of Infant-Feeding Advice Received by Mothers: Queensland, Australia, 1945–1965,’ Nursing Reports 2, no. 1 (2012): 71–79.
- 14.
Shurlee Swain, ‘Adoption, Secrecy and the Spectre of the True Mother in Twentieth-Century Australia,’ Australian Feminist Studies 26, no. 68 (2011): 193–205; Denise Cuthbert, ‘Stolen Children, Invisible Mothers and Unspeakable Stories: The Experiences of Non-Aboriginal Adoptive and Foster Mothers of Aboriginal Children,’ Social Semiotics 11, no. 2 (2001): 139–154.
- 15.
Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 176–182.
- 16.
Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home.
- 17.
Kate Darian-Smith, On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime, 1939–1945 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990).
- 18.
John Murphy, A Decent Provision: Australian Welfare Policy, 1870 to 1949 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 9.
- 19.
John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000).
- 20.
Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle, ‘Sexuality and the Suburban Dream,’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15, no. 2 (1979): 4–15.8.
- 21.
Krupinksi and Stoller, 14.
- 22.
Ibid., 14–15.
- 23.
Game and Pringle, ‘Sexuality and the Suburban Dream,’ 7.
- 24.
John Murphy and Belinda Probert also suggest that the real figures are likely higher, with official data obscuring women moving in and out of paid employment: John Murphy and Belinda Probert, ‘Never Done: The Working Mothers of the 1950s,’ in Double Shift: Working Mothers and Social Change in Australia, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, John Murphy, and Belinda Probert (Beaconsfield, VIC: Melbourne Publishing Group/Circa, 2005), 134.
- 25.
Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe, Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 26.
Denise Cuthbert and Marion Quartly, ‘“Forced Adoption” in the Australian Story of National Regret and Apology,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 58 (2012): 82–96; Marion Quartly et al., The Market in Babies: Stories of Australian Adoption (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2013).
- 27.
Kerreen Reiger, ‘“Sort of Part of the Women’s Movement. But Different”: Mothers’ Organisations and Australian Feminism,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 22, no. 6 (1999): 585–595; Jill Barnard and Karen Twigg, Nursing Mums: A History of the Australian Breastfeeding Association 1964–2014 (Malvern, VIC: Australian Breastfeeding Association, 2014); Kerreen M. Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women’s Movement (Carlton South, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2001).
- 28.
Heather Sheard, All the Little Children: The Story of Victoria’s Baby Health Centres (Melbourne: Municipal Association of Victoria, 2007), 79.
- 29.
Kevin, ‘Maternal Responsibility and Traceable Loss,’ 8, 12.
- 30.
Marion Quartly et al., The Market in Babies: Stories of Australian Adoption (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2013), 3.
- 31.
Game and Pringle, ‘Sexuality and the Suburban Dream,’ 12. However, this temporary spike following divorce law reforms did subsequently plateau.
- 32.
Michelle Arrow, ‘“Everyone Needs a Holiday from Work, Why Not Mothers?” Motherhood, Feminism and Citizenship at the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships, 1974–1977,’ Women’s History Review 25, no. 2 (2016): 320–336. See also Michelle Arrow, The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (Sydney: New South, 2019).
- 33.
Bettina Cass, ‘Citizenship, Work and Welfare: The Dilemma for Australian Women,’ Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 1, no. 1 (1994): 106–124, 108.
- 34.
Deborah Brennan, The Politics of Australian Child Care: From Philanthropy to Feminism (Cambridge; Melbourne; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. See also Chap. 16 in this volume.
- 35.
Cass, ‘Citizenship, Work and Welfare,’ 115.
- 36.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Measuring Unpaid Household Work: Issues and Experimental Estimates, Cat. No. 5236.0 quoted in Cass, ‘Citizenship, Work and Welfare,’ 116–117. See also Jan Harper and Lyn Richards, Mothers and Working Mothers (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979).
- 37.
Cass, ‘Citizenship, Work and Welfare,’ 111.
- 38.
Penelope Rush, ‘Dad and Partner Pay: Implications for Policy-Makers and Practitioners’ (Australian Institute of Family Studies, February 2013).
- 39.
Cass, ‘Citizenship, Work and Welfare,’ 108.
- 40.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Superannuation Australia, Cat. No. 6319.0 (1995).
- 41.
Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, Superannuation Account Balances by Age and Gender, October 2017, 5, 13.
- 42.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Year Book, Australia, 2005, Cat. No. 1301.0: Population, Births.
- 43.
- 44.
Kevin, ‘Maternal responsibility and traceable loss,’ 72.
- 45.
Some Australian laws previously restricted ART to women in married or heterosexual de facto relationships. Legal challenges in South Australia and Victoria overturned these restrictions as contrary to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth). However, a state or territory may remove ART from their anti-discrimination laws, which the Northern Territory has done: Sonia Allan, ‘Access to assisted reproduction,’ Health Law Central website, Accessed 15 November 2018, http://www.healthlawcentral.com/assistedreproduction/access/. See also Chap. 8 in this volume.
- 46.
Catherine Kevin, ‘Maternity and Freedom: Australian Feminist Encounters with the Reproductive Body,’ Australian Feminist Studies 20, no. 46 (2005): 3–15.
- 47.
Natasha Campo, From Superwomen to Domestic Godesses: The Rise and Fall of Feminism (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009); Chila Bulbeck, Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also: Carla Pascoe Leahy, ‘From the Little Wife to the Supermom? Maternographies of Feminism and Mothering in Australia since 1945,’ Feminist Studies 45, no. 1 (2019): 100–128.
- 48.
Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, ‘Introduction: “Mother Worlds”,’ in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4.
- 49.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976).
- 50.
Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
- 51.
Julie Stephens, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
- 52.
Anne Manne, Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005).
- 53.
Andrea O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice (Bradford, Canada: Demeter Press, 2016).
- 54.
See Carla Pascoe Leahy’s chapter on pregnancy in this volume.
- 55.
Wendy Hollway, Knowing Mothers: Researching Maternal Identity Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 56.
Daphne de Marneffe, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004).
- 57.
Marian Baird and Leanne Cutcher, ‘“One for the Father, One for the Mother and One for the Country”: An Examination of the Construction of Motherhood Through the Prism of Paid Maternity Leave,’ Hecate 31, no. 2 (2005): 103–114.
- 58.
For more on the history of children and childhood in Australia, see: Carla Pascoe, ‘The History of Children in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Historiography,’ History Compass 8, no. 10 (2010): 1142–1164.
- 59.
For discussion of the complex issues relating to ART, see: Robyn Rowland, Living Laboratories: Women and Reproductive Technologies (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992); Susan B. Boyd, Dorothy E. Chunn, Fiona Kelly, and Wanda Wiegers, Autonomous Motherhood?: A Socio-Legal Study of Choice and Constraint (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Renate Klein, Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation (North Geelong, VIC: Spinifex Press, 2017); Jennifer Lahl, Melinda Tankard Reist, and Renate Klein, eds, Broken Bonds: Surrogate Mothers Speak Out (North Geelong, VIC: Spinifex Press, 2019); Gayle Davis and Tracey Loughran, eds, The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
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Pascoe Leahy, C., Bueskens, P. (2019). Contextualising Australian Mothering and Motherhood. In: Pascoe Leahy, C., Bueskens, P. (eds) Australian Mothering. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20267-5_1
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