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'Sexually cursed, mentally weak and socially untouchable': women and venereal diseases in world war two Adelaide.

Article Excerpt
Controversial emergency regulations restricting the sexual behaviour of civilians, especially women, during the second world war in Australia has been the focus of research by scholars including Kate Darian-Smith, Kay Saunders and Helen Taylor, and Michael Sturma. (1) Saunders and Taylor in 1988 described Australia as subject to a severe and prolonged moral panic that was orchestrated through the most influential levels of society during the period 1942-1945. (2) The male-dominated government, press and clergy maintained a wartime paranoia that demanded decisive measures for the prevention and treatment of venereal diseases. The 'evangelical and cathartic enterprise' that followed involved the identification and systematic defamation of a group of women. Collectively, the mobilisation of the state's apparatus to identify, stigmatise and punish women constituted an institutionalised power to discriminate. This power was claimed through the implementation of legislative measures that 'ultimately strengthened and expanded the functions of the state'. (3) Michael Sturma in his article 'Public Health and Sexual Morality: Venereal Disease in World War II Australia' (also from 1988) argues that 'venereal disease served as an important symbol of moral corruption'. (4) As venereal diseases threatened individual health, so women's new autonomy as they took up roles left absent by soldiers threatened the social body. In Sturma's account, the fact that efforts to exert greater control over sexual conduct were directed mainly toward women was indicative not only of a double standard for male and female victims of the disease but also of the belief that women's changing role threatened the very fabric of domestic moral order. The need to maintain moral order, Sturma argues, 'provided a rationale for reasserting traditional sex roles, and in this respect venereal disease as a public health issue served as an ideological tool and instrument of women's repression'. (5) Thus a major theme of literature on wartime attitudes toward venereal disease has been that there was a system of institutionalised misogyny that worked to undermine women.

The National Security (Venereal Diseases and Contraception) Regulation is commonly represented as the legal manifestation of this misogyny. However, this approach neglects to recognise women's agency and the important part that women played in the venereal diseases control issue during this period. In the South Australian case, assumptions in the existing literature may be given a new inflection to expose moments where women's agency was heightened both by and in resistance to the Regulations. This article attempts to identify points where the South Australian experience diverged from that of other states, though this experience was by no means unified. While some women became the object of new, harsh wartime regulations, other women enforced them, some with the feeling that their involvement in venereal diseases control was their only contribution to the war effort. (6) Still others fought against controversial state policy for the control of venereal diseases. Despite this breadth of experience, women's involvement in the administration of harsh legislation and in politics in South Australia tempered the outcomes of what has been interpreted as an extremely difficult period for some women on the home front.

Legislating the libido

The surveillance of sexually transmitted disease in Adelaide during the second world war has a significant precedent: in the years immediately following the first world war, all Australian states but one introduced compulsory notification and treatment for venereal diseases, despite the fact that there was no efficient and safe cure available. In September 1920 the South Australian Venereal Diseases Act was passed despite objections from most of the medical profession, religious leaders and women's organisations. (7) Their main objections were that the Act would have a greater impact on women than men and was therefore discriminatory; would deter sufferers from seeking medical treatment; and was, most damningly, a reintroduction of the infamous British Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864-1888. (8) These Acts provided for the detention and forcible examination of women designated prostitutes in some port and military towns. The Acts drew criticism in Britain almost from the outset from liberal reformers such as John Stuart Mill and Josephine Butler. They were thought to be unjust as they were directed only against women; immoral because they appeared to condone prostitution; useless because they failed to serve the purpose for which they were introduced, namely reducing the incidence of venereal diseases among the armed forces; and unconstitutional because they violated the basic liberties of some English women. (9)

Although the Venereal Diseases Bill was rushed through the South Australian Parliament in late 1920 before any real opposition could organise itself, the Act was never proclaimed law, largely because of economic reasons and the belief that the Adelaide Hospital would not be able to handle the expected avalanche of venereal cases. (10) However, the real objection--at least, that which attracted the most debate--was the issue of compulsory notification. The concept was unpopular among members of the South Australian Branch of the British Medical Association, and it was from this organisation that the government took advice. (11) The South Australian Government eventually chose to persist with a voluntary system similar to that deployed in Britain and some parts of Europe. (12) This meant that, unlike all the other states in Australia, there was no legislative provision for the control--that is, the detection and treatment, such as it was before the advent of penicillin--of cases of venereal disease. This would become a significant issue of concern with the outbreak of the second world war.

Shortly after war broke out there were warnings that the military losses by attrition due to venereal diseases that characterised the first world war should not be repeated. Commissioner of Police R L Leane pointed out that great attention was given to guard troops against diseases such as typhoid, tetanus, smallpox and typhus; however, except for some prophylactic instructions, troops in South Australia were not adequately protected against venereal diseases. In early 1940, Commissioner Leane argued that with proclamation of the South Australian Venereal Diseases Act 1920 steps could be taken to ensure persons suffering from a venereal disease could not infect others. Furthermore, by ensuring the protection of the 'potential guardians of our Nation' from the great 'casualty producing scourge', great expense could be spared to both federal and state governments. Leane warned that generalisation as to the moral aspect of the question was of little use; the youth of the nation needed to be protected from themselves. Leane recommended that if the difficulties of working the whole provision of the Venereal Diseases Act were insuperable, perhaps consideration could be given to making some provision under the Health Act to bring venereal diseases into line with other notifiable diseases where isolation was enforced during the infectious stages. (13) Due to the sensitive nature of compulsory treatment, any changes to the system of free voluntary diagnosis and treatment would throw the issue into the spotlight. As the war progressed, this spotlight focused to an alarming degree on women.

In 1939 Dr Harry Medcalf Fisher, medical officer in charge of the female...