Category Archives: Feminism

Foundlings

06 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by in Australian History, Feminism, Government policy

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I have been tracking newspaper items about foundlings – newborns abandoned by their mother – from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. The state: New South Wales although I am sure the other states had similar matters to consider.  Foundlings were newsworthy. This entry is not  atypical but it is rather more fully reported than many such items. It was published in 1879.

A FOUNDLING

A strange discovery was made on Saturday night at Ashfield, by a gentleman living near the Foundling Hospital, who found attached to the gate of his private residence a red carpet-bag containing a healthy-looking   female child, apparently about 2 week old,wrapped in a piece of soft flannel. The other contents of the bag were a glass feeding-bottle and the following letter written in a neat female hand, and addressed to the matron of the Foundling Hospital:—

“Dear Madam,

—Please to be kind to this dear little girl, for it is hard, hard, for me to part with her; but I am a poor girl and have not the strength to work for its support; but if things turn out better than they are at present I will send money for its maintenance. Please call her Hilda McCarthur, and a fond mother’s blessing will be your reward. For the present, I do wish it was in my power to keep the dear little lamb, and the great God above, who is the only witness to my sorrow at this moment, will forgive me for this cruel act; but I hope I may yet, perhaps, in after years, show her a mother’s care, for a mother’s love she has already. And now I once more beseech you to call her the name mentioned above, and to be kind to her, for she is very good. And I remain, my dear Madam,

— A mother in sad, sad trouble.” (The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954) Monday 7 July 1879 p 5).

One line of interpretation might be to consider the mother’s background – single, holding a secret, torn between her love for her baby and social expectations of her; hoping, vainly, most likely, that she might find a way to support her infant. Perhaps she was an educated lass, of the middle classes where education was more than basic reading and writing. She wanted a particular name for her child: what does that mean? In a society with so very few rights for single mothers, where illegitimacy was a mark of doom; a sign of inherited degeneracy, this mother was giving as much as she could to her child.

We can only imagine what might have happened next. Little Hilda would have been taken in and cared for, perhaps in a large nursery. Perhaps she was boarded out, Maybe her mother was able to find a position – as a servant or governess. It is clear though that she was one of many that the government of the day was turning its mind to – at the urging of a group of leading women and, indeed, if this report is indicative, sympathetic newspaper editors.

In 1881 New South Wales was one of the first of the Australian colonies to pass legislation making provision for state children to be boarded out – fostered – with families. The  government, led by the venerable and colourful Henry Parkes, was influenced by a group of women – including Lady Mary Windeyer  whose concern for the well being of orphans and foundlings was awakened by British reformer Florence Davenport Hill through her friendship with South Australian woman reformer, Caroline Clark. Hill had written of children living in workhouse and barrack style conditions, their uniformity, the subsequent loss of individuality and the ‘idiocy’ resulting from lack of parental care and bonding. Caroline Clark whose advocacy of boarding out also determined the direction of South Australian government policy. In her little book published in 1907: ‘State Children in Australia’  South Australian  author, reformer and also a  friend of Caroline Clarke, Catherine Helen Spence wrote of the value of boarding out for these abandoned children. Not only  was their vitality apparent but the bonds formed with their foster families continued beyond these formal arrangements. Far better, she affirmed, for the stability of the state.

Hill, Clark and Spence all argued for the contribution of environmental factors as these interacted with inherited traits. They challenged popular notions of abandoned and illegitimate children being of inferior genetic stock – a position affirmed by American sociologist Richard Dugdale in his 1877 study of five generations of a New York family – which he called the Jukes family. Seeking to  understand the origins and intergenerational transmission of ‘crime and dissipation’ Dugdale, I suggest, affirmed the importance of  environmental factors in early infant development… traces of thought taken up by  Freud  and later theorists of the infant mind: D W Winnicott and John Bowlby.

Proposed Psychoanalytic Institute – Perth, Western Australia

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Australian History, Bill McRae, Feminism, Psychology Training - History, University of Western Australia Archives, western australia

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The  National Library’s digitized newspaper collection has thrown up another gem worthy of further pursuit. On 4 July 1943 Perth’s Sunday Times reported discussions between  the British Medical Association, the Perth Branch headed by Dr Roberta Jull, and the University of Western Australia about developing psychoanalytic training in that state. Australian cricketer turned  psychotherapist, Bill McRrae, was another mover.  McRae had  returned to Western Australia three years beforehand after studying psychoanalysis in the United States. Perth, the capital of Western Australia is a long way from Australia’s eastern capitals. It was rare enough for news of the west to reach the east. Despite its isolation Perth’s intellectual and cultural climate was thriving. Clearly.

