We can imagine Beatrice Faust — sleek bobbed hair, slash of red lipstick, large sparkling intelligent eyes — delivering an address at the second Mary Owen dinner in Melbourne in 1987. Hundreds of feminists, swathed in suffragette purples, whites and greens, were gathered at a dinner organised by the Women’s Electoral Lobby, and it is fitting that Beatrice, who founded WEL in 1972, was among the speakers.
Beatrice began by quoting from a Glen Tomasetti song, “Don’t be too polite girls… show a little fight,” and then applauded two feminists who had faced “gross hostility, vilification, harassment and misrepresentation” by the media. The first was Irene Bolger, who had led an unprecedented strike of nurses and midwives in Melbourne. The second was Alison Thorne, a socialist feminist and spokesperson for the Gay Legal Rights Coalition, who had caused controversy a few years earlier when she had condemned a police raid on a Melbourne-based paedophile discussion group.
Thorne, a school teacher, had excoriated the raid as a homophobic denial of free speech, noting that homosexuals had higher age of consent laws than heterosexuals. At the end of one radio interview about the raid a school bell could be heard ringing. Derryn Hinch replayed excerpts of the interview on his own program, adding: “Well there, you heard the recess bell. The woman expressing those views about the rights of kids to have sex with adults… is a teacher.” Thorne became front-page news around the country, condemned by editorial writers and radio hosts and was soon moved to an administrative position.
Beatrice’s speech was celebrating the Equal Opportunity Board’s ruling that Thorne had been discriminated against and must be reinstated. Like Bolger, she said in her address, Thorne had sustained a “worse battering than any modern feminist I know of. Both stood up to this magnificently. They showed that women can have True Grit and show a little fight.”
Beatrice agreed that the raid was an infringement on civil liberties, saturated in homophobia and driven by “wowsers, puritans, Catholics and cowardly governments.” She had written about her own romantic affair with an older man at the age of sixteen: “He is my secret. He is bliss. He is a paedophile. I remember him with tenderness and affection.”
In her excellent new biography, Fearless Beatrice Faust, Judith Brett paints an evocative picture of the response to Faust’s speech: “People shifted uncomfortably in their seats, eyes lowered, lips tight, barely listening… Few of the assembled feminists saw things quite as Bea did.”
I confess I equivocated about beginning this review with that unsettling scene. Beatrice Faust, I thought, is someone few people now remember, yet she should be a household name. Her attitude towards paedophilia was discomforting, to say the least.
But if politicians today seek to woo women’s votes around election time or backflip on anti-women policies (like Peter Dutton’s shortlived pledge to end working from home for public servants) then it’s because WEL, the organisation she founded, taught them to think about women’s concerns and to place them high on any political agenda. If states around Australia have decriminalised abortion, it is because campaigners like Faust shattered taboos, spoke about their own abortions and protested at the legal regulation of women’s bodies. And if contraception has become easily available and sex education is on school curriculums it is because Beatrice Faust and other women of her generation fought hard and tirelessly for these reforms. They deserve books, films and statues in their honour.
The wonderful thing about a biography of Faust written by an historian as interested in her private motivations as her public deeds is that the temptation of political hagiography gives way to humanistic complexity. The past is a foreign country whose strangeness or “otherness” can strike even when we are reading about the 1980s. At that dinner, Beatrice seems to be speaking a different language — yet, as Brett explains, her stance on paedophilia is not anomalous with her campaigns around abortion, sex education, homosexual rights or contraception.
Entering adulthood in the late 1950s, Beatrice was part of a generation of feminists whose activism began in the movement for civil liberties and who saw the police and the law being used to suppress sexual lives. The raid on the paedophile group, Brett explains, reminded her of how police had busted abortion clinics during the struggle for abortion law reform. The movement to introduce compulsory sex education in schools had unleashed a moral panic in the late 1970s, and in the frenzy around paedophilia Beatrice thought she found herself in combat with the same enemies of her youth, battling wowserish governments and sexual puritans for the right to speak freely about difficult sexual and moral issues.
