Lillie Goodisson

Who was Lillie Goodisson?

Lillie Elizabeth Goodisson née Price was a Welsh Australian nurse and a pioneer of family planning in New South Wales.

Goodisson was born in Holyhead, Wales. She trained as a nurse and at age 19 married London physician Lawford David Evans. Soon after they moved to Auckland, New Zealand, where they started a family. The couple and their two children moved to Melbourne in 1895, and in 1897 established in Myrnong private hospital at St. Kilda. Her husband died in 1903 and thereafter she went to Western Australia where she met and married her second husband, Albert Elliot, Goodisson in 1904. They lived in Geraldton until Albert Goodisson went to Batavia in September 1913 to receive treatment for an illness, he died in 1914 leaving little to his wife, she borrowed money from her friend Ivy Brookes and returned to Melbourne.

She was involved in patriotic causes during the first World War, however her finances did not improve, and she took another loan from Brookes to establish a library at Elwood in Melbourne. Debts and ill health forced its liquidation in 1924. Goodisson moved to Sydney to be with her daughter in 1926. She joined the Women's Reform League and with Ruby Rich, Marion Louisa Piddington and Anna Roberts founded the Racial Improvement Society, which later became the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales. The association was involved in promoting sex education, preventing and eradicating venereal disease and the education of the public in eugenics. Goodisson served as general secretary for the association. She advocated the selective breeding of future generations for the elimination of hereditary disease, and defects and campaigned unsuccessfully for the segregation and sterilization of the mentally deficient and for the introduction of pre-marital health examinations. Although Goodisson campaigned for her association's eugenics goals, her main interests were in contraception and politics. The likely catalyst for her campaign interests was her husband's death from general paralysis and dedrangement a symptom of Tertiary Syphilis.