FEARLESS BEATRICE FAUST: SEX, FEMINISM AND BODY POLITICS – JUDITH BRETT

As a modern-day Professor Henry Higgins might have said, Beatrice Faust is the voice who helped put today’s women in your life. “Beatrice Faust,” said Helen Garner, “is not scared of anybody.” Faust was the transformative feminist activist, writer and intellectual who founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Melbourne in 1972. She campaigned for abortion law reform, and thought, talked and wrote about sex and feminism, from the sexual revolution of the 1960s through to the neoliberal 1990s, always with her own demanding body as her guide. She was a force to be reckoned with. To discuss that force, Judith Brett – academic and historian and author, most recently, of Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics, addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 26 May 2025

FEARLESS BEATRICE FAUST: SEX, FEMINISM AND BODY POLITICS

JUDITH BRETT

Thank you Gerard for inviting me again to talk to the Sydney Institute about my new book. It’s very generous of you and I appreciate it – and the support you and the Institute give to writing and thinking about Australia’s politics and history.

Beatrice Faust is best known as the founder early in 1972 of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL). She was also active from the mid-1960s in the campaigns to decriminalise abortion and in civil liberties where she argued against the censorship of what adults could read and watch about sex. And, like her contemporary at Melbourne University, Germaine Greer, she was very comfortable talking and writing about sex and its pleasures.

She had hoped to be a literary academic, but when this prospect disappeared she decided, around 1970, to become a freelance writer and what would later be called a public intellectual. She would practise critique and promote the public good – with the clarity recommended by George Orwell in his 1948 essay, “Politics and the English Language”. She would do this through books, reviews and features. In 1970, this was a realistic ambition, with new weeklies like Digger, Nation Review and the National Times soon to appear and the broadsheet newspapers generally increasing their use of freelance writers. She served two stints as photography reviewer for The Age, and in the 1990s, the decade of the public intellectual, she had a regular column in the Focus section of the Australian, alongside B.A. Santamaria.

By the end of the 1990s, as the digital revolution destroyed newspapers’ and magazines’ advertising base, such an ambition was no longer possible. Trawling through the microfilms, which is a necessity when researching the second half of the twentieth century as most newspapers from these decades are undigitised, I am astonished to be reminded of how much space the broadsheet papers gave to serious debate. Bea’s journalism quickly gave her a public profile, and she was regularly invited on to television panel shows to discuss issues around sex and feminism – issues such as lesbianism, rape, pornography, the differences between men and women’s experience of sex, and paedophilia.

Now, to say a little more about WEL. 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. Initially, the surveys were posted to candidates – but when few returned them the decision was made to interview the candidates, which necessitated rapid recruitment and the establishment of interstate branches. Two of the early recruits were Age journalists with by-lines, Iola Hack – who later married Race Mathews, and Sally White, and they helped publicise WEL through the media. In Victoria, Sally White had something of a coup when she persuaded the editor of The Age – Creighton Burns – to include a special lift out just before the election.

Over the next few years, with a sympathetic national government, WEL grew into a powerful lobby group for feminist issues. The Canberra branch was well situated to lobby the federal government, though state branches remained important as many of the restrictions on women’s lives were in the hands of the states.

Compared with much of Women’s Liberation, WEL was a reformist project. It was not attempting to overthrow the patriarchy but to position women’s concerns high on the mainstream political agenda and to achieve practical reforms to improve their lives. Scores of women joined that first year, and for many it changed their lives.

Bea died in 2019 and some of these women thought she deserved a biography. I received an email from Iola Mathews, enquiring if I knew anyone who would be interested. It was 2020, in the midst of Melbourne’s lock down. I had no project on the go, so I put up my hand. I had the research skills and I knew how to write a book. Like the life of Alfred Deakin, it was a Melbourne story, but one which overlapped with my life. I was born in 1949, a decade after Bea, and have long been interested in the women half a generation or so older than me, who left their girlhoods under one set of expectations, carefully groomed and marrying young, put up with the condescension of their male peers and the unequal opportunities of the workplace, then broke out as adult women, becoming feminists, leaving their marriages, fighting for change, forging careers and reputations. Brought up under one structure of feeling, they created a new one, from which I and my peers benefitted.

