Melbourne's feminist Woman Voter was aghast 100 years ago this week at some appalling wartime ideas about marriage and pregnancy. It published, to condemn it, a letter to the press by Alfred Neale MD, arguing that girls had a patriotic duty to marry and be made pregnant by soldiers before those men went away to war and had their precious sperm dried up forever by death.
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"THE DEGRADATION OF MARRIAGE. WOMEN, AWAKE!"
"Sir, - Many amongst us are thinking seriously of the problem of population after the war.
"The Australian casualties up to date are over 34,000 ... these in the flower of youth and the best material the Commonwealth could desire for parentage. Who are to replace them? The weaklings, the rejected, the old? Those 6000 killed alone might easily have been fathers to 18,000, a town in itself. The wastage still goes on. Australia's population will be thrown back for years.
"Worldly prospects and prudishness should be set aside. A determined national effort should be made to increase the birth rate. Enlisted men willing to marry could be put in communication with girls willing to face the chances of war with equanimity. There is nothing new in the idea. Arranged marriages are common enough in other countries and the results are no worse than when passion is the sole selector.
"The crying national need will be for babies, and the woman who marries a soldier now for better or for worse shows the highest form of patriotism."
