Books
Judith Brett
Fearless Beatrice Faust
Beatrice Faust was brilliant, contradictory and often profoundly difficult, and her work delivered hard-won victories for Australian women. Judith Brett’s Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism & Body Politics captures this polarity with empathy and rigour, forcing readers to reckon with a figure whose legacy is both foundational and fraught. In charting Faust’s life, 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.
Judith Brett writes not only as a biographer but also as a witness to the era that shaped Faust – and it shows. Her account is informed by her knowledge of postwar Melbourne’s intellectual and political worlds, which adds texture without indulgence.
Brett’s empathy – and occasional frustration – is striking, extending not only to Faust but to those around her: a remote father, an overwhelmed stepmother, an array of collaborators and adversaries across decades. Brett neither excuses nor conceals Faust’s flaws; instead, she builds context, helping the reader understand why Faust behaved as she did, while questioning where she failed.
Faust’s early childhood, marked by maternal death and alleged neglect, is presented not as trauma testimony but as part of the map, with Brett noting Faust would have emphatically rejected the notion of trauma. Faust also refused to connect her multiple chronic conditions to the concept of disability – a silence as loud as anything she ever said, given the body she inhabited and endlessly dissected.
Brett resists the contemporary urge to diagnose, trusting the reader to draw meaning from the era’s emotional constraints. In doing so, Fearless Beatrice Faust becomes more than biography – it becomes a study in how feminism, like the women who advance it, should be read, both historically and morally.
Faust’s legacy is as undeniable as it is uneven to the modern eye. She was among the first women to campaign for civil liberties, abortion law reform and sex education. She fought for women’s entry into the public service and elevated the political power of women’s votes. The influence of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and her work on abortion law are lasting, material achievements that reshaped politics and personal freedom.
It was rare for Faust to step back from a fight. She fearlessly confronted frothing anti-abortion protestors at Holy Family Parish in Mount Waverley – the same Catholic church my parents left at the time, only to return later and have me baptised there. Brett – but more likely Faust’s notes – misplaces the event in Glen Waverley: a minor slip but a reminder that sources may occasionally be unreliable.
The same woman who fought so hard for others also defended positions many now find indefensible. Her comments on rape, pornography and paedophilia – along with her longstanding personal and professional support for a man widely suspected to be Mr Cruel – read less as principled rationalism and more as wilful dismissal of harm. She was impatient with emerging feminist theory and often derisive towards what she called “wimp feminism”.
Faust could be both brilliant and blinkered, a tactician who could alienate allies and foes with ease. It is tempting to see her contradictions as fatal flaws but that flattens what is more accurately intellectual obstinacy – a refusal to adapt to a changing world. She did not always grow but she fought for others to have the space to do so. That is the knot younger feminists must hold: some, but not all, of the work mattered, as is the case with any theory or movement in constant evolution.
One of Fearless Beatrice Faust’s quiet provocations is the challenge it poses to third- or fourth-wave feminists: what does it mean to inherit a movement shaped by figures who would not survive today’s purity tests? Faust is a case study in this generational dissonance. She was not interested in expressive politics or collective identity. She mistrusted radical language, often rejected feminism in favour of humanism and valued reform over revolution.
For those raised on intersectionality, mutual care and an evolving politics of harm, Faust can read as cold, even callous – and, at times, bizarre. But there is value in confronting that discomfort. History is not clean. Movements are made not by ideals alone but by people – messy, flawed, sometimes infuriating. To demand perfection from those who came before is to risk narcissism, to flatten the complex interplay of context, character and constraint.
Faust’s work was significant. What this book makes clear is that feminism’s past is often uncomfortable – but it is always instructive, if you are willing to stay in the room with it.
Fearless Beatrice Faust is an elegantly constructed and exhaustively researched biography, but its power lies in something rarer: restraint. Brett resists both condemnation and canonisation, instead offering a textured portrait shaped by discipline and deep contextual knowledge. Her evocation of postwar Melbourne – its claustrophobic intelligentsia, its cafe politics and campus feuds – adds a vivid, local specificity that will be recognisable to many and unsettling to some.
This was a world where privilege and isolation often existed side by side. Brett never lets the reader forget that Faust’s frequently leveraged access – to education, platforms and decision-makers – was not universally shared. But she also does not mistake access for ease.
The result is a biography that feels both precise and alive, tracing one woman’s idiosyncratic path through a movement still unfinished. If Fearless Beatrice Faust has a lesson, it is that feminism’s history is not a sequence of icons to revere or reject but a complex terrain. Navigating it demands curiosity, clarity and courage and, to borrow from Millicent Fawcett, the understanding that courage calls to courage everywhere. Faust’s feminism was never safe, nor is its legacy. It will unsettle you – and it should.
Text Publishing, 304pp, $36.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Fearless Beatrice Faust".
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