Helly on Paisley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939 Dorothy O. Helly Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000.) Scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the 1920s and 1930s, and gender and empire take their place in this investigation. Fiona Paisley’s book on feminism and the question of aboriginal rights in Australia in this period is timely and well argued. She scrutinizes a predominantly middle-class group of “liberal” women with strong ties to Britain who saw Australia’s claims to modernity as a settler nation within the British Commonwealth in terms a need to improve the status and conditions of its indigenous population. Their feminist politics emphasized women’s duty as citizens to lobby governments to reform Aboriginal policies to modernize race relations in Australia and make it a model for British settler nations worldwide. Paisley’s book can be compared to conclusions reached by Barbara Bush in her examination of white women, race, and imperial politics regarding Africa in interwar Britain. 1 Both historians explore how reform-minded, educated middle-class women, conscious of themselves as politically “emancipated,” sought to gain political influence in national policies. Bush finds such women in England working closely with men as colleagues in questions of empire in Africa, with “few links with black women and little interest in feminist issues.” In contrast, Paisley traces the work of maternalist feminists, conscious of having few formal political roles in Australia, who reach out to establish and rally networks of women’s organizations to urge a male-dominated government to change its policies regarding goals of aboriginal assimilation, child removal from indigenous mothers, and white encroachment on aboriginal reserves. Considering this contrast, it is ironic that Australian activists found in the the London-based British Commonwealth League an international organizaton to which they could bring their feminist cause and receive support in the name of progress and modernity. Paisley tracks a small group of feminist leaders in Australia who founded and linked local, national, and international women’s groups and spoke in the name of thousands of women members. The leading activists were women with adequate wealth and strong social connections to Britain; and their progressive reform agenda reflected international concerns about women’s marriage and nationality rights as well as Aboriginal rights. Paisley focuses on three Australian-born women: writer and teacher Mary Bennett, who alone among them worked at Aboriginal mission stations; Bessie Rischbieth, theosophist and recognized participant in international feminism; and Constance Cook, who founded the Aboriginal Protection League; as well as on English-born Edith Jones who lived in Australia as a missionary wife. All turned to international feminist alliances to bolster their efforts to contest local and national policies in the name of Aboriginal and human rights. They argued for Aboriginal citizenship rights, community-based reserves, improved health and welfare provisions, and Aboriginal women’s safety from predatory white frontiersmen. They demanded a moral future on behalf of the Aborigines, but not, as did Helen Bailie, who founded the Victorian Aboriginal Fellowship, with Aborigines who had found their own voices. In this, they were women of their time who did not challenge the pervasive contemporary concepts of racial hierarchy. Yet they deplored gender and race oppression in the face of a white settler frontier ethos in which “civilization” had a tenuous hold over crude and brutal white men and displaced and mistreated Aboriginal women and children. Just as Bush has asked what effect activism had on how feminists constructed their own identity, so Paisley presents these Australian women reformers as constructing a specific identity for themselves as “white, British, and European” upholders of Australian national morality. Their major battle was with the biological assimilationist policies of their day, which they saw as fostering the degradation of Aboriginal women and children, whom they sought to aid by means of feminist protection. The question mark in Paisely’s title successfully problematizes the issue. Though Australian feminists gained some influence in the early 1930s through national and international newspaper coverage of the conditions of Aboriginal life that they exposed, by the late 1930s their cause failed...