White anxieties and the articulation of race: the women’s movement and the making of White Australia, 1910s–1930s

This chapter examines the racial anxieties at work in the Australian

women’s movement in the early 1900s, focussing on campaigns and

organisations aimed at increasing and ‘improving’ the white population

on the one hand and discussions of the ‘Aboriginal problem’ on the other.

It particularly examines the activities of the National Council of Women,

the largest women’s group of this period, and the Australian Federation of

Women Voters, a smaller but highly influential organisation, as well as

local groups which emerged to further these causes. Specifically, it

explores efforts to promote immigration from Britain, which went

alongside eugenic measures to exclude ‘unfit’ white migrants as well, and

various schemes aimed at producing ‘well born’ white children. As I hope

to show, these seemingly disparate activities were informed by a single

racial imperative. The racial interests of the movement coalesced around

anxieties about the need for a large and healthy white population to

secure the nation’s future. Indeed, their racially based reforming

campaigns revolved almost entirely around anxieties internal to

whiteness. While the women’s movement showed remarkably little

interest in the ‘Aboriginal problem’, or the ‘peril’ of Asian immigration,

their vigorous campaigns around improving the quality and quantity of

the white population reveal how racialised thinking in fact permeated the

movement and animated many of its endeavours. And women’s work was

presented as essential to implementing these vital racial programs.