‘Wanted! A Real White Australia’: The Women’s Movement, Whiteness and the Settler Colonial Project, 1900–1940

Abstract

This chapter examines some of the new roles being claimed by white women in the settler colonial project of ‘White Australia’ in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the activities of the National Council of Women, then the country’s largest women’s group, and some prominent women reformers, it explores how ideas about race and nation, particularly the desire for a large and healthy white population to secure the country’s future, animated many of their projects. While exhibiting little interest in the ‘Aboriginal problem’, or the ‘peril’ of Asian immigration, their extensive campaigns around white racial betterment reveal an enthusiastic promotion of eugenics and racialized identifications. From early in the twentieth century ‘mental deficiency’ in particular was identified as one of the greatest threats to the future of the white race and an issue that needed urgent attention. Women’s organizations advocated strong measures to combat this ‘menace’–including segregating such unfit bodies into ‘farm colonies’ or other institutions, along with sterilization, to prevent their ‘propagation’. At the same time they promoted women’s work as essential in effecting these reforms. More significantly, as the opening quotations illustrate, their campaigns demonstrate how the ‘race problem’ in early twentieth–century Australia was frequently conceived entirely in terms of white racial health.

The race problem … is a women’s problem, and the proper care and supervision of mental defectives and the gradual elimination of the unfit should be one of the responsibilities undertaken by associations of this kind … these defectives are a heavy charge on the nation, and an endeavour should be made by us to prevent the race from degenerating.

Mrs Pymm, delegate to the National Council of Women Congress, Sydney 1912 (‘Women and the Race Problem’,Argus, 2 August 1912

[T]he uncontrolled reproduction of the lowest types of humanity must result in the physical deterioration of the race… In a young, partially developed country like Australia the need for a virile stock to propagate the generations to come is particularly urgent… unless steps are taken to ensure the perpetuation of a healthy and normal population before it is too late, we will be inviting inevitable shipwreck as a people.

Lorna Hodgkinson, Superintendent of the Education of Mental Defectives, 1923 (evidence to the New South Wales Royal Commission on Lunacy Law and Administration, 1923, p. 660).