Women's capacity to reproduce has always attracted feminist attention. That attention has ranged from activism of many types, through sociological analyses of birth and mothering to philosophical examinations of maternity and its meaning. There has always been a diversity of approaches to the role that maternal politics plays in feminist emancipatory projects. This diversity is represented in these two very different accounts of women's activism in Australian history. In Susan Magarey's Passions of the First Wave Feminists and Kerreen Reiger's Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women's Movement, we are offered two historically distinct accounts of how women's reproductive capacities have shaped and been shaped by the Australian social and political landscape. Magarey examines how the discourses of health, both sexual and reproductive, influenced the activities and achievements of first wave feminist movements in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia. Reiger examines how the maternal consumer movements of the 1960s and 1970s have impacted on the delivery of birth services in the Australian health system. Although both accounts focus on health and the body, they reveal the widely divergent feminist politics that animated these movements and their differing aspirations.

Magarey's Passions of the First Wave Feminists examines the Australian Woman Movement as it agitated for suffrage for women in the new Australian Federation. Arguing that the Foucauldian lens which foregrounds the hystericisation of women's bodies can be usefully integrated with the 'testosteronisation of men's bodies in the Australian context (3), Passions of the First Wave Feminists examines how these factors impacted on the political mobilisations of the Woman Movement. For her study, Magarey uses published journals like Louisa Lawson's Dawn, letters exchanged between prominent women inside the Movements and novels, as well as more conventional sources like Government reports. Such a diverse array of material allows for a rich and complex account of the first wave feminists and their goals. Passions of the First Wave Feminists charts the various debates around sexual purity, love and marriage that formed the background for the development of the Australian Woman Movement. This framework allows for a detailed exploration of how important sex, sexual relations and the sexual double standard were to the first wave feminists and their political activities. The centrality of such 'health discourses' in the political landscape of the emerging nation, and the activity of the first wave feminists in arguing for contraceptive and sexual health, demonstrates their commitment to redefining 'the sexual labor of wives and mothers as labour' (101). These concepts of sexual purity and health are extended to an exploration of the role the scientific accounts of evolution played in the construction of discourses and political positions on the question of women's role in public life. Some evolutionary discourses worked to confine women inside the domestic sphere while others, in direct contrast, argued that women's movement into public life must be encouraged on the basis of their greater 'natural' access to altruism.

Magarey also documents the splits and changing allegiances that led to the formation of various different women's organisations within the broader sphere of the Woman Movement. The importance of challenging traditional hierarchies for feminists like Rose Scott, a founding member of the Womanhood Suffrage League (WSL), is contrasted with the personal and political investments of activists like Lady Windeyer, who moved on from the WSL to the Women's Christian Temperance Union. 'Political solidarity on the basis of sex' (57) was put under pressure by differing approaches to the status of marriage and class solidarity. In the move toward Federation and suffrage, Margarey argues that such differing allegiances were further refracted through the politics of race, where the sexual inclusiveness of citizenship in the new Australian nation was gained through the exclusion of non-white Others, emblematised in the legislative passage of the White Australia policy (155).

The exploration of developing women's economic independence as they moved into industries like typography in the 1890s, is followed by an analysis of the legislative limitations to such independence that emerged in the period after Federation. The activities of arbitration courts and trade unions in embedding wage structures in discourses of natural sexual divisions of labor demonstrates that these measures, while contributing to Australia's status as the 'working man's paradise' had other implications for women. 'Once again…the principal means to a livelihood ha[d] become…for the majority of women...trading possession of their bodies in marriage' (139). The activities of census bureaucrats in re-defining waged labour and domestic activity to women's disadvantage is shown to have lingered long in Australian analyses of women's contributions to the economy of the nation.

Passions of the First Wave Feminists argues that feminist politics as expressed in the Australian Woman Movement were a significant part of the changing demographic configurations that resulted in declining birth rates at the turn of the Twentieth Century. For Magarey, 'the Australian family transition' is not caused, as such, by feminist activism. Rather, she argues that 'the Woman Movement's argument gave expression to a desire that was even more widely spread that those expressed in feminist debates', a desire for change in women's reproductive health, in enforced maternity and the transmission of sexual diseases (115). As such, birthrate debates resurface a century later, and their relationship to women's public and private roles is again a key matrix in public discourse on reproduction; this nuanced exploration of such cultural movements and influences has striking resonance. The reading of official reports through the lens of other cultural artefacts such as journals, letters and novels give body to Magarey's expressed desire to locate her work in a conversation between 'History and Cultural Studies' (20). Passions of the First Wave Feminists demonstrates the value and strength of such a conversation.*

Our Bodies, Our Babies: The Forgotten Women's Movement offers an account of the development of the maternity reform movement in the Australian context. It engages with what author Kerreen Reiger identifies as the contradiction between the attempt 'to make the birth of a newborn baby a warmer and more “humane” process, … [and] … the escalation of technical management and professional expertise' in the birth process. It does so through a history and analysis of grassroots reform movements where the development of the notion of consumer rights in the delivery of birth services and its relationship to the broader movement and feminist ideals is examined. The organisations considered include the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (NMAA), and other groups such as Childbirth Education Association (CEA) and Childbirth and Parenting Association (CPA).

