In this blog, Judith Brett shares her experiences writing the biography of Australian author and women’s activist Beatrice Faust.

As a political historian, I have always included women’s experience in the stories I am telling, but before this book I have not tackled a book primarily about women. However, when some women from the early days of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) were looking for someone to write the biography of its founder, Beatrice Faust (1939–2019), I put up my hand.

Beatrice Faust

Faust was born in 1939. By the time she started university in the late 1950s, young people’s sexual behaviour was changing as the moral authority of the church declined and access to cars offered privacy. The advent of the contraceptive pill in early 1962 accelerated this change. Although at first it was difficult for unmarried women to access, by the end of the 1960s the pill was readily available, and sexual liberation was in full swing.

Faust’s early writings reveal that her political activism owed as much to humanism and the civil liberties campaigns of the early 1960s as it did to 1970s feminism. She was half a generation older than the young ‘women’s libbers’ who took to the streets in the 1970s with their long hair and hippy skirts, and she already had a decade of political activism behind her.

Her activism was not directed to wholesale social change and the overthrow of the patriarchy but rather to practical, achievable changes in the laws and regulations which limited what women could do in their working, family and sexual lives. Faust placed her faith in lobbying politicians and in rational argument to change public opinion, rather than in confrontational protest politics or in radical separatism. She was also active in the campaigns to decriminalise abortion and in civil liberties where she argued against the censorship of what adults could read and watch about sex. Drawing on her own bodily experience and on the evidence of sociologists and sexologists, she was always frank, fearless and controversial.

Bea described herself as a sceptical feminist, and she differed from the prevailing 1970s feminist orthodoxy on the importance of biology to understanding the differences between men and women. Her best-known book, Women, Sex and Pornography (1980), is an exploration of the differences between men and women’s experiences of sexual pleasure. In this she is no simple essentialist, recognising that there is both variety and overlap, and that cultures differ in their construction of gender differences, but she insisted that biology was part of the story.

While Bea had hoped to be a literary academic, upon this prospect disappearing, she decided, around 1970, to become a free-lance writer. Fortunately, at this time, newspapers were becoming more hospitable to freelancers, especially new weeklies, like Nation Review, and the Carlton-based countercultural paper, Digger, riding the waves of various protest movements. The relaxation of censorship enabled frank writing about sex.

For the next three decades, ‘Beatrice Faust’ was a regular by-line in the press. Her voice and face were familiar on radio and television talk shows canvassing views on topics such as sex education, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, age of consent, and pedophilia. Faust wrote her last column in The Australian in October 1997, as digital technology was sending newspaper readership into free fall and fragmenting the once taken-for-granted idea of the public.

My Journey Writing Faust’s Biography

The scope of a biography depends, in large part, on the quality and extent of the sources, both what the subject has created during their life, and what has survived. Political activist, writer and intellectual are public roles which leave their traces in the public archive, but what of the private, inner life? Had she left private papers?

Her estate was being managed by trustees who gave me permission to travel to her home in Churchill to see what was there. Journalist and WEL co-founder Iola Mathews came with me, and we took away many boxes of papers, including around two decades of diaries and copies of letters to close friends. These transformed the biography for they gave me access to Bea’s own analysis of her feelings and experiences.

All biographers are voyeurs on the life of another, but few would have access to so much about their subject’s sexual desires and disappointments, nor to the deep fears and insecurities which were the legacy of her miserable childhood. Had Bea’s fellow feminists from the 1970s not sought a biographer, her papers would not have survived as she left no literary executor and had no family able to preserve them.

Bea’s mother had died twelve hours after her birth, and the grandmother who took on the care of the motherless baby died when Bea was two and a half. Her father was emotionally withdrawn, and the young Bea hated the stepmother who arrived when she was around five years old. Compounding her difficult family circumstances, Bea had serious health problems, with congenital bronchiectasis and scoliosis. Bea’s unhappy, motherless childhood left lifelong scars.

Bea has a poem in Kate Jennings’ 1975 anthology, Mother I’m Rooted. Titled ‘On Her Strength’, this poem is about a self-divided between the marching political activist her comrades see and the suffering of inner pain. Her competence, she writes to a friend, is like a lobster shell built up to protect the vulnerable insides when there is no other way of coping.

My challenge was to write about both of these selves: the public and private, the outer and inner, and their connections and misses. I especially wanted to understand how Bea resisted falling victim to her life’s difficult beginnings; and how she was able to live such a meaningful and consequential life. Existentialism, which was influential on Bea’s generation, provided part of the answer, with its exhortation to recognise and embrace the freedom inherent in every human situation.

Psychotherapy was also important, especially the insights of Eric Berne’s transactional analysis with its attention to the roles people play in their relationships. Bea did use drugs to alleviate symptoms, but she did not medicalise their cause. When, in the 1980s, she inadvertently became addicted to benzodiazepine she was furious, and wrote her last book, Benzo Junkie (1993).

Today, Faust would likely be seen as suffering from trauma-induced mental illness, but this is not how she saw herself. So her biography, I realised, could also provide insight into the history of mental suffering. This is not something I had expected when I agreed to write the biography of the founder of WEL.

Feminism is Alive and WEL

As a feminist who was not fully at ease with the sisterhood, Beatrice Faust’s life attests to range of ideas and experiences that fuelled second wave feminism as well as the sexual liberation that preceded it.

It is hard  for societies to get the balance right on sex. Too much repression is harmful, as is too much licentiousness; the needs and desires of men and women need to be balanced, individual differences accommodated and violence and depravity confronted. Bea’s thinking about sex was influenced by both feminism and sexual liberation.

Most readers today would not agree with all of Faust’s conclusions about human sexuality, but we should welcome the openness and seriousness she brought to this fraught area of human experience.

Judith Brett is a political historian who lives in Melbourne.  She taught Australian politics, public policy and political biography at La Trobe University from 1989 to 2012. She has published a trilogy of prize-winning books on the history of the Australian Liberal Party and its leaders:  Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992), Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (2003)  and The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (2017)  which won the 2018 National Biography award.Since the 1990s she has commented regularly on contemporary Australian politics in the media and has written four Quarterly Essays. In 2019 she published From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got compulsory voting, and in 2021 a collection of her writing  under the title Doing Politics: Writing on Public Life in 2021. Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex Feminism and Body Politics is her most recent book.

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