This is a very different biographical project from my previous ones on Robert Menzies and Alfred Deakin. A biography of a prime minister needs no justification – their lives are self-evidently of national significance; there is a rich public record and, one hopes, a ready readership. Bea is a minor feminist, political activist and public commentator from the 1960s through to the 1990s. She is not a transformative feminist like Germaine Greer, with whom she was at university. Does she warrant a biography? Who will read it?

My answer to these questions is that many people read social and political history through biography so Bea’s life would be a way to tell the story of second wave feminism and of 1960s and 1970s sexual liberation, though there was a surprise for me in this story. As I read her early writings, I realised that Bea’s political activism owed as much to humanism and the civil liberties campaigns of the early 1960s as it did to 1970s feminism. She was ten years or so older than the young women’s libbers who took to the streets in the 1970s with their long hair and hippy skirts, and she already had a decade of political activism behind her.

Her activism was not directed towards wholesale social change and the overthrow of the patriarchy but to practical, achievable changes in the laws and regulations which limited what women could do in their working, family and sexual lives. Like the humanists and civil libertarians, she placed her faith in lobbying politicians and in rational argument to change public opinion, rather than in confrontational protest politics and she had no sympathy for radical separatism.

A further reason for writing her biography was that her life intersects with key questions about sex and feminism in the decades after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some of these which are still perplexing us, so I hoped that the book would not just be of historical interest but of contemporary relevance.

What the biographer can do depends a good deal on the available evidence. I made arrangements with the trustees managing her estate to visit her house in Gippsland and remove material. I took what I thought was relevant, which included around two decades of diaries and copies of her letters to friends. Political activist and intellectual are public roles and leave their traces in the public archive.

The private archive transformed the project, giving me insight into her emotional, sexual and intellectual life. All biographers are voyeurs on the life of another, but few would have access to so much about their subject’s sexual desires and disappointments, nor to their deep fears and insecurities. As I had. Bea wrote frank accounts of her sexuality in various places, including that she had orgasms from the age of three, so I had no fear of unwarranted intrusiveness or of breaching the restrictions of the Privacy legislation. For her many lovers, dead and alive, it is a different matter, and here I have respected their privacy, as Catherine Lumby did in her recent biography of Frank Moorhouse, another promiscuous inhabitant of the same era.

Three quotations guided my thinking about the intersection between Bea’s life, her times and ours: The first is from the political psychologist, Harold Lasswell, who was a pioneer in the study of political psychology: “The political activist solves for others what they cannot solve for themselves.”

Bea’s mother was a Catholic who refused medical advice on both contraception and abortion, and died twelve hours after her baby was born. Her mother’s death was the defining fact of Beatrice’s life. The motherless child was sickly, with chronic lung disease and insipient scoliosis. Bea believed that her father blamed her for his wife’s death and that she was unwanted and unloved. A stepmother arrived when she was about four and Bea hated her. She also believed that her physical ailments, as well as her androgenous sexuality, had begun in the womb of her anxious mother.

There was nothing she could do about her mother’s death, but she could work to ensure that other children were not born unwanted and unloved as she felt herself to be. The fate of unwanted children rather than a woman’s right to choose was the emotional core of her commitment to the decriminalisation of abortion.

Her concern with unwanted children was supplemented by a rationalist’s argument that laws against abortion were unenforceable – that, whatever the law, women would seek abortions and so they should be safe and accessible, both to prevent women’s death and injury and to remove incentives for corruption and medical profiteering. As well, their unenforceable illegality encouraged negligence and corruption in doctors as well as policy corruption.

Bea’s campaign to de-criminalise abortion was also informed by her own experience and that of her peers. By the time she started university in the late 1950s, young people’s sexual behaviour was changing as the moral authority of the church declined and access to cars offered privacy. Even though she used contraception, Bea had three abortions before she was 25, in one of which she believed the doctor had risked her life, operating on her without resuscitation equipment to hand even though she was a chronic asthmatic.

