Biography

Swimming against the tide

Item: Fearless Beatrice Faust
Author: Joy Damousi

A fine biography of a controversial activist

by Joy Damousi •

May 2025, no. 475

Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, feminism and body politics by Judith Brett

Text Publishing, $36.99 pb, 320 pp

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Biography

Swimming against the tide

A fine biography of a controversial activist

by Joy Damousi •

May 2025, no. 475

‘Bea never swam with the tide’, observes Judith Brett in her eloquent biography of the social reformer, activist, and public intellectual Beatrice Faust. Brett takes us behind the public face of this confident, outspoken, and strident political figure, whose name became synonymous with second wave feminism in Australia. The psychological reading of Faust that Brett offers, in a refreshingly analytical approach provides depth, complexity, and insight which makes this beautifully written book compelling to read.

Joy Damousi

Professor Joy Damousi is Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She is the author of numerous books, including Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia (Cambridge, 2001); Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (UNSW Press, 2005; winner of the Ernest Scott Prize) and Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 (Cambridge 2010). She is a former president of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Historical Association.