There were also more personal reasons for Bea’s stance, more visceral, intimate and bodily. Throughout her life she believed she had a genius for sex: a preternatural ability to orgasm even in early childhood. Sex, she argued, was healthy, natural and diverse, whether it was gay, lesbian or, debatably, expressed by children. Brett deftly translates Beatrice’s speech in a manner she adopts throughout her book: by shuttling between Beatrice’s fertile inner terrain and her wider social context, suspending easy judgement and offering careful psychological speculation.
She also offers a riposte: why did Bea care more about the suffering of paedophiles than children? Shocking as it is, this scene shows why Faust makes such a rich subject and Brett such a clever, companionable and careful guide to her world.
Beatrice Faust came into the world on 19 February 1939 in a birth marred by tragedy. Her mother, who had never wanted a child but refused on religious grounds to take contraceptives or have an abortion, died twelve hours after her baby was born. Her death, says Brett, “was the defining fact of Beatrice’s life,” leaving her with a “visceral hunger for love” and providing the rationale for her abortion activism: every woman should have the right to choose, and every child should be loved and wanted.
Raised by an emotionally reticent, poorly educated, working-class father and a disengaged stepmother, Beatrice described her childhood in Melbourne’s suburbs as a “suppurating wound.” It was a world of “suburban viciousness” she later wrote, “of boiled mutton, greasy carrots and weevilly soup where…. on race days, the wireless had to be left on at full volume even when there was no one in the room.”
Alongside her intellectual malaise, Beatrice’s childhood was plagued by illnesses: chronic asthma, scoliosis and hearing impairments. Later in life she suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and depression which she treated with a range of therapeutic and medical remedies, from yoga and meditation to dangerously addictive anti-anxiety drugs. Where second-wave feminists sought consciousness-raising groups in place of psychology, blaming psychic suffering on political and structural problems, Beatrice turned to existentialism — with its exhortations to personal choice and responsibility — and transactional psychology. Circumstances which today we would describe through a language of “trauma” she saw as mere obstacles to an ever-achievable goal of self and social transformation. As Brett reminds us on a few occasions, she was never a victim.
Young Beatrice was “saved” by a teacher who saw her early brilliance and shepherded her into Melbourne’s Mac.Robertson’s selective school — a refuge for clever girls from poor families, many of whom went on to assume significant public roles. She excelled at high school and won a commonwealth scholarship to Melbourne University. When her ambitions to become an English literature academic were thwarted by a masculinist intellectual culture, she instead became a public intellectual.
Alongside her activism — around state censorship, abortion law reform, gay and lesbian rights and electoral lobbying — she also wrote books and pamphlets on sex and gender, was an art critic for the Melbourne Age and became a go-to commentator on sex. As Brett puts it, Beatrice “never swam with the tide.” As her controversial views on paedophilia show, she was a fearless and radical free-thinker, arguing for the marshalling of empirical evidence and open, rational debate, no matter what the topic. Her politics were guided by her research and by her body, though not in that order. As Brett surmises: Bea’s body would alert her to “social problems that demanded a political solution.” Whether it was the circumstances of her birth, her non-normative sexuality, her discerning eye or her sedative addiction, “Beatrice Faust’s politics,” in Brett’s inimitable opening words, “were driven by her body, its needs and pleasures, and by the body of her mother who died…”
One of this biography’s many strengths is its articulation of the plurality of philosophical positions that have comprised the feminist movement since the 1960s, and particularly the importance of generational differences. Easy generalisations, like the notion that feminists of the sixties and seventies were committed to making the personal political, appear more complicated when examined at the level of an individual’s life.
Like other women of her generation, Beatrice was often closer to liberalism than women’s liberation. She first campaigned for abortion reform in the late fifties not through the feminist movement, which was yet to begin, but through the Council for Civil Liberties, where it was argued that the police, the church and the law should not interfere in personal lives. As with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the viewpoint was more aligned to that of John Stuart Mill: the personal was not political, and the choice to abort a foetus was a private matter rather than one to be determined by lawmakers.
Yet in making these arguments Beatrice and other feminists used their personal lives as a prompt for activism and broke from their predecessors by placing sexuality at the centre of politics. To this extent, they forged a unique form of feminism grounded in liberalism that campaigned for reform through the state while also being deeply suspicious of state interference in private lives.
