Traps of womanhood

his article is informed by and situated within a history project I am undertaking with Ann Curthoys and Zora Simic that takes a number of different routes to understanding the meanings of, conditions for, and experiences of domestic and family violence in Australia since 1850. 1 While the legal archive has been at the centre of most historical accounts written to date, including some of our own, we also examine political campaigns, government policy, visual representations, memoir and fiction.Ruth Park's interest in intimate relationships and families in crisis makes her novels fruitful sites for exploring representations of domestic and family violence in fiction.One of the tasks we have set ourselves is to establish the heuristic utility of terms that have come to define a wider range of abuses that are now crucial to contemporary understandings of what constitutes domestic and family violence.Financial abuse, sexual and reproductive coercion and coercive control are three such terms, coined in recent decades, that we consider throughout.In this essay, I am primarily interested in fictional representations of reproductive coercion.The term first appeared in the legal literature on interpersonal relationships and reproductive autonomy in 2008 (Priaulx 193-94).Research in Australia was first published in the late 2010s and pertains to control of fertility, such as contraceptive sabotage, and pregnancy outcomes such as abortion.In 2018, the Australian branch of MSI (formerly Marie Stopes International) drew attention to the wider context of structural reproductive coercion in Aus

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