Many young women of Bea’s generation had abortions but, for most, these were matters of shame and secrecy and few told their mothers. Bea had no mother and she was not ashamed. On a TV debate on the issue in the late 1960s a fellow panellist asked Bea if she had had an abortion. Chivalrously, Father Eric D’Arcy, who was later the Catholic Bishop of Sale in Gippsland, said, you can’t ask that. But Bea was unfazed and announced she had had three.

My second quote is from the American writer, bell hooks: “Queer is not about who you are having sex with but about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

Bea described herself as a “sceptical feminist”, not an ideological feminist. She did not fit the standard second wave feminist template and the friction she experienced with the feminism of her day reveals fault lines that are still with us. Her sexual style was more masculine than feminine. She a high need for sex and was easily aroused, responded to pornography which most women do not, and enjoyed sex with no emotional expectations or involvement. This made her more sympathetic to men than the average feminist, she claimed, and she reacted against what she saw as misandry in much feminist thinking and had no sympathy with separatism.

Sex is a biological category and gender a social and cultural one, laying down socially acceptable and desirable conduct for both sexes. Bea did not dismiss the importance of socialisation and cultural expectations in shaping men’s and women’s lives and sense of themselves. Nevertheless, she argued, the social constructions of gender built on biological foundations, which was at odds with the feminist orthodoxy of the 1970s. Her best book, Women Sex and Pornography, is an exploration of the differences between men’s and women’s experiences of sexual pleasure.

In this, she was no simple essentialist, recognising that there is both variety and overlap, and that cultures differ in their construction of gender differences, but she insisted that biology was part of the story. She believed that for her and her mother biology had been a sort of destiny, so when the women’s movement started mocking biology, she thought it was wrong.

Bea also rubbed up against feminist orthodoxy in her scepticism about one of the big slogans of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s “the personal is political”. One of its meanings was the promise that if you changed society your personal problems would disappear and you would be happy. Bea never believed that. The personal was also psychological she said. Bea was extremely intelligent, a confident and compelling public speaker and a good organiser. Many of the women I have talked to about her say they were in awe of her. But her diaries and letters reveal a different self who struggled with feelings of worthlessness and depression and had suicidal thoughts.

Politics could not bring back her mother, and her death and its consequences were the well-spring of Bea’s unhappiness. But Bea wanted to be happy. She was of the intellectual generation convinced by existentialism that even when circumstances seem most compelling one still has choice and to evade this is bad faith. She would not be a victim, of her miserable childhood, of the patriarchy, or of her imperfect body, and she worked hard to learn how to be happy with the tools that were to hand to her.

She sought out psychotherapists, and applied the insights of Eric Berne’s transactional analysis to her own life and those of her friends and lovers. She did yoga to counter her arthritis and transcendental meditation to soothe her anxiety and help her sleep. She did use drugs to alleviate symptoms, but she did not medicalise their cause. When, in the 1980s, she inadvertently became addicted to benzodiazepine she was furious, and wrote her last book, Benzo Junkie. Today Bea would likely be seen as suffering from trauma-induced mental illness, but this is not how she saw herself. The unhappiness in lives can tell us a lot about the social tensions and conflicts they struggled to resolve, more than the lives of those who found their niche and snuggled in. They tell us too about the historical means available to people to resolve their conflicts and find happiness. Suffering and its balms are both experienced in historical time.

My last quotation is from Orwell. Bea used it in a letter to her friend Barbara Wertheim: “Each generation imagines itself more intelligent than the one before and wiser than the one that comes after. This is an illusion … one ought to stick with one’s own world view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned, …to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.” Some of Bea’s views are deeply offensive to much contemporary thinking which imagines itself in matters of sex to be much wiser than the libertarian 1960s and 1970s. I’ll discuss two – her views on rape and on paedophilia.

