School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item'Survival of the fittest in contraceptives': charting the British Family Planning Association's scientific and medical efforts to standardise contraception, 1920-1969( 2017)This thesis argues that the Family Planning Association (FPA), its predecessor the National Birth Control Association (NBCA), and affiliated societies and groups, developed and shared an ideology during the 1920s that supported the scientific legitimisation and standardisation of contraceptives as a result of sexological, medical and scientific advances that made the matter a viable research concern. In addition they worked toward perfecting their methodology throughout the next decade in order to pass their regulatory responsibilities to the medical profession and government as soon as was viable. To achieve this scientists in Scotland and Oxford were commissioned to develop a replicable qualitative technique to assess the efficacy and safety of available spermicidal products. Once convinced this had been achieved, the NBCA developed and published an annual approved list of contraceptives, which was touted as a definitive register of effective contraceptive devices and compounds sold in Britain. They then convinced the majority of local contraceptive manufacturers that gaining NBCA/FPA approval, through passing their standard tests and having products appointed to the list, would be fiscally practicable, as the Association increasingly dominated public support and custom through their contraceptive clinics, and eventually aimed to be considered the arbiter of contraceptive products and advice in Britain. The NBCA/FPA recruited physicians and scientists to undertake clinical and research work to implement and increasingly raise contraceptive standards. Clinical trials were initiated from the early 1930s to investigate product safety, effectiveness, quality, ease of use, and acceptability to users, and were increasingly employed to regulate products that passed approved list quality testing. Further, the Association introduced a regulated universally applicable clinical procedure, and standardised record keeping, developing and implementing patient case cards and standardised equipment and dressings in Association clinics. This ensured medical and lay machinations of Association clinics were effectively identical throughout the United Kingdom as the century progressed. The gaining and sharing of sexual and contraceptive expertise framed scientifically and medically, offered the NBCA/FPA a means to standardise another aspect of contraception. The Association’s medical and administrative staff grasped that if they could fill gaps in sexual, physiological and contraceptive knowledge, they would be able to formulate and direct lay and medical training in those areas. This was achieved through the introduction and refinement of a medical training curriculum for doctors and nurses, the setting of educational standards for contraceptive clinic medical staff, and the introduction of public lectures and marital and sexual guidance courses. The success of the medicalised regulatory aspirations of the NBCA/FPA is apparent in the British experience of oral contraceptives in their first decade. The Association was by 1960 seen as the arbiter of safety and efficiency, and in that capacity founded a specialised research body, the Council for the Investigation of Fertility Control. The Council, in collaboration with the medical profession and health authorities, developed and implemented large-scale chemical and animal trials of oral contraceptive preparations before they would consider human clinical and acceptability trials. Their scientific and medical authority allowed them to stagger the release of oral contraceptives, until means were developed for their regulation, as per the standards applied to all other contraceptives issued by FPA clinics, which dominated the contraceptive landscape of Britain at the close of the 1960s.
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ItemFactory girls: gender, empire and the making of a female working class, Melbourne and London, 1880-1920( 2007)Between 1880 and 1920, something remarkable happened among the women and girls who worked in the factories of the British Empire. From being universally represented as the powerless victims of industrial capitalism, women factory workers in the cities of Melbourne and London burst onto the stage of history, as bold, disciplined and steadfast activists and demanded their rights, not merely as the equals of working-class men, but as the equals of ladies. The proletarian counterpart of that other subversive fin de siecle type, New Woman, the factory girl became visible at a time when the nature of femininity was being hotly contested, and coincided with the growing militancy of the organised working-class. Her presence in the streets, economic autonomy and love affair with the new mass culture, represented a radical challenge to conventional bourgeois ideas of how women should behave. Her emergence as a new social actor also coincided with a crisis of confidence in Empire, radical disillusionment with the project of modernity and a growing unease about the consequences of urban poverty. As middle-class anxieties proliferated, so surveillance of the factory girl intensified. In this way, female factory workers came under the scrutiny of missionaries, medical men, demographers, social workers, socialists and sociologists. This study traces the role of female factory workers in the emergence of a transnational movement for working-class women's rights. As more women entered the factories in search of independence, their shared experience of exploitation emboldened and empowered them to demand more. During this period, increasing numbers of female factory workers in both cities thus confounded the stereotype of female workers as submissive, shallow and innately conservative, by organising and winning strikes and forming unions of their own. Such explosions of militancy broke down trade unionist prejudice against women workers and laid the foundations of solidarity with male unionists. They also forged of a new model of working-class femininity; based not on the pale imitation of gentility, but one which expressed a profoundly modern sensibility. In the process, women workers fashioned a new political culture which articulated their common interests, and shared identity, as members of a female working class. Yet the rise of working-women's militancy also coincided with the mature articulation of a racialised labourism and the rise of male breadwinner regimes. As the white populations of Empire were re-configured as one race with a common imperial destiny, the corresponding preoccupation with the white settler birth rate, increased hostility and suspicion of women workers. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw the solidification of a regulatory apparatus which sought to police and discipline young working women in preparing them for their racial destiny as mothers. The contemporaneous demand of the labour movement for a family wage worked to further marginalise wage-earning women, and ultimately reinforced the sexual division of labour.
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ItemNot just routine nursing: the roles and skills of the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War 1( 2006)This comparative labour history seeks to reveal the working life and nursing practices of female military nurses I the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) during this period, and to highlight the importance of trained female professionals in caring for soldiers within many allied medical services. Official histories concern themselves with the logistics and administrative arrangements for the AANS rather than discussing the elements of hands-on nursing, and secondary sources tend to highlight the travel adventures of, and the impact of war on, the nurses themselves. Through a detailed examination of archival sources, this thesis explores the development of the AANS’s roles and skills from a military perspective. From an examination of pre-war civilian nursing, it explores in detail the impact of foreign physical environments, other allied personnel and systems, the military itself and war diseases and injuries on nursing work. While A.G. Butler, the official medical historian, may have thought that work in Australia hospitals in France was ‘routine’, this study explores the many events such as the ebb and flow of war that make military nursing different to civilian nursing. Australian army nurses did not limit their war work to nursing care. The exigencies of war expanded the scope of nursing into medical, military and non-nursing roles. The AANS performed military administrative roles such as Orderly Officer and in known roles such as that of Home Sister, now transformed into something akin to a hotel manager. They took on medical roles such as anaesthetist and assistant surgeon. Often providing the only female presence to soldiers who had been at the front for months, they also provided important mental comfort, moral support and friendship. In many cases, the expansion of their roles, skills and authority helped them to save more lives. During World War I, military nurses formally became part of the Australian military system for the first time. In doing so, they created a recognized niche for future military nurses.