Recent discussions about the decline in the birthrate and about women's work in households and other places (where they are paid for their work) carry resounding echoes of the past. To recognise these echoes, though, it is necessary to revise a common view of the feminists of the campaigns for votes for women.

'Wowsers' those women have been called, because some campaigned against drunkenness. 'Moralistic', because they were opposed to men's casual sex: 'God's Police', 'spoilers of men's pleasures'. For more than a generation our image of Australian suffragists has been of women who were fearsomely respectable, crushingly earnest, socially puritanical, politically limited, and sexually repressed.

But we have, I would now argue, all been astonishingly wrong. It was the sexual double standard governing heterosexual relationships that suffrage-era feminists objected to. Not sex itself. Indeed, rather than being opposed to sex, they were centrally preoccupied with sex - and with its pleasures as well as its dangers. If you look past the prissy cardboard characters of the books of the period, if you de-code the euphemisms of the past instead of assuming ignorance, then you find feminists who were varied, engaging, often sexy and urgently demanding change to the common experience of sex for women.

They wrote about sex, these First Wave feminists. Louisa Lawson, proclaimed in her journal the Dawn that 'a happy married life is the best kind of life for both men and women'. But she then went on to depict the horrors of married for a woman partnered to a drunken sot, one of the kinds of marriage that could follow from what she dubbed 'our unequal sex code'. Another Sydney feminist editor, Maybanke Wollstenholme, commented on 'the beauty of sex-love' that is 'founded upon sex needs', but found it necessary to produce sex education pamphlets and publish coded advertisements for contraceptives to assist women gain such beautiful experience. Catherine Spence, in South Australia, invented a utopian society a century into the future in which the key social regulators were early marriage and contraception - a clear recommendation for sexual pleasure, separated from reproduction. Brettena Smyth, in Victoria, went further. She gave lectures advocating contraception, and advertised and sold them: 'Best Female French Preventatives' priced at 10 shillings and 6 pence, or 'Ingram's Improved Seamless Enema and Syringes', 12 shillings and 6 pence if they were polished, 10 shillings and 6 pence if they were not.

And all around these feminists, women who were married were practising contraception, and women who were not married were on strike against marriage - or at least against the current forms of marriage governed by the double standard of sexual morality. For the period of Federation was also the period of what demographers have since called 'the Australian family transition', a time when the average number of children that any woman might bear fell from about seven to about five, and the proportion of women choosing not to marry at all rose to almost 18 percent.

The whole female population was in league, it seemed, to change relations between the sexes so that women would be able to enjoy sex, rather than putting up with it - as a means of gaining a livelihood.

And now?

What do can we learn from these echoes today?

Two things, I'd suggest.

Firstly, public political concern expressed about women's reproductive labour may well herald new polarisations between the sexes - even antagonisms - at odds with democratic commitments to equality and inclusiveness. And secondly, the context of such antagonisms a century ago included the inauguration of the infamous White Australia policy in relation to immigration, and the dis-enfranchisement of those Aboriginal Australians who had previously participated in elections for the colonial parliaments.

Xenophobia and racism, then and now - themselves profoundly anti- democratic - foster ideas, policies and practices which are also extremely sexist.