Bea did not agree with feminists like Susan Brownmiller who argued that sexual relations between men and women were all about power, and that fear of rape is used by men to keep women subordinated to male power, and that all men thus benefit from the actions of the few who rape and so all men are complicit. A generalisation like this was a red flag to rationalist Bea. On a Monday conference panel with Brownmiller, she cited evidence of women who rarely thought about rape, of men who feared it from other men, and much more. She did not agree that sex between men and women was just or always about power. For men, sex could be just about sex. She did not dismiss the seriousness of rape as a crime, but she argued that all rapists are not the same. Some rape is the result of a failure of communication between the man and the woman, and of their mutual incomprehension of each other’s sexuality. “I know women don’t ask for it, as some men think, but they do invite it in ways that Women’s Lib won’t face,” she wrote. She believed that unwanted sex in situations where consent is at least possible could be eliminated with better sex education.

Bea did not dismiss the horror of violent rape and murder but she also did not see it as the primary locus of women’s oppression, compared with their lack of financial independence and high rates of poverty. Hers was a rational, utilitarian argument, a calculus of harm, but arguments about mutual responsibility could look very like blaming women for arousing men and open her to accusations of victim blaming. And they put her off-side with feminists whose top priority was violence against women. And they would put her off-side with aspects of the me-too movement and a view of consent where a woman can say no at any stage of a sexual encounter.

Even more difficult in the contemporary context is her writing and speaking about paedophilia, which became a public issue in the early 1980s around the same time as homosexuality was being legalised. Over the next two decades Bea said and wrote things that are now barely sayable. To Bea, it seemed that there was a demonising and repressive impulse behind the sudden public concern with child sexual abuse and the civil libertarian in her was alarmed when men in a Melbourne paedophile self-help group were arrested though they had committed no crime. The wowsers, she wrote, had lost their major battles on abortion, contraception, fornication, masturbation and homosexuality and were losing the battle against the legalisation of prostitution. Child pornography, child prostitution and child molestation were all they had left in their crusade to control human sexuality, she wrote to a friend.

As in her arguments about rape, she challenged generalisations, drew distinctions and looked for evidence. Child sexual abuse, she said, was an umbrella term which obscured differences between the experiences of boys and of girls; between children’s sexual contact with strangers, with blood relatives like fathers and brothers, with friends of the family, and with people in positions of trust like clergy and teachers. It did not distinguish between forced and unforced contact; between pubescent and pre-pubescent children, or various types of contact including exhibitionism, touching outside or inside clothes, kissing and cuddling, and penetration.

It also ignored differences in young people’s sexual maturity and libidinal energies. “­­Child abuse,” she wrote, “becomes an inchoate, toxic cloud and youthful consent to sexual experience with adults becomes unthinkable.” She was particularly exercised by issues around the age of consent, and the denial of the sexual agency of post pubescent adolescents. She herself had had a relationship with a much older man when she was sixteen – although she said she looked much younger. For her, she wrote, it was erotic bliss.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as evidence emerged of the extent of the emotional and sexual abuse of children and adolescents in institutions and by teachers, priests and others in positions of authority, as sexual abusers faced the courts and survivors testified to life-destroying harm, it became difficult to imagine and impossible to say that some such encounters might sometimes be benign or even beneficial, that some young people might be sexual agents rather than traumatised victims. Even though she recognised harms and injuries, today Bea would likely be cancelled. But Bea always said what she thought.

To conclude: As a feminist who was not fully at ease with the sisterhood, Bea’s life attests to range of ideas and experiences that fuelled second wave feminism as well as the sexual liberation that preceded it. It is 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 to be balanced, individual differences accommodated and violence and depravity confronted. And whatever the prevailing norms, not everyone will be happy.

We need to be able to talk about this, to discuss issues around age, consent, sexual assault, victim blaming, gender identity and more, without being told “You can’t say that”. We need to be open to evidence and argument, to different points of view and experiences. And we need to be kind. Most readers today will not agree with all of Bea’s conclusions about human sexuality and will want to argue with her, but we should welcome the openness and seriousness she brought to this fraught area of human experience.