Beatrice Faust

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Beatrice Eileen Faust (19 February 1939 – 30 October 2019) was an Australian author and women's activist. In 1966 she was president of the Victorian Abortion Law Repeal Association. She was also a co-founder of the Women's Electoral Lobby in 1972 and co-founder of the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties c. 1966.

She attended Melbourne University in the 1950s, where she became acquainted with Germaine Greer and they extended their feminist inclinations through various cogitations, earning her bachelor's degree in English and subsequently her master's degree. Much later in her life, the higher degrees of PhD and LLD were conferred upon her, the former for her 1991 book Apprenticeship in Liberty and the latter for her life's work in general, as a social reformist and researcher.

She was one of the first women to argue for civil liberties, abortion law reform and well-informed sex education for all. In 1966 she co-founded the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties to advocate for civil rights and, in 1972, the Women's Electoral Lobby, to agitate for legislative reform along specifically feminist lines and to give Australian women a greater voice in politics.

In 2001 Faust was awarded the Centenary Medal. In the same year, she was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. In 2004 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for such efforts and more.

Among her early writings, she contributed to the Australian edition of The Little Red Schoolbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Red_Schoolbook, a book written by two Danish schoolteachers in 1969 which encouraged and instructed young people to question social norms and was translated into many languages in the early 1970s. The book aroused much controversy and moral panic, especially around statements such as "Some girls, and a very few boys, don't masturbate. This is quite normal. It is also normal to do it." In the UK, Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse pressed for the UK edition of the book to be prosecuted in a letter to the Director of Public Prosecutions, although action was already being taken. She was quoted in a Daily Telegraph article published on 29 March 1971 asserting the book "had caused 'incalculable harm' to children" in Denmark"; it "normalises the most licentious behaviour", she believed. Ross McWhirter, in a letter to The Guardian, thought "the real issue" about the book was its seditious nature.[11]

The offices of the book's British publisher, Richard Handyside, were raided by the police and the eventual prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act was successful

Relevant Writing:

Faust, B. (1980). Women, Sex and Pornography (Penguin Books: Melbourne). [Book].

Faust, B. (1986). 'The paedophiles', in The Betrayal of Youth: Radical Perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People, Edited by Warren Middleton (CL Publications: London), pp. 107-115.

Faust, B. (1995) "Child sexuality and age of consent laws: The Netherlands model." Australasian Gay and Lesbian Law Journal 5: 78-85.