Single Mothers and their Children
Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia

This 1996 book is a powerful and moving history of the treatment of single mothers and their children in Australia.

Shurlee Swain (Author), Renate Howe (Author)

9780521474436, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 December 1995

288 pages, 11 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.56 kg

"...a useful, and, at times, powerful and moving contribution to our knowledge of the history of sexuality, motherhood and family life." Elizabeth Yeoman, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering

This 1996 book is a comprehensive history of single motherhood in Australia. Shurlee Swain and Renate Howe tell the powerful, if painful and often moving, story of these women and their children and the lives they constructed. Starting in the 1850s when abandonment and infanticide were not uncommon, the book's main focus ends in 1975 when the legal status of illegitimacy was abolished. The book covers issues of baby farming, infanticide, abortion, sex education, birth control, adoption and marriage, in effect becoming a history of sexual practice in Australia. While tracing profound changes from a time when single mothers were locked in gaol for discarding their babies to the establishment of state benefits, the authors find a good deal of continuity over the period. This book makes an important contribution to social, welfare and women's history in Australia.

1. Introduction: To have an unlicensed child
2. The mothers: a perfectly nice girl - an ordinary girl, perhaps your own daughter
3. Breaking the news: what are you going to do about it?
4. Pregnancy and confinement: medicos, midwives and morals
5. Death: very army of murderesses within our midst
6. Separation: now put this thing that has happened to you away, forget about it, get on with the rest of your life
7. Surviving: you must maintain your own
8. Illegitimacy: to punish the innocent child
9. Empowerment and resistance: speaking out publicly.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], Australasian & Pacific history [HBJM]