This is not to suggest that the abortion campaign was homogenous; groups like the Women’s Abortion Action Committee, for instance, drew on a more radical language of sexual citizenship. In Beatrice’s life, we see the sharpness of these ideological, generational and class differences, as her politics — which are largely liberal and reformist — jostle alongside other more utopian and revolutionary demands. This was partly because she was schooled in different philosophical and political ideas but also because, unlike middle class university students, she didn’t have the luxury to experiment with downward social mobility, signified in the radical dress or indecorous behaviour of women’s libbers. Beatrice had fought hard to leave behind her working-class origins, where swearing was more a routine than an act of revolt. Without a middle-class mother or father policing her speech and comportment, she felt few of the behavioural strictures experienced by middle-class women in the sixties and seventies.
Brett describes her biography as a Melburnian story: feminist activism was local and regional, she argues, because laws governing abortion were state-based and air travel and long-distance telephone calls were much more expensive than today. Yet glimpses of transnational exchanges between feminists abound in the book, for instance when we learn of Beatrice hosting Tunisian-French defence lawyer Gisele Halimi (who worked on the Bobigny abortion trial that led to legislative change in France) for the UN International Women’s Year in 1975, or when we read that WEL had an antecedent in the United States.
Brett could perhaps have said more about the internationalism of the women’s movement at this time. As Rosa Campbell has argued, the Abortion Law Reform Association, of which Faust was president, explicitly drew on British legal precedent to pressure for abortion reform and launch test cases that expanded abortion rights, and abortion activists shepherded women from New Zealand to Australian abortion clinics, often meeting them at airports dressed in red coats.
As with her award-winning biography of Australia’s second prime minister, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, Brett has access to a tantalising trove of personal papers that help make her book both a feminist biography and a history of how Beatrice gave meaning to her own experiences through philosophy, literature and technology specific to the mid-to-late twentieth century.
“All biographers are voyeurs on the life of another, but few would have such open access as I did to their subject’s sexual desires and disappointments, nor to their deep fears and insecurities,” writes Brett of the extensive diaries, family papers, notebooks and correspondence she was able to use to reconstruct Beatrice’s life. It is in this wealth of private papers that Brett encounters a woman who is at once typical of her generation — whose sexuality as a site of pleasure rather than mere reproduction was shaped by the introduction of the Pill; who wanted more from life than marriage and motherhood; whose friendships formed the basis of her activism; who placed sexuality at the forefront of her politics — yet also saw herself as radically unique.
Beatrice felt different from other women because of her assertive sexual style, which she evidenced in her capacity to separate sexual pleasure from emotion, her response to visual stimuli and her early sexual development. “I am one of a group of women, which Kinsey numbers at three per thousand of his sample, who can remember masturbating to orgasm before the age of three,” she wrote in a published memoir. She made sense of her body’s feelings not through feminist thought but in the writings of sexologists — Havelock Ellis, the Kinsey reports, Masters and Johnson — all of which led to what might appear to us as a rather essentialist, binarised, biologically deterministic view of sexuality.
Men and women simply had different sexualities and sexual styles, she argued, and as she herself didn’t fit into the feminine model she concluded she must be masculine. The writers she drew on could not easily imagine a powerful female sexual style, except that it looked masculine, and by the 1980s Beatrice identified as androgynous. In the eighties and nineties, from this concoction of self-defined masculine sexuality, existentialism and civil libertarianism, Beatrice formulated fervent defences of pornography and railed against “victim feminism’s” focus on rape.
The chapters on Beatrice’s writings — both public and private — about sexuality make for fascinating reading, particularly in light of our current conversations about the proliferation of pornography and its links to increased violence against women. Like her views on paedophilia, the argument that pornography contributes neither to women’s subordinate status nor to higher rates of violence now appear woefully dated.
I agreed to review this biography, I confess, because it felt like a duty I should perform. I first came across Beatrice — as the founder of the Women’s Electoral Lobby — in high school, and I went on to loathe her when, as a university activist, I saw her as a conservative, liberal, twinset-and-pearls-wearing commentator who seemed to hate radical feminists. Finally, as an academic, I came to a grudging appreciation of what she achieved through pragmatic reform.
Brett’s book introduced me to a wildly different person. Fearless Beatrice Faust is an apt title, but it could also have been called the fretful, riotously funny, exquisitely fashionable and utterly fascinating Beatrice Faust. •
Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics
By Judith Brett | Text Publishing | $36.99 | 304 pages
