Codognotto, Kathleen and Tyler, Deborah (1992) History of children's services in the Western Region : regulating Footscray mothers - the Tweddle Baby Hospital and the Plunket System. Crow Collection Association.

Abstract

From the latter part of the nineteenth century until the 1950' the western world, including Australia, was preoccupied with the size, composition and health of each nation's population. The common problems were a falling birth-rate and an alarmingly high infant mortality rate. In underpopulated Australia there was an additional perceived threat: of being overrun, in the language of the time, by the prolific breeding Asians nearby. From the 1890' to the 1930' this population ideology gave rise to the growth of 'experts' in various fields of public health who sought to exercise a rational control over all aspects of family life, and women's lives in particular. The construction of modern Australian femininity was directly influenced by population ideology and its campaigns: for public health, infant welfare, social purity, [1] education, child welfare and protective labour laws. The focus of population ideology was the family. The focus of reform, and central to the family, 'was woman, defined as the ideal mother' or 'the good mother'. At its height, during the 1920' and 1930', population ideology became part of commonsense, part of everyday know [2]. This paper focuses on what occurred in the area of infant welfare and education for motherhood in Victoria and is based on the role played by Tweddle Hospital, (situated on the corner of Gordon St and Barkly St in Footscray), in promulgating the ideal of the 'good mother'.

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