Potent males and patent females: male infertility and the standardisation of sterility investigations

Population was of primary concern in the mid-twentieth century, and Australia’s declining birth rate in the 1930s and 1940s brought forth concerns about the reproductive nation. One of the key professions that engaged with ideas of a reproductive Australia was medicine, particularly gynaecologists, obstetricians, and surgeons. Their medical discourse in the mid-twentieth century when exploring infertility exhibited a tension between the burgeoning medical understanding of infertility within marriages—shared between the husband and wife—and the social understanding of reproductive responsibility resting on the woman. Through new approaches to diagnosis and therapeutic technologies, such as artificial insemination, this tension around responsibility was elucidated in the medical discourse. Even when incorporating or exclusively assessing the man’s fertility status there was an underlying presumption of, if not female fault, female responsibility. As the majority of practitioners were gynaecologists, obstetricians, and surgeons, the continued focus on women could be justified through their particular medical specialisation which exclusively examined women. Despite the increased knowledge of male fault, often incurable male fault, in infertile marriages the very nature of examination, diagnosis and treatment was grounded in ideas of female reproductive responsibility.