Gender, work and fears of a 'Hybrid Race' in 1920s New Zealand

Gender and History

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 501-518

  Brookes, Barbara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; RACE; SEXUALITY; WOMENS EMPLOYMENT;

AUSTRALASIA; NEW ZEALAND;

EID: 35348913122     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00495.x     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. Mr Slaughter, Evidence to the Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Maoris on Market Gardens (CIEMMG), H1 11685, Archives New Zealand, Wellington (ANZ).
2. 'Maoris' is now spelt 'Maori' since there is no 's' in the Maori language, but contemporaries, both Maori and Pakeha (White New Zealanders), used the English plural form freely.
3. New Zealand Herald, 10 September 1929, p. 12.
4. For analysis of these issues in South Africa, see Timothy Keegan, 'Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca. 1912', Journal of Southern African Studies 27 (2001), pp. 45-77.
5. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. p. 182.
6. On the problems of viewing race relations as bicultural, see Daniel R. Mandell, 'Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880', Journal of American History 85 (1998), pp. 466-501.
7. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
8. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 7.
9. Bronwyn Labrum, 'Family Needs and Family Desires: Discretionary State Welfare in New Zealand, 1920-1970' (unpublished doctoral thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2000), p. 53.
10. See Brian Moloughney and John Stenhouse, '"Drug-Besotten, Sin-Begotten Fiends of Filth": New Zealanders and the Oriental Other, 1850-1920', New Zealand Journal of History 33 (1999), pp. 43-64.
11. Peggy Pascoe, 'Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of "Race" in Twentieth-Century America', Journal of American History 83 (1996), pp. 44-69, here p. 48.
12. Renisa Mawani, 'The "Savage Indian" and the "Foreign Plague": Mapping Racial Categories and Legal Geographies of Race in BritishColumbia, 187-1925' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 2001), p. 218.
13. Constance Backhouse, 'The White Women's Labor Laws: Anti-Chinese Racism in Early Twentieth- Century Canada', Law and History Review 14 (1996), pp. 315-68.
14. Kate Walsh, The Changing Face of Australia: A Century of Immigration 1901-2000 (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2001), pp. 40-42.
15. Marilyn Lake, 'The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia', History Workshop Journal 58 (2004), pp. 41-62, here p. 56.
16. Manying Ip, Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (Auckland: New Women's Press, 1990), p. 178.
17. DavidWalker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), p. 181.
18. Walker, Anxious Nation, p. 181.
19. Ip, Home Away from Home, p. 178.
20. Charles P. Sedgwick, 'The Politics of Survival: A Social History of the Chinese in New Zealand' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Canterbury, 1982), p. 636.
21. Sedgwick, 'The Politics of Survival', p. 324.
22. Lake, 'The White Man under Siege', p. 57.
23. See Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 74-7.
24. T. D. H. Hall, 'N. Z. and Asiatic Immigration', in Apirana Ngata et al., New Zealand Affairs (Christchurch: The New Zealand Institute of Public Relations, 1929), pp. 81-100, here p. 81.
25. James Bennett, 'Maori as HonoraryMembers of the White Tribe', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29 (2001), pp. 33-54.
26. Bennett, 'Maori as Honorary Members of the White Tribe', p. 37.
27. Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR), G-8, 1927. Maori were assumed to have land and hence were discriminated against in the payment of means-tested pensions, for example. See Elizabeth Hanson, The Politics of Social Security: The 1938 Act and Some Later Developments (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1980), pp. 162-4.
28. See Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1994), pp. 287-8.
29. M. P. K. Sorrenson (ed.), 'Introduction', in Na To Hoa Aroha = From Your Dear Friend: The Correspondence between Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck 1925-50, vol. 1 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), pp. 9-49, here p. 17.
30. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 17, emphasis in the original.
31. Raewyn Dalziel, 'The Politics of Settlement', in W. H. Oliver with B. R. Williams (eds), The Oxford History of New Zealand (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 87-111, here p. 102.
32. New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (NZPD), vol. 83, 1894, p. 569.
33. NZPD, vol. 185, 1919, p. 6.
34. Janet McCallum, 'Rehutai Maihi, 1895-1967', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 7 April 2006, . Api Mahuika has noted that customary prohibitions against women speaking on the marae (the ceremonial gathering place in front of a meeting house) did not apply in the Ngati Porou Iwi.
