why Beatrice Faust’s views still resonate in Australia

Beatrice Faust is best remembered as the founder, early in 1972, of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL). Women’s Liberation was already well under way. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique in 1962, arguing that many women found life as a full-time housewife and mother unfulfilling. With prevailing social assumptions denying them meaningful work, they were bored and frustrated, trapped by an ideal of domesticity that had become a prison.

Consciousness raising groups were meeting to understand how patriarchal assumptions had limited their members’ lives and self-understandings. Campaigns for equal pay, for childcare, for abortion law reform, were underway. In 1970 Germaine Greer, who had been at Melbourne University with Faust in the late 1950s, published The Female Eunuch, with its attack on the suburban consumerist nuclear family.

WEL began when Beatrice invited ten carefully-selected women to meet in the upstairs room of her Carlton terrace. The idea behind WEL was simple, as many brilliant ideas are. It was to survey political candidates for the 1972 federal election on their position on various issues of central concern to women and then to publicise the results. American feminist activists Gloria Steinem and Patricia Carbine had surveyed the candidates for the forthcoming US presidential election and rated them according to their responses. After 23 years of Coalition government, momentum was building behind the Labor party and its dynamic leader, Gough Whitlam, and a Labor victory seemed within reach. So why not do the same here? Compared with much of Women’s Liberation, WEL was a reformist project. It was not attempting to overthrow the patriarchy or hasten socialism, but to position women’s concerns high on the mainstream political agenda and to achieve practical reforms that would make a difference to women’s lives. Scores of women joined that first year. For many, it transformed their lives, and by the end of the year WEL had become an effective feminist lobby group. When Faust started WEL she already had a decade of political activism behind her, in civil liberties and in the campaign to decriminalise abortion, which was illegal in all Australian states and territories. Like many other sexually active young women before the contraceptive pill was readily available, Faust had abortions, three in fact.

She had another reason to campaign for reform of the abortion laws. Her mother had died 12 hours after giving birth to Beatrice. She had been advised to have an abortion, but she was a Catholic and had refused. Her mother’s death was the defining fact of Faust’s life. The motherless child was sickly, and her childhood miserable. She believed that her father blamed her for his wife’s death and that she was unwanted and unloved.

The pioneering political psychologist, Harold Lasswell, said of political activists that they try to solve for others what they cannot solve for themselves. There was nothing Faust could do about her mother’s death, but she could agitate to ensure other children were not born unwanted, as she felt herself to be.

Repealing the laws that made abortion illegal, together with better sex education and easily available contraception, were her core political missions. She also agitated against the wowserish censorship regime limiting what adults could read and see in 1960s Australia, and publicly celebrated and privately enjoyed the pleasures of sex.

Faust grew to sexual maturity during the 1950s when a repressive public sexual morality was already fraying, both from the emergence of a confident youth culture and the decline in the moral authority of churches.

The advent of reliable contraception in the early 1960s turbo-charged this, removing the fear of pregnancy that had kept respectable unmarried people chaste. With the pill separating sex from reproduction, sex could become, as Faust put it, a recreational activity pursued for pleasure. The implications of this are still playing out, in the unstable co-existence in the contemporary moment of constrained public discourse with private sexual licence.

Faust was a passionate advocate of sex education so that men and women could better understand their own and each others’ sexuality. Contrary to many in the women’s movement, she did not believe that differences between men and women were only the result of social roles and conditioning. The social constructions of gender built on biological foundations, Faust believed. This meant if a woman was to live as an autonomous social being and to have sexual agency, she needed to understand her body, and how it differed from the bodies of other women and of men. For her and her mother, biology had been a sort of destiny, so when the women’s movement started mocking biology, she disagreed.

Faust was not just a political activist. She was also in her time a public intellectual, who wrote books, articles, op eds and reviews and commented frequently in the media. Because of her unusual openness about her sexuality, she became a go-to person as constraints loosened during the 1970s on the public discussion of all matters sexual.

Her sexual style, she claimed, was masculine, giving her an androgenous perspective that made her as sympathetic to men as to women, and which informed her provocative perspectives on pornography, rape and paedophilia. Describing herself as “a sceptical feminist”, she was wary of the misandry she believed informed feminist separatism and feared that second-wave feminism was succumbing to the same sexual puritanism that had weakened the first.

Many of her views will be challenging for contemporary readers. It’s hard for societies to get the balance right on sex. Too much repression is harmful as is too much licentiousness, the needs and desires of men and women need balancing, a range of individual differences accommodated, and violence and depravity confronted.

Whatever the prevailing norms, not everyone will be happy. We need to be able to talk about this, to discuss issues around age of consent, sexual assault, victim blaming, gender identity and more, without being told “you can’t say that”. Faust was never afraid to say what she thought. She was fearless.

Fearless Beatrice Faust (Text Publishing), by Judith Brett, is available from April 23.