The relationships and conflicts between professional expertise, maternal knowledge and consumer power are key axes of analysis in this text. Drawing on interviews and survey material, organisational minutes and educational material produced by various organisations, Our Bodies, Our Babies offers a detailed examination of how notions of 'motherhood as experience' drew on and conflicted with feminist aspirations. As the title, with its reformulation of the famous slogan of the Boston Women's Health Collective indicates, the relationship of other feminist projects to the revaluation and assertion of motherhood and birth as fundamental and valued experiences is of key interest here. Our Bodies, Our Babies takes the primacy of the 'personal is political' in the development of women's liberation and examines how that was translated into maternity reform politics in the Australian context.

Our Bodies, Our Babies charts the changing missions and philosophy of the birth reform movements throughout the course of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Reiger explores how the emphasis on psychoprophylaxis (which trained women in the ability to disengage from the painful sensations of birth) was a key impetus in early reforms. Later, this gave way to a focus on working inside the body and its experience. Later still, and perhaps reflective of the lessening prominence of movement-based reform, there was greater concentration on choice. Such developments can be seen in relationship to changing feminist aspirations across those decades although the relationship between feminism and the childbirth reform movement was complex. As Reiger argues, there was a lack of attention to maternity politics in many second wave feminist developments, and this impacted on how women in the birth reform movement saw feminism. In Reiger's view, they were at once 'quite responsive to feminist ideals and strongly committed to women's choices and autonomy', while maintaining some distance in order to pursue their own projects (171).

Reiger argues that the models for change that were adopted, most particularly by NMAA, can be characterised to some extent as 'maternalist'; she also documents the strategies by which such groups constructed their platforms and agitated for change. Drawing on their 'expertise' as mothers, while strategically engaging powerful advisers, allowed the NMAA in particular to gain acceptance as legitimate contributors to the educational process for women and to be called on as a resource by health professionals. In an interesting irony, the commitment of women to childbirth reform organisations often 'undercut the traditional family message' (143), as the time and energy involved was considerable. Our Bodies, Our Babies also examines how the 'self-confidence' gained through organisational activities often crossed over into a greater sense of awareness of women's power in other areas of life (149).

There is also attention to the varied approaches adopted by different groups within the childbirth reform movement. The NMAA adopted a conservative line of engagement with 'the System', laid out in its 'Code of Ethics' which encouraged polite and non-confrontational tactics with unsympathetic medical professionals. This reflected differences in how groups drew on maternal expertise but also, as Reiger cogently points out, was influenced by the significantly lesser challenge posed to the medical hierarchy through the search for breastfeeding reforms. Change in the delivery of childbirth services, by contrast, put groups such as Childbirth Education Australia (CEA) in direct conflict with a medical establishment that was not keen to concede power or knowledge to lay people. The conflicts within the movements themselves around professionalisation: training for childbirth education, midwifery involvement in such organisations, the emergence of professional lactation consultants and the roots of such movements in the notion of 'mother-to-mother' grassroots support are examined. Location and personality are explored as key factors in how such conflicts emerged, were managed and resolved or led to the formation of new groups. As Reiger indicates, the notion that 'the personal is political' has strong resonance in the field of childbirth experience, and also has significant implications for how emancipatory politics for women are experienced in the local context. Hierarchies and personality conflicts, as well as issues of class and cultural specificity within the childbirth reform groups, form part of the background for the public activities and achievements of such organisations.

The negotiation by these organisations of the more individualised consumer models for accessing care and achieving change also attracts sustained attention. The progression from a movement for reform throughout the 1970s and 1980s in the Australian landscape toward a stronger concentration on the achievement by individual women of a desired birth experience is examined. Reiger argues that the significant changes that have occurred in the delivery of childbirth services need to be considered alongside increasing intervention rates and the movements of governments towards rationalising the delivery of maternity care. Such interactions form a continued ground for attention and activism (286). The work of 'reconceptualising women's rights as sexually specific citizens', in Reiger's view, remains an important goal in the achievement of public and political recognition of the social value of reproductive labour (288). Our Bodies, Our Babies offers a valuable record of the history of activism in the area of reproductive reform.

The childbirth reform movements sought change on the basis of maternal expertise and women's experience, but the first wave feminists, Magarey argues, did not seek 'maternal citizenship' (172). Such differences in approach demonstrate the breadth and diversity of feminist concerns and activism in Australian political and social history. These texts, which both deal with grassroots movements for reform, operating at different times with widely divergent goals and strategies, add significantly to an appreciation of this breadth and diversity.

Jane-Maree Maher holds degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Melbourne and completed her doctoral studies at La Trobe University in 1999. She currently teaches at the Centre for Women's Studies and researches in the fields of women's studies, cultural studies and literary theory.

* Magarey has been exploring these links for some time. See, for example, 'The Feminist History Group Goes to the Berks', Hecate 19.1 (1993): 36-57.