35. See Api Mahuika, 'Leadership: Inherited and Achieved', in Michael King (ed.), Te Ao Hurihuri: Aspects of Maoritanga (rev. edn; Auckland: Reed, 1992), pp. 42-63, here p. 48.
36. NZPD, vol. 187, 1920, pp. 908-9.
37. Manying Ip, 'Maori-Chinese Encounters: Indigene-Immigrant Interaction in NewZealand', Asian Studies Review 27 (2003), pp. 227-52, here p. 233.
38. Ip, 'Maori-Chinese Encounters', p. 229.
39. Sedgwick, 'The Politics of Survival', p. 318.
40. See e.g., Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial 'Amalgamation' in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (1973; repr. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995).
41. Evidence of W. Hapi and Amo Hamitemiti, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ.
42. Evidence of Andrew Chong, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ. P.W. Hohepa, A Maori Community in Northland (1964; repr. Wellington: Reed, 1970), p. 73, describes such patterns of work for a later period.
43. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 157.
44. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 209.
45. Apirana Ngata to Peter Buck, 1 August 1928, in Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 123.
46. The work to which Ngata was referring is George Pitt-Rivers, The Clash of Culture and the Contact of Races: An Anthropological and Psychological Study of the Laws of Racial Adaptability, with Special Reference to the Depopulation of the Pacific and the Government of Subject Races (London: Routledge, 1927).
47. Ngata to Buck, 1 August 1928, in Sorrenson (ed.) Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, pp. 126-7.
48. There is little scholarly work on Maori masculinity, though see Brendan Hokowhitu, 'Tackling Maori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport', The Contemporary Pacific 16 (2004), pp. 259-84.
49. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 13.
50. Roberta Nicholls, The Women's Parliament: The National Council of the Women of New Zealand, 1896-1920 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996).
51. Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) of the Ngati-Mutunga Iwi, who trained as a doctor, became anthropologist. He became director of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and took a Chair in at Yale University. During his work in the Pacific, Buck wrote to Ngata about his views (mentally backward) and Tongans (mentally alert). His correspondence suggests the creation of Polynesian manhood. See e.g., Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 72.
52. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 235. For Ngata's full address see NZPD, pp. 483-92.
53. Jacqueline Leckie, 'In Defence of Race and Empire: The White New Zealand League at Pukekohe', New Zealand Journal of History 19 (1985), pp. 103-29, here p. 128.
54. Steven Oliver, 'Patrick Smyth', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography vol. 4, 1921-1940 Auckland University Press, 1998), pp. 484-5.
55. Jennifer Curnow and Edward Rahiri Graham, 'George Samuel Graham, 1874-1952', Dictionary Zealand Biography, vol. 4, 1921-1940, pp. 203-4.
56. Minute Book of Te Akarana Maori Association (TAMA), 1927-1933, MS 2002/ 113, Auckland Museum Library (AMML).
57. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 67.
58. Auckland Star, 5 August 1929, p. 6.
59. TAMA, 18 November 1927, MS 120, AMML. A motion to admit women to the general not succeed: TAMA, 18 April 1929. The sentiments about womanhood were expressed during with the National Council of Women, TAMA, 25 July 1929.
60. TAMA, 14 July 1927, Associate Members of the NCW, Auckland, Minutes, 26 April 1926 1937, MS 879, AMML.
61. Minutes, 28 November 1927, Executive and General Minutes,NCW, Auckland, August 1926 MS 879, AMML.
62. Minutes, 14 July; 8 September 1927; 12 September; 10 October 1929, Associate Members' NCW, 16 April 1926-12 April 1937, MS 879, AMML.
63. Minutes, 23 September 1929, Executive and General Minutes, National Council of Women, Auckland, August 1926-June 1933, MS 879, AMML.
64. Sun, 26 July 1929, p. 1. On Staley see Mirror, 1 July 1927, p. 41.
65. Sun, 26 July 1929, p. 1.
66. Sun, 27 August 1929, p. 1 and 23 August 1929, p. 1.
67. Sun, 12 June 1929, p. 1.
68. 'Maori Conference at Putiki', AJHR, 1928, G-8, p. 2.
69. TAMA, 18 July 1929, MS 120/M99, AMML.
70. Sun, 12 June 1929, p. 1.
71. Sun, 17 June 1929, p. 8.
72. TAMA, Minutes of an Extraordinary Meeting, 4 August 1927, MS 2002/113, AMML.
73. TAMA, 25 August 1927, MS 2002/113, AMML.
74. Report of meeting deputation to the Maori Methodist Synod, 23 September 1927, MS 2002/113, AMML.
75. 'Maoris in Market Gardens', Evening Post, 13 July 1929, L1 10/3/ 268, ANZ.
76. Auckland Star, 13 July 1929, L1 10/3/268, 'Maoris in Market Gardens', ANZ.
77. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 235. Whatever Ngata's motivation for this imputation, it was a view repeated by others in the course of the Inquiry. Matire Ngapua married John Rankin in 1896. She was the sister of Hone Heke Ngapua, MHR (Member of the House of Representatives) for Northern Maori from 1893 to 1911.
78. Angela Ballara, 'Hone Heke Rankin', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 4, 1921-1940, p. 419.
79. 'Maori Hygiene', CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ.
80. Evidence of Mr Grieve, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 26.
81. Evidence of Dr Mildred Staley, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 58.
82. Evidence of Sister Ivy, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 43. See Margaret Tennant, 'Pakeha Deaconesses and the New Zealand Methodist Mission to Maori, 1893-1940', Journal of Religious History 23 (1999), pp. 309-26.
83. Evidence of Mr Goffe, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 46.
84. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 57.
85. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 109.
86. Ip, 'Maori-Chinese Encounters', p. 230.
87. Evidence of Wirepaheta Raka, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 119.
88. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 13.
89. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, pp. 12-21.
90. Evidence of George Graham, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 17.
91. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, pp. 66-7.
92. Mr Malone, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 63.
93. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 84.
94. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 5.
95. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 42.
96. Evidence of Mr Dale, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 52.
97. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 53.
98. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 58.
99. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 19.
100. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 34; 42-3.
101. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, pp. 71-5.
102. Jessica Heine, 'Colonial Anxieties and the Construction of Identities: the Employment of Maori Women in Chinese Market Gardens, Auckland, 1929', Unpublished masters, University of Waikato, 2006. See also Dorothy Page,
103. 'Miriam Bridelia Soljak', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 4, pp. 486-7.
104. CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ, p. 28.
105. Auckland Star, 6 September 1929, p. 12.
106. Sorrenson (ed.), Na To Hoa Aroha, vol. 1, p. 67.
107. Ruawai D. Rakena, 'Arthur John Seamer', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 4, pp. 467-8.
108. Undated clipping, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ; New Zealand Herald, 18 October 1929, p. 12.
109. Press clipping, New Zealand Herald, 4 November 1929, CIEMMG, H1 11685, ANZ.
110. Unattributed clipping, 30 October 1929, CIEMMG, L1 10/2/268, ANZ.
111. Unattributed clipping, 10 November 1929, CIEMMG, L1 10/3/268, ANZ; AJHR, 1929, G-11, p. 6.
112. Labour Inspector to the Department of Labour, 22 July 1929, CIEMMG, L1 10/3/268, ANZ.
113. Unattributed clipping, ? July 1929, CIEMMG, L1 10/3/268, ANZ.
114. Apart from this letter, and an article in the Auckland Star, 11 June 1931, which indicated that the League was assisting unemployed women, nothing more is known of this organisation except that it preceded the important national Maori Women's Welfare League, founded in 1951. See Barbara Brookes, 'Nostalgia for "innocent homely pleasures": The 1964 New Zealand Controversy over Washday at the Pa', Gender & History 9 (1997), pp. 242-61.
115. Mere Newton to Apirana Ngata, 8 August 1930, L1 10/3/268, ANZ.
116. Patricia Grace, Irihapeti Ramsden and Jonathan Dennis, The Silent Migration: Ngati Poneke Young Maori Club 1937-1948: Stories of Urban Migration (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2001), pp. 14-28, here p. 27.
117. AJHR, 1929, G-11, p. 4.
118. AJHR, 1929, G-11, p. 6.
119. AJHR, 1929, G-11, p. 6.
120. NZPD, vol. 240, 18 September-10 November 1934, pp. 1181-2.
121. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, p. 10.
122. Inspector to the Department of Labour, 22 July 1929, L1 10/3/268, ANZ.
123. Inspector to the Department of Labour, 22 July 1929, L1 10/3/268, ANZ.
124. Manying Ip, 'Evolving Maori-Chinese Interactions: From Warmth to Wariness', Asia in New Zealand Symposium, University of Otago, 6 February 2005, cited with the permission of the author.
125. Letter from S. George, New Zealand Herald, 4 November 1929, p. 14.
126. Letter from George Graham, New Zealand Herald, 6 November 1929, p. 14.
127. Letter from Keira Newton, New Zealand Herald, 14 November 1929, p. 14.
128. Backhouse, 'The White Women's Labor Laws'.