This thesis investigates Australian and Canadian legislation that regulated women's
reproduction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and offers some explanation
for their enactment.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Australia and Canada enacted a series of laws that
were aimed at limiting the control women could exercise over their reproductive functions.
From the 1880s through to the first decade of the twentieth century, legislation that
prohibited the advertisement of contraception, regulated maternity homes as well as
criminal laws that proscribed abortion were promulgated by Australian and Canadian
parliaments. This thesis investigates why such legislative activity occurred and proposes
that the initiation of these measures targeting abortion, infanticide and birth control cannot
be disassociated from the highly gendered and racialised rhetoric resonating throughout the
British Empire. Concern about racial integrity, heightened by a fear generated by the
declining birth rate, promoted a climate in which exercising control over women's fertility
was seen as warranted. White women's reproductive capabilities were a vital ingredient in
keeping the settler colonies of Australia and Canada white and British — white women
were expected, quite literally, to give birth to the nation. As this thesis shows, when women
did not adhere to these expectations of maternity, the law was used in an attempt to monitor
and regulate their reproductive activities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/12462 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Falconer, Louise Morag |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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