Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender and the Rural-Urban Divide

268 Pages·2010·1.461 MB·English

by  Murphy, Kate

Fears and
Fantasies
PETER LANG
New York (cid:121) Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:121) Bern
Frankfurt (cid:121) Berlin (cid:121) Brussels (cid:121) Vienna (cid:121) Oxford
KATE MURPHY

Fears and
Fantasies

Modernity, Gender, and
the Rural–Urban Divide

PETER LANG
New York (cid:121) Washington, D.C./Baltimore (cid:121) Bern
Frankfurt (cid:121) Berlin (cid:121) Brussels (cid:121) Vienna (cid:121) Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murphy, Kate.
Fears and fantasies: modernity, gender, and the rural–urban divide / Kate Murphy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Rural life—Australia. 2. Rural-urban relations—Australia.
3. Civilization, Modern. I. Title.
GT3471.A9M87 307.74—dc22 2009046483
ISBN 978-1-4331-0950-8

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity
of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2010 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Printed in Germany
Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................................vii
Introduction...................................................................................................................1
Chapter One
Urban Fears and Rural Fantasies in the Early Twentieth Century:
The Australian and Transnational Contexts...............................................................9
Chapter Two
“Very Decidedly Decadent”: The Birth Rate in the Rural–Urban
Discourse.......................................................................................................................51
Chapter Three
Purity and Impurity: Venereal Disease, the Girl Problem, and the
Rural–Urban Divide....................................................................................................83
Chapter Four
“The Modern Idea is to Bring the Country into the City”: Urban
Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality........................................................................115
Chapter Five
The “Most Dependable Element of Any Country’s Manhood”: The
Modern Rural Space and Masculinity.....................................................................147
Conclusion
Modernity and the Reconceptualisation of the Rural–Urban Divide,
1900–1930...................................................................................................................185
Notes...........................................................................................................................193
Bibliography.............................................................................................................237
Index...........................................................................................................................255

Acknowledgments

This book has its origins in my PhD thesis, which was undertaken in the School
of Historical Studies at Monash University, Australia, and made possible by
generous financial assistance in the form of an Australian Postgraduate Award. I
was fortunate in being supervised by Professor Marian Quartly, and associate
supervisors Professor Barbara Caine and Dr Marc Brodie. I am particularly
grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Marian as my principal
supervisor. Marian’s great intellectual facility, gentle guidance, good humour,
and attentiveness made my candidature a joy. Her ability to see the direction
and broad significance of my project from the beginning, and to push me with a
light hand to realise them, has been extremely stimulating and helpful. Barbara
and Marc’s inspiration, support, and assistance was also invaluable and I am
very grateful to them both.
I am indebted to a number of other scholars who assisted me in my
doctoral endeavour in myriad ways. Thanks to Seamus O’Hanlon, Maria
Nugent, David Garrioch, Graeme Davison, Mark Peel, Alan Mayne, Ian
Hoskins, Sally Alexander, Judith Smart, Alison Bashford, and Mary Spongberg
for their help and advice. To my thesis examiners, many thanks for your
enormously insightful and constructive comments and criticisms.
I was fortunate to undertake my doctoral research alongside a wonderful
group of postgraduates who became friends as well as mentors. Particular
thanks to Jess Lee-Ack, Megan Blair, Nick Dyrenfurth, Josie Monro, Carly
Millar, Barbara Russell, Gen Heard, and Duane Duncan for their support and
critical feedback.
For their generous help in the preparation of this book, I would also like to
thank Bain Attwood and other members of my research group, Katie Jenkins,
Megan Blair, Carly Millar, Jacqui Wilson, Natasha Campo, Ernest Koh, Lauren
Johnson, Sarah Pinto, Nicole Jacobs, and Sarah Cannon. Many thanks to my
wonderful editor, Penny Rankin. I am grateful to the School of Historical
Studies for providing research funds to assist this publication. Thanks also to
Rosemary Johnson and other administrative staff in the School of Historical
Studies for their assistance and kindness.
viii Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural–Urban Divide

My wider network of friends and family have read drafts and offered
support in ways I could not imagine doing without. Love and thanks to my
parents Esmé and Peter, and to Pam, Lynne, Joan, Jill, and Tom. A special
thanks to my husband, Chris, for his unwavering love and support.
I also owe thanks to several people without whom I may never have
embarked on postgraduate study. Staff of the School of History and Classics at
the University of Tasmania—especially Michael Bennett, Margaret Lindley, and
Stefan Petrow—inspired and encouraged me to continue on an academic path,
for which I am very grateful.
I gratefully acknowledge copyright holders for their permission to reprint
sections of the following works:

Kate Murphy, ‘‘‘The Modern Idea Is to Bring the Country into the City’: Australian
Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality, 1900–1918,” Rural History 20 (2009): 119–
136, 2009 © Cambridge Journals, reproduced with permission.

Kate Murphy, “The ‘Unnatural’ Woman: Urban Reformers, Modernity, and the Ideal of
Rurality after Federation,” Australian Feminist Studies 21, no. 51 (2006): 369–378,
reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor and Francis Ltd,
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals).

Kate Murphy, “‘Very Decidedly Decadent’: Responses to Modernity in the Royal
Commission on the Decline of the Birth Rate in New South Wales, 1903–4,” Australian
Historical Studies 126 (2005): 217–233, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor
and Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals).

Kate Murphy, “Rural Womanhood and the 'Embellishment' of Rural Life in Urban
Australia,” in Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia, ed. Graeme
Davison and Marc Brodie (Melbourne: Monash University ePress, 2005), 02.1–02.15,
reprinted with permission from the editors.

I would also like to thank the Pictures Collection at the State Library of
Victoria, for their permission to use James Fox Barnard’s photograph Country
Family with City Man (circa 1900).
Introduction

The idea that the city and the country are different worlds, wholly separate in
geographic, social, cultural, economic, and political terms, is a powerful one in
Western culture. Despite the artificiality of this binary logic, many cultural
stereotypes and assumptions continue to hang on the notion of a clear and
meaningful divide between the urban and rural spheres. This is particularly true
of assumptions about the nature of modernity: as Raymond Williams noted in
his powerful work The Country and the City (1973), the rural–urban binary is
symbolic of an “unresolved division and conflict of impulses” between the pre-
modern (the traditional, the known, the authentic) and the modern (the
unknown, the uncharted).1 Thus, most people think of the “modern” as being
implicitly attached to urban lifestyles and aesthetics. The suggestion that the
rural may have some relationship to the modern―that it might give us access to
the modern―seems counter-intuitive.
This is a book about the ways in which ideas about the city and the country
shaped responses to the modern world, and thus to modernity itself, in the early
twentieth century. In particular, it explores how fantasies about returning to, or
revitalising, rural life helped define Western modernity.
As Jill Julius Matthews reminds us, the term “modernity” is problematic for
historians. It can be used to refer to any period between the Renaissance and
the present, and can be understood as having lasted from anywhere between
five centuries and fifteen years. There has been a tendency for academics to
avoid references to modernity without careful definition and problematising,
but even so there exists a “war of irreconcilable meanings” around the term.2
The decades around the turn of the twentieth century are a fruitful period for
the study of modernity, if we are to define it in the most useful way: not as a
specific historical juncture, but as a state of mind―the sense contemporaries
had of their own modernity, an awareness of a break with the past, an
exhilarating and frightening sense that they were negotiating uncharted
territory.3
While the cultural tendency to construct a meaningful dichotomy between
the country and the city is ancient in origin, the rural–urban contrast took on
new symbolic significance in the responses to modernity being formulated in