QUEENSLAND'S 'GIRL-PROBLEM' THROUGH THE EYES OF RED JESSIE AND THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S CHARTER, 1943

In December 1943 the Australian press ran a set of syndicated articles about Queensland’s ‘girl problem.’ A month before the ‘scourge’ of loose women, pickups and camp followers hit the headlines, Australian feminists led by United Associations of Women president Jessie Street launched a sweeping and radical manifesto for the future, The Australian Women’s Charter. In far-north Townsville where thousands of allied troops were based from 1942 -1945, it was reported that “gaudy, young and garishly painted” girls from the south were breezing into town competing with the good womenfolk of Townsville for scarce resources, particularly food and accommodation. The Brisbane Telegraph reported that the city’s maternity hospitals were bursting at the seams with ‘mere slips of girls’ and their babies. Moral laxity was everywhere.

Outraged politicians and citizens called for a range of punitive measures. One of the few to gain any real traction in Queensland was the arrest of women upon suspicion of venereal disease and incarceration in lock hospitals. Street was outraged too ­ at the double standards applied to women in relation to sex and sexual hygiene. The Charter document reflects Street’s strongly-held view that the root of most social ills ­ including promiscuity - lay in the economic exploitation of women. In this paper I contextualize the ‘girl-problem’ and offer a contemporary feminist analysis of media discourses using the Charter principles as analytical tools in the first instance, and as objects of analysis in their own time and place, in the second.