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Jan Kershaw
PhD candidate, Magill campus, University of South Australia
'Reproducing Motherhood in the 1930s: The Dionne Quintuplets in the Australian Women's Weekly'
The birth of five identical Canadian girls, the Dionne quintuplets, in May 1934 made news even in faraway Australia, particularly in the top rating women's magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly. The governments of both countries were concerned with the declining birth rate, which had been falling steadily for half a century, but Mrs. Dionne did not fit the neat, clinical vision of motherhood which was promoted by those same governments, the medical profession and the media. She was from the minority Catholic French Canadian culture, whose large families were often viewed by mainly Protestant, Anglophone Canadians as evidence of their vulgarity, primitiveness and confirmed their lower class status in the eyes of the English speaking middle classes.
The extraordinary upbringing of the Dionne quins will be used to highlight some of the contradictory constructions women had to negotiate in the minefield of motherhood and how these were addressed by the Australian Women's Weekly. Within this particular narrative one can see how the subject position of women first and foremost as mothers - this being their 'natural' role, conflicted with the construction of Mrs. Dionne. Removing the girls from their parents, and controlling every aspect of their upbringing might be described as the ultimate result of the professionalisation of child rearing. This paper considers how motherhood in the abstract was glorified while specific mothers were criticised for their child rearing practices. It will also examine some of the varying constructions of the quins themselves, such as tourist attraction and research subjects.
Bio: I am a mature age PhD student at the University of SA, working with Prof. Alison Mackinnon and Dr. Jackie Cook. My thesis is still untitled but concerns constructions of women and the subject positions offered to them through the Australian Women's Weekly 1933-53.
<robin.kershaw@bigpond.com>