The Australian history profession suffered some tough losses in the first half of this year. We lost scholars whose work has been foundational to our research and teaching and, for some of us, we lost significant mentors too. Those who died in Australia — Lyndall Ryan and Frances Peters-Little — devoted whole careers to scholarly communities here. Others left an indelible mark when they departed to make their contributions elsewhere.
Judith Allen was one such historian whose sudden and untimely death in London on 4 July has shocked and saddened many historians. Productive to the end, her death left unfinished a number of books that promised to have her signature game-changing effect on how we think about the history of gender and sexuality.
Judith Allen was Distinguished Professor and Walter Professor of History at Indiana University (Bloomington), where she had worked for almost three decades. She was researching in London, her cultural-historian husband Peter Bailey’s home city, when she died.
I first met Judith in 2006 when I was working at the Menzies Centre at King’s College London. Thrilled to have struck up a friendship with a scholar whose work had been indispensable to my History PhD, I was invited to their London flat for brunch. I was a little surprised (disappointed, even) to discover on arrival that this would not be an intimate occasion, but the crowd made sense when our hosts announced that this was not an ordinary brunch gathering but their wedding. It was a warm and hospitable celebration and there was a lot of laughter.
Some months later Judith was keynote speaker at a conference on feminism and the body I convened. Her lecture packed the venue, a testament to the interest in her topic, “Cultural Genealogies of Anovulation: Revisiting Abortion, the Pill and Feminist Sexual Politics,” and her reputation in Britain. Ours was a fleeting friendship in Judith’s richly connected and intellectually vibrant life, but her generosity and insights have lingered with me.
When I returned to Australia, her ongoing companionship took the form of books, chapters and articles that have always been close to hand. When I had started my PhD in 1999, Allen’s writings were models of feminist history, both empirically and theoretically, that made it seem possible to write my own history of the pregnant body. Her feminist agenda and her embrace of poststructuralist approaches to historical research offered a language and conceptual toolkit for charting the changing nature of the pregnant body in Australian medicine, law and feminism. As I resumed this line of inquiry post-PhD, her historical interventions continued to inform and guide me.
I am hardly alone in finding Judith’s work a continued inspiration. Allen’s chapter “Evidence and Silence: Feminism and the Limits of History” in Feminist Challenges (1986) has long been a classic text on feminist methodologies. For me and many of my peers that essay sits alongside its contemporary, Joan Scott’s “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis,” as key to our emergence as feminist historians.
Scott argued that all historical research was impoverished without due consideration of gender in all its expressions, material and metaphorical, “as a category of analysis.” Throwing caution aside, Allen went further and proposed jettisoning a discipline, history, that she saw as a moribund site of enquiry for those keen to understand the situation of women.
No doubt she believed the respect she had garnered from historians in Australia — men and women alike — meant she could afford to make such claims, and perhaps they anticipated her move from history at Macquarie University to Griffith University, where she became the inaugural professor of women’s studies in 1990.
In 2017 Kathryn M. Hunter’s article “Silence in the Noisy Archives” called for renewed attention to Allen’s feminist caution against conventional historical methods in the context of transformations in archival research brought about by digitisation. This revisiting of Allen’s essay almost twenty years after its publication was testament to what Mary Spongberg recently described as her “paradigm shifting” on evidence and silence that “changed the way in which women’s private lives were studied in Australia and beyond,” including in women’s studies. But Allen’s ties to history remained.
In the same year she moved to Griffith, Allen published Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880, which applied the philosophical and methodological lessons imparted in “Evidence and Silence.” This was the major work on the history of abortion in Australia and remains the most comprehensive account of the subject in the period up to the mid-twentieth century. Like its forerunner, “Octavius Beale Reconsidered” (1982), Sex and Secrets introduced many students of Australian history in the 1980s and 1990s to the politics of gender and reproduction in the Australian colonies and the new nation. This is true also of the book’s discussions of infanticide and domestic violence.
In recent years Australian historians have revisited the theme of domestic and family violence, reflecting a growing awareness and sense of urgency about this phenomenon in the present. This field of feminist history had been almost dormant since Sex and Secrets, which was the culmination of a decade of Allen’s research and publishing on this topic alongside her peer Kay Saunders.
Allen’s compelling work on the history of domestic violence in Australia was undertaken in the early stages of her career. When her book chapters were published in the 1980s and 90s, they attracted scholarly engagement as well as contributing to policy conversations within the federal government. To begin with, Allen and Saunders found the domestic violence sector more receptive to this work than Australian historians. Both empirically and conceptually, Allen’s work was both ground-breaking and extraordinarily mature and influential for someone so early in their career. It continues to inform the direction of this field.
Scholars since have opened up histories of domestic violence to questions of race and a fuller range of expressions of masculine status, areas that Allen was criticised for not having adequately attended to. Yet, as I work with Ann Curthoys and Zora Simic on a major history of domestic violence since 1850, Allen’s publications remain foundational and illuminating. They were also a touchstone for Elizabeth Nelson’s 2014 book Homefront Hostilities: The First World War and Domestic Violence.
