Growing Up In New Zealand 1925-1950, Part 2: New Zealand, Gender Roles

You may wish to read the first part in the Growing up in New Zealand 1925 – 1950 here. Or read the articles in the original Growing Up in New Zealand series.

Gender roles clearly differentiated There were clearly defined roles for men and women in this period. The men were usually the breadwinners and few married women had jobs outside the home except as a war effort. They were kept very busy at home if they followed the norms of the day.

Gardens The men usually did the outside jobs like the lawn mowing (no motor mowers), the vegetable garden, sometimes the flower garden and the chopping of the wood for the open fire, the range and the copper. Most of the vegetables and many fruits were grown by our fathers in the quarter acre section on which most houses in town were built. Those who grew up in the country had large vegetable gardens and orchards.

The standard remedy for caterpillars and white butterflies on the vegetables was Derris Dust. Soapy water from the washing tub was kept to cool in buckets and then thrown on green-fly and sooty mould. There were few nurseries for the purchase of plants, so many gardens were filled with cuttings from friends’ plants.

The introduction of the rotary clothesline was a welcome innovation as it meant that vegetables could be grown under the clothesline and the grassy area for the drying green was no longer a mandatory part of the section. The woman hanging her clothes on the rotary clothes line is wearing the apron which was so necessary when many garments required ironing, or even dry cleaning as the colours ran or the fabrics shrank.

In the towns the car was used mainly at the weekends and the men walked or cycled to work or caught the tram, bus or suburban train. If the car was taken to the city there was not the present difficulty of finding a park. Many country families used the farm truck for family transport as well.

Fathers as handymen Most men had a workshop. Many painted the exterior walls of the house and the iron roof and did minor repairs to the house and fences. Some did interior painting and paperhanging. They repaired bicycles and if they had a car were likely to do the maintenance as the procedures were simpler than with modern cars.

Many families had a last for repairing shoes. Wallace recalls his father’s role as boot repairer. "The boots we wore had protectors which Dad fitted on a last. For Sundays and trips to the pictures we wore our new pairs and the old pairs were studded. Then a full sole was fitted to make them last a while longer. The sole was pulled off using pliers and the new one cut to size and hammered down with brass tacks. These were always held in one’s mouth so that two hands were free to hold the newly cut leather in place. Then beeswax was applied to the edges."

Money Money was not discussed in front of the children, but most were taught that it was important to be economical and to save. Parents who could afford it paid their children a small amount of pocket money in return for doing jobs in the house or garden. School bank accounts were available and many children banked small amounts from their pocket money each week to learn the habit of saving.

Some older children had jobs such as delivering newspapers or parcels for the shops or mowing neighbours’ lawns or minding children.

The father in the family as a rule made most of the decisions about expenditure, although a lot of women were given a housekeeping allowance and allowed to decide how that would be budgeted.

Few women were economically independent. Most shops would not open accounts in the name of the woman in the family and banks were reluctant to grant mortgages on properties to women.

Preserving
Most women bottled the fruit, made jam, and had well stocked pantries.

Wallace’s mother made over 350 pots of jam so that she could open a fresh pot each week. During the war jam making was limited and the bottling was done in water instead of syrup and if necessary sugar was added very sparingly when the fruit was served.

The beans, most often scarlet runners, were sliced and salted in a crock for the winter.

Eggs varied in price during the year and at their cheapest were bought and preserved in Nortons Egg Preserver in 4 gallon kerosene tins for use in cooking when eggs went up in price. Another method of preserving was to rub Ovaline on the eggs. Many families had a henhouse in the back garden and kept some fowls to have their own fresh eggs. In the country it was common to be wakened in the morning by the sound of the rooster crowing to greet the day.

Children’s chores With so much activity at home there were regular chores for the children, usually chopping wood or mowing lawns for the boys as soon as they were old enough, and housework for the girls. Helping with dishes was mandatory as there were no automatic dish washers.

Tom recalls that family planning wasn’t quite respectable during this time, so family sizes were larger – often four to six or more children – so there was plenty of ‘child power’ for the chores.

Barbara S recalls that in the 1930s white butterflies appeared and caused havoc in the cabbage patch. "We were paid one penny for each dead one which we had chased and hit with a tennis racquet".

Christmas dinner Christmas dinner usually consisted of roast lamb or fresh chicken There were no frozen chickens and chicken was rarely eaten at any other time. The vegetables were new potatoes and fresh green peas. Podding the peas on Christmas morning was usually a shared chore for the family.

Popular desserts were trifle and traditional Christmas pudding, often made wrapped in a cloth and boiled in the copper. These were usually made well ahead of Christmas and sometimes kept hanging on the clothesline in their cloths. An exciting treat was to find in your helping one of the boiled threepences or even sixpences in the pudding. As Tom pointed out, in those times silver currency WAS made of silver. A dish of raisins and almonds was another Christmas treat.

The Festive Season’s chores The Christmas season was a time of stress for adults, especially the women. Not only were there presents to buy, often to make, parcels and cards to send, and Christmas food to prepare, but it was also the time when berