Did you know that the woman who founded Australia’s most successful feminist lobby group also defended paedophiles, dismissed rape as a “miscommunication,” and spent five years addicted to prescription drugs? That’s the Beatrice Faust you won’t find in the history books, and that’s exactly why Judith Brett’s Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism & Body Politics is the most unsettling feminist biography you’ll read this decade.
Table of Contents
Overview
Fearless Beatrice Faust is a political biography of one of Australia’s most influential yet contradictory feminist figures. Beatrice Faust (1939–2019) founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972, which transformed Australian politics by surveying federal election candidates on women’s issues and publishing the results.
She campaigned relentlessly for abortion law repeal, sex education, and civil liberties. But she also defended positions that now seem indefensible: she argued that rape was often a “failure of communication,” claimed that some paedophile relationships with adolescent boys were harmless, and dismissed what she called “wimp feminism” as victim culture.
Judith Brett, an award-winning political historian and emeritus professor at La Trobe University, draws on Faust’s private diaries and correspondence to reveal a woman who was brilliant, brave, and deeply wounded. The book refuses to be a hagiography.
Instead, it forces readers to sit with the uncomfortable truth that the people who built the feminism we inherited were deeply flawed, and that their flaws are part of the story we need to tell.
Reader recommendation for Fearless Beatrice Faust
Read Fearless Beatrice Faust if you are:
- A feminist who wants to understand where second-wave feminism came from—and where it went wrong
- A student of Australian political history who wants to know how WEL actually worked
- Someone who has ever felt conflicted about a feminist hero’s problematic views
- A reader who appreciates psychologically rich, unsentimental biography
Skip Fearless Beatrice Faust if you are:
- Looking for a simple hero narrative
- Uncomfortable with frank discussions of sex, abortion, and paedophilia
- Expecting a conventional feminist victory lap
Background
Beatrice Faust was born on February 19, 1939, in Melbourne. Her mother died twelve hours after giving birth to her. Her Catholic mother had refused contraception and, when advised to abort a dangerous pregnancy, refused that too. Faust grew up believing her father blamed her for his wife’s death. A stepmother arrived when she was about four, and Faust hated her.
The motherless child was sickly, chronic asthma, deafness for the first six years, scoliosis, and later arthritis. Yet she was exceptionally intelligent. She won a scholarship to Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School, the selective school that prepared clever girls for university, and then a residential scholarship to the University of Melbourne in 1957.
At university, she became acquainted with Germaine Greer. She married Clive Faust in 1959, took his name, and kept it after their divorce. She had a son, Stephen, in 1965. She campaigned for abortion law reform, co-founded the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, and in 1972 founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby.
But behind the confident public persona was a woman who struggled with suicidal thoughts, chronic pain, and a five-year addiction to benzodiazepine. She died in October 2019 at the age of eighty.
Fearless Beatrice Faust Summary
1. The Motherless Child
Faust’s mother’s death was “the defining fact of Beatrice’s life,” Brett writes. It left her with “a visceral hunger for love, ‘a scrappy nestling waiting with open beak for a mother who never comes'”. Faust came to believe that her father blamed her for his wife’s death and that she was unwanted and unloved.
This childhood shaped everything. Faust later told a friend that she couldn’t talk about her childhood without crying. She developed the acute recall of a highly sensitive, anxious child who had to remember everything to prevent bad things from happening again.
Brett notes that Faust would have “emphatically rejected the notion of trauma”. Yet the book makes clear that Faust’s childhood was traumatic by any standard, and that her refusal to see herself as a victim was both her superpower and her blind spot.
2. Becoming Notorious
At Melbourne University in the late 1950s, Faust discovered that her experience of sex was different from her friends’. She later claimed to have had orgasms before the age of three. “I am one of a group of women, which Kinsey numbers at three per thousand of his sample, who can remember masturbating to orgasm before the age of three,” she wrote.
She realized that her “strong physiological sex drive and childhood orgasms were rare”. This launched two lifelong quests: to understand human sexuality and to reform the laws that prevented its consensual enjoyment.
3. Abortion Law Reform and Civil Liberties
Faust’s first abortion, around 1960, was a harrowing experience. She was referred to a mobile abortionist who operated out of safe houses. She later wrote a detailed account for the Royal Commission into Human Relationships.
In 1966, she organized a teach-in on abortion at Melbourne University. She told the Herald that over 200 “illegal operations” were performed each week in Melbourne, eighty percent of them on married women. The police surgeon judged her estimate “very conservative”.
Faust became president of the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Association in 1972 and changed the “R” from Reform to Repeal. Her goal was not just to clarify the law but to remove abortion from the Crimes Act entirely.
4. Founding the Women’s Electoral Lobby
On February 27, 1972, Faust gathered nine hand-picked women in her Carlton terrace. The idea was simple: survey political candidates on women’s issues and publish the results. She had been inspired by a US feminist article that rated presidential candidates.
The survey was a triumph. The Age published a four-page lift-out guide. Labor candidates scored notably better than Liberal and Country Party candidates. Prime Minister Billy McMahon scored one; opposition leader Gough Whitlam scored thirty-three.
When Labor won the election, nearly every reform WEL asked for was achieved: equal pay, removal of taxes on contraceptives, no-fault divorce, single mother’s benefit, and more. As Brett notes, “It was a remarkable achievement for a lobby group less than a year old”.
5. The Personal Is Also Psychological
Faust rejected the slogan “the personal is political” as insufficient. She believed that “feminists needed to be able to distinguish between miseries that were caused by being a woman and were amenable to structural change, and miseries caused by personal circumstances”.
She turned to transactional analysis, the psychology of Eric Berne, to understand herself. She concluded that her childhood script was “Drop Dead”—that her father and stepmother wanted her dead. She worked hard to rewrite that script, but it was a lifelong struggle.
6. Benzo Junkie
In 1977, Faust was prescribed theophylline for her asthma. It triggered a cyclic mood disorder. In 1982, a psychiatrist prescribed Ativan (lorazepam). By 1983, she was on 2.5 mg daily.
Over the next five years, she experienced terrifying symptoms: loss of libido, pelvic pain, neurological symptoms, loss of taste and smell, and a foul body odor. Doctors told her she was malingering, hysterical, or menopausal.
It was only in 1988, when she halved her dose and her symptoms worsened, that she realized she was addicted. She later wrote Benzo Junkie (1993), attacking the medical-industrial complex that prescribed the drugs without warning patients of their addictive properties.
7. The Erotic Eye
Faust became the regular photography critic for The Age in 1977. She had a keen aesthetic sense and a disciplined eye. Unlike most women, she was sexually aroused by visual stimulation.
She spent years trying to distinguish pornography from erotica, arguing that the former was repetitive and clichéd while the latter attended to formal qualities.
8. Paedophilia
This is the most difficult chapter of Faust’s life. In 1983, she defended Alison Thorne, a teacher who had spoken in support of a paedophile discussion group. Faust argued that Thorne was exercising her right to free speech and that the police raid was an infringement of civil liberties.
But Faust went further. She argued that “some children below the age of consent… are mature enough to have sexual preferences”. She claimed that “many boys enter paedophile relations because their social or biological age is ahead of the legal minimum age for sex”. She cited the work of Glenn Wilson and Paul Wilson to argue that some paedophile relationships were not harmful.
Brett does not excuse this. She writes: “There is a telling silence in all Bea’s discussions of paedophilia: the voices of the children and adolescents, except for her own, and Wilson’s twelve informants”.
She adds, “In the contest between the suffering child and the oppressed paedophile, why was she more interested in the paedophile? It is not a question she ever asked herself”.
9. Victim Feminism
In her 1994 pamphlet Backlash? Balderdash!, Faust attacked what she called “wimp feminism”. She argued that feminists were inflating statistics of women’s suffering and encouraging a victim mentality. “The truth is that while any woman can be bashed, victims are overwhelmingly poor; while any woman can be raped, victims are overwhelmingly young and poor,” she wrote.
She believed that “too much feminist propaganda assumes that women have no choices, no skills, no inner resources and no strength”. For Faust, who had refused to be a victim despite her miserable childhood and chronic illness, this was personal.
Fearless Beatrice Faust Analysis
What Brett Does Brilliantly
Brett’s greatest achievement is that she refuses to sanitize Faust. As one reviewer put it, “Brett offers not a hagiography but a case study in how feminist history evolves, and why its inheritors must learn to hold complexity without retreating into purity”.
She integrates Faust’s private life with her public commitments. We see the woman who founded WEL also struggling with suicidal thoughts, addiction, and the collapse of her marriage. We see the civil libertarian who defended free speech also defending positions that now seem indefensible.
Brett also situates Faust in her historical context. Faust came of age in the civil liberties movement of the 1960s, when the fight was to get the law out of people’s sex lives, not to invite it in. She never fully grasped that the world had changed, that sexual harassment laws, for example, were a response to real harms that women had previously been expected to endure in silence.
Where Faust Was Wrong
Faust’s views on rape were, at best, naive. She argued that rape was often a “failure of communication” between men and women. She told Susan Brownmiller on Monday Conference that “men do not know how to tell if a woman means ‘No’ or if she means ‘Ask me again'”. This is classic victim-blaming, however much Faust denied it.
Her views on paedophilia are even more troubling. She minimized the harm, relied on dubious sources, and never listened to the voices of abused children. Brett’s judgment is damning: “In the contest between the suffering child and the oppressed paedophile, why was she more interested in the paedophile? It is not a question she ever asked herself”.
And her dismissal of “wimp feminism” seems, in retrospect, like a failure of empathy. Faust could not imagine that other women might experience the world differently from her, that they might not have her confidence, her sexual ease, her refusal to be a victim.
Where Faust Was Right
And yet. Faust was right that the law is a blunt instrument for regulating sex.
She was right that sex education matters. She was right that women should not be defined by their reproductive capacity. She was right that feminism should be about expanding choice, not restricting it.
She was also right that the personal is psychological, that not all suffering is political, and that we have to take responsibility for our own healing. This is an unfashionable view today, but it is not wrong.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Psychologically rich: Brett draws on Faust’s private diaries and correspondence to reveal a complex inner life.
Historically grounded: Brett situates Faust in the context of postwar Melbourne, the civil liberties movement, and second-wave feminism.
Unsentimental: Brett does not excuse Faust’s flaws; she builds context and lets readers draw their own conclusions.
Well-written: Brett is a clear, direct writer who avoids academic jargon.
Weaknesses
Dense at times: The book covers a lot of ground, and some readers may find the detail overwhelming.
Uncomfortable subject matter: Faust’s views on paedophilia and rape are genuinely disturbing, and some readers will struggle with them.
Limited international context: The book is very focused on Australia; readers outside Australia may need to do some background reading.
Comparison with Similar Works
Fearless Beatrice Faust invites comparison with other feminist biographies that refuse to simplify their subjects:
Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew by Christine Wallace (1997: Like Faust, Greer was a brilliant, difficult, and controversial feminist. Wallace’s biography is similarly unsentimental.
The Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair (1922): A novel, not a biography, but it explores similar themes of maternal loss and its psychological consequences.
Conclusion
Fearless Beatrice Faust is not a comfortable read. It will make you angry, frustrated, and sad. It will force you to confront the fact that the people who built the feminism we inherited were deeply flawed—and that their flaws are part of the story.
But that is precisely why you should read it. As one reviewer put it, “Faust is a case study in this generational dissonance. She was among the first women to campaign for civil liberties, abortion law reform and sex education… The same woman who fought so hard for others also defended positions many now find indefensible”.
Brett’s book challenges us to hold complexity without retreating into purity. It asks us to reckon with a figure whose legacy is both foundational and fraught. And it reminds us that feminism, like all human movements, is made by humans, with all their contradictions, blind spots, and failures.
If you are ready to sit with that discomfort, read this book.