With her next major book after Sex and Secrets, Allen knew she had a challenge on her hands — how to write an exciting history of first-wave feminist Rose Scott, best known perhaps as a wowser who fiercely opposed mixed-sex surf bathing and railed against the “animal in man.” Not only was she up for it, having first studied Scott for her honours thesis, but Allen produced one of the most enduring works of Australian feminist history.
Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism 1880–1925 illuminated the general character of Australian feminism in this period, introducing other key figures and describing their cultural milieu and strands of political thought. Allen’s interest in feminism’s changing political critiques of heterosexuality and strategies for combatting its role in determining women’s identities and statuses saw her trace Rose Scott’s growing awareness of the differences between women.
Rather than reject the likes of Scott as second-wave women’s liberationists had done, Allen approached her and other feminists of the time on their own terms. I learned from her close friend, Stephen Garton, that in Bloomington Allen cultivated an impressive rose garden in honour of this significant Australian.
While Allen began her career in Australia, her biography of Scott was the last of her Australian studies. In our conversations in London, Allen critiqued Australian historians for their false sense of exceptionalism, a critique that she was well placed to make given the direction her research had taken since the mid 1990s. Her subsequent publications established her reputation as an expert in British and US histories of feminism and sexuality; they included a 2009 biography of American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman that picked up some of the themes in her account of Scott’s later feminist thought.
In 2019 I was delighted to have the opportunity to preview a section of the manuscript Black Market in Misery: Criminal Abortion and British Sexual Cultures, 1780–1980, which promised to be the first major history of abortion in Britain. It showcased Allen’s outstanding empirical research, evocative storytelling and compelling analysis. If this book is published it will surely be compulsory reading for anyone interested in the cultural, medical and legal histories of sexuality and reproduction in Britain and elsewhere.
For example, Allen analyses in unprecedented detail the introduction and early implementation of the far-reaching Ellenborough Act, so crucial to an understanding of the status of abortion in British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Australia, placing it in the context of changing British sexual cultures that looked to post-Revolution France for inspiration and with trepidation. As ever, she sets her analysis within a wider international frame.
Allen also had a number of book projects underway dealing with the legacy of US sexologist Alfred Kinsey and signalling her emerging status as our foremost expert on this key figure in the history of sexuality. Her contribution to this field was facilitated by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, where she served as the senior research fellow for the final decade of her life. Her work towards Kinsey and the Feminine is a robust challenge to the standard narrative of Kinsey’s second report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — the view that it was of less interest to him than the first, and thus a further indicator of strands of misogyny in his character and work. It prompts a thorough rethinking of standard perceptions of Kinsey, tracing how he assembled his evidence and exploring the wider context of relationships that influenced his interpretations. Allen’s longstanding interest in the implications of this history for sexual politics strengthen its contemporary relevance for scholars and the wider public.
An abiding theme of Allen’s work is the history of heterosexuality and marriage. As well presenting her paper “Desperately Seeking Solutions: Battered Women’s Options since 1880” at the 1985 National Conference on Domestic Violence, she made a provocative closing speech imagining a culture with “woman-centred values” that would identify and regulate marriage “as a dangerous trade, just like coal mining or working in a nuclear plant.” Its health hazards for women would be advertised in the same way as those associated with smoking. Where these hazards manifested as domestic violence, perpetrators would be “disenfranchised and lose citizenship rights.”
This brilliant utopian vision was presented in the spirit of feminist solidarity. Its rhetorical purpose was to place in sharp relief the masculinist world inhabited by women. It remains salient in 2024 as some of us arm ourselves with Allen’s insights to advance histories of domestic and family violence, a problem that can seem intractable, in ways that speak to present concerns.
Allen sought to shift the nature of inquiry and to unearth and spotlight assumptions that have dulled the quality of historical understanding. She often gave overdue recognition to the intellectual and political work of important historical figures. Scholars with the power to persuade their colleagues to reflect on closely held truths, reconceptualise research problems and take new approaches to their craft are rare and invaluable.
She maintained a handful of significant friendships with historians in Australia, but for the most part the profession here adjusted to life without her embodied presence. Elsewhere the loss of Judith Allen is registering daily. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, her colleague at Indiana, wrote to me recently of her grief and the extraordinary impact of the friendship and mentoring Allen offered her when she arrived in Bloomington in 2005:
She quickly became not only a dear friend, neighbor, and colleague, but a savvy mentor who dispensed humor, insights, and advice in equal measure while always having my back. She openly acknowledged the misogynoir I faced… I will always picture Judith sitting at one of our favorite tables at a local restaurant called C3, listening to Peter play piano on the patio with various jazz trios. Wearing one of her trademark, jewel-toned dresses with matching lipstick and holding a glass of “Troublemaker” red wine, she would regularly break into one of her big, buoyant, show-stopping laughs while slapping the table and yelling “Oy!” My God, how I miss her. She was one of a kind.