Members of the British Medical Association were keen to have psychoanalysis incorporated into the teaching of psychology, Perth’s Sunday Times reported,  ‘so that qualified analysts’ might work alongside members of the medical profession. There was a dream: to make Perth the centre of psychoanalytic practice in the Southern Hemisphere. McRae, we learn, had established good relations with Perth’s medical fraternity. The Adult Education Board had invited him to give a lecture series: “The Foundations of Behaviour” – described as ‘outstandingly successful’ with an enrolment of 297. Prior to the lecture, Professor Fowler, head of the Psychology Department had raised a question with the University Senate. McRae’s course was not about psychology,as its title implied he said, but psychoanalysis. The Senate regarded the matter as unimportant. Two hundred and twenty-two pounds was not to be sneezed at! McRae’s lecture series was published as a book in 1945.

The vision for this new psychoanalysis – was it McRae’s? – included a school with analytically trained teachers for students from kindergarten level through to leaving. There was to be adult and parent education – analytically orientated – a clinic conducted on a not-for-profit basis and, eventually a Psychoanalytic Institute for the training of practitioners.

Perhaps McRae was on a mission? Another article appeared in the press three weeks later. McRae’s lecture ‘How Psychoanalysis Can Help Children’ given to the Women’s Services Guild. Here, McRae told his audience that the most important phase of life was the child’s relationship with its mother. He
explained:

The fulcrum of the science centred around the proven fact that in the first few years of life, a child developed a goal, or an attitude towards his environment [that remained through life]. This meant that if there were any difficulties, causes were traced to his early life.

‘A child developed along two lines,’ Mr McRae was reported as saying.Firstly, he became confident in facing life and its problems, and secondly he viewed life with pessimism, or a fear to face life. The latter attitude, he said, developed a strategy of how to live and at the same time evade life.

So resulted such traits as selfconsciousness, shyness, depression, irritability and the individual who no matter what he took on, invariably failed. In other words, life was a threat and the mind developed a capacity to avoid things that were un pleasant. ‘So we find people who do not make a success of marriage, of getting on with other people, and who fail in their chosen task,’ said Mr McRae. A favourite strategy the mind used was to cause a person to become helpless, so that he tried to shift responsibility on to other people.

McRae added:  ‘By giving schoolteachers, parents, social workers an opportunity of psychologically understanding the children they cared for, clinics would not be needed. But as this was rather an ambitious undertaking, we had to realise the need for psychological clinics with a stress on psycho-analysis’.

But this was war-time – fighting overseas and the fate of soldiers at war was also on peoples’ minds. McRae’s idea seems to have faded far from sight under the weight of it all…

Perhaps McRae eventually got his wish, after a fashion. His biographer, Marion Dixon, recounts that, after a stint in Zurich at the C. G. Jung-Institut in 1958-59, he was persuaded by the orthopaedic surgeon George Bedbrook and Archbishop George Appleton of Perth to set up a three-year training programme in psychotherapeutic methods for doctors and clergymen.

William McRae: Published Works

About Ourselves and Others, Melbourne, Oxford University  Press, 1941.

Sex, Love and Marriage: Psychological Factors, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1941.

The Psychology of Nervousness, Melbourne,Oxford University Press, 1941.

Adventures in Self-Understanding, Melbourne, The Book Depot. (1945)

The Foundations of Behaviour, Melbourne, Oxford University Press,1945

My Pain is Real ( 1968)

 
 

Making Wayward Children Wise Citizens – Sydney Feminsts and Psychoanalysis in the 1920s

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1920s, Child Study, Feminism, NSW

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Writing on behalf of the National Council for Women for in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Women’s Column of 15 June 1921 Maybanke Anderson set out a  proposal for the development Child Study circles for women. ‘Increasing understanding of psychoanalysis, and all that it involves, may, if women choose to study it and compare notes have an inestimable effect on future generations’. Hopefully ‘if every mother knows how to make a wayward child into a wise citizen our gaols and asylums might, in one generation, be converted into playgrounds’. She invited interested women to the first meeting at 3 o’clock the following Friday.

It was probably inevitable that Maybanke, born in 1845, whose activism  on behalf of women and children since the early 1890s, would make this link between psychoanalysis and child study. Interest in psychoanalysis was remarkably widespread across Australia during these immediate  years after the end of the Great War.  Perusal of the National Library’s Digital Newspaper collection shows that lectures and literature about psychoanalysis drew much interest – not just in the capital cities but in centres as far afield as Northern Queensland, and the far west of New South Wales. There was, of course, the realisation that  shell-shock could be treated using psychoanalytic techniques,  practiced by members of the medical fraternity.

During the 1890s Maybanke Anderson had been a suffragette and,in 1894 founded her own paper, Woman’s Voice  to promote reforming ideas about the rights of women and children. Her friends and associates of that time included a number of significant women reformers –  Rose Scott, Lady Mary Windeyer and her daughter, Margaret,  Louisa Lawson, and  Dora Montefiore. In 1896 when she was a campaigner for womens’ rights she and her colleagues had begun  the world’s first free kindergarten in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo, She continued working with the Free Kindergarten Union well into the second decade of the twentieth century.Her marriage to Francis Anderson, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1899 also brought her into contact with the university world.  Francis Anderson’s associate, the psychologist H Tasman Lovell was a particular admirer and friend. He had been charged with developing the first experimental psychology course, including the study of psychoanalysis at the University. Maybanke’s experience with children included teacher training and a period running her own school, Maybanke College in the early to mid 1880s. She was mother to seven children from her first marriage to Edmund Wolstenholme in 1876. Only two  survived to adulthood.

