School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Innocent ingénues, virtuous mothers, and ‘semi-respectable girls’: complicating Australian attitudes toward female sexual desire during the Great War

Smith, Madeline ( 2015)

The Great War was a period in which competing ideations of female sexuality, modest and immodest, came into contact and overlapped. Middle-class girls and married women, though seemingly immune to this new sexualised articulation of womanhood, were nevertheless guarded more intently, lest they too succumb to a now presupposed base instinct. What had been mere shadows of suspicions around the working-class girl were now projected onto a national framework, and supported the supposition that honest young women could, and did, pursue sex outside of marriage. The resulting confusion paved the way for more complex articulations of female desire that rejected a dualistic organisation. Despite the arguments of scholars who suggest that the influence of the war was negligible in the twentieth-century reimagining of female desire, this thesis demonstrates that a close study reveals a clamorous discussion around the nature of sexual womanhood. While the Madonna/whore duality may still have held sway after the war, a contemporary observer could no longer say that women were categorically dispassionate.