Abstract
-
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.