It seems that the take-up of psychoanalytic – and psychological – ideas by women and women’s groups in Australia at this time has not been documented. I cannot find much on this, even though the most recent published history of psychoanalysis in Australia, Joy Damousi’s 2005  Freud in the Antipodes has pointed to the work of the professors at various Australian Universities, and to the significance of the medical fraternity in the development of this arena. Yet women, such as Maybanke, were beginning to argue that as mothers and as educators the understanding of the inner world of the child was as important as physical care.

Maybanke’s book, Mother-Lore, published in 1919, written in the form of an advice manual, picked up notions from the ‘New Psychology’ and from the Child Study Associations  active in Sydney at the time.  In her book she was  concerned not with the physical, bodily care of children – there were plenty of such tomes,  but with the parents’ responsibility to care for the developing minds of their children. She wrote in common language, eschewing technical, psychological terms. Her message was for mothers – and fathers. Maybanke’s argument was that the child’s mind is something that is to be understood nurtured and developed. Children were not miniature adults, nor primitives to be trained in the ways of civilisation but sentient beings learning about themselves in the world. Far from utilising stringent measures as those promulgated by  New Zealander Dr Truby King, (was she having a  swipe at him when she remarked that few doctors were concerned about the developing mind of the baby?) famed for his advocacy of the strictly timed, four hourly feed, Maybanke Anderson  underlined the significance of the maternal/ parental relationship for the growing child. Her account of infant and child development is based  upon careful observation and experience. Maybanke directs her reader’s attention to the developing baby – born blind and deaf,  she asserts in the early chapters. She alerts readers to the babe’s exploration of self  – of arms, legs, hands, toes and fingers but also notes the child’s developing emotional life. She notes that patterns established in early childhood continue for life,  fears, lies, instincts and education. For twentyfirst century readers it is a glimpse into the common problems of child-rearing and notions of citizenship in middle-class English- Australian life during the early 1920s.  A baby has a brain, of course, she wrote. It is the mother’s task and responsibility to direct and help the child to develop.

Overall Maybanke seems to be groping, if not reaching for the notion that the mother’s/parents capacity for attunement and recognition of the babe’s gesture is central to the child’s  sense of becoming.  Her writing is powerfully clear.

Note how the energetic child may become a lazy man. His small endeavours to construct were burned as rubbish, or swept away because they littered the floor. He hurt his fingers with the hammer and we denied him the result of his experiments and hid the tool he longed to use. He cut the furniture with his little saw and scratched the floor with his chisel so we took them both away, not remembering that training he got by his endeavours would be of more use than the polish of the furniture and the tidiness of the floor. He was a troublesome boy, always wanting to do something. So we sent him to school early; and there all the work was talking and reading, he learned that work with the hands was degrading rather than ennobling, and that, if he wanted to be a gentleman he must wear a stiff collar and a good coat. So at length with his bright enthusiasm killed, he learned to sit still and smother his instincts, and the world lost an inventor, and gained a draper’s assistant. If it were not so common we would think it a tragedy. ( Mother-Lore, pp 17-18).

As a representative of the National Women’s Council Maybanke could have been following the lead of other women’s organisations in Sydney. It may be that some of its members also attended a lecture on psychoanalysis and war trauma given by Ethel Mortimer Langdon at the Women’s Club. In October 1920, the Feminist Club sponsored a lecture on psychoanalysis by Ruby Rich,who had just returned to Sydney after eight years away, some of these,  a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, said, spent studying ‘under Freud in Switzerland’. Perhaps this was an error… Switzerland was the place where  Carl Jung, Freud’s former protegé, was located. Rich’s lecture described as captivating by its listeners, was  followed by a second lecture. Both were repeated. A month later Ruby Rich announced her intention to ‘form a study circle on the subject of psychoanalysis under the aegis of the Feminist Club’. Apparently the Club continued its interest in mental health matters. On 9 February 1921 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that  the Feminist Club had passed a motion urging the re-centering of   ‘the clinic of psychiatry’ in general hospital work, and not be carried out by the Lunacy Department’.The Club paid especial attention to children. It included a clause ‘that special provision should be made for children temporarily mentally affected under the aegis of the work of this (hospital) clinic’.

Psychiatry was not Maybanke Anderson’s field. Her’s was education, in kindergartens and schools.  It is clear though, that in the immediate post-war years that she and her colleagues were working together, albeit following different threads of thought – to advocate for the development of psychological services within their particular communities of parents and children. For them psychoanalysis – and psychology –  held ideas that should not remain exclusive, confined within the portals of the medical fraternity. They had a place in the broader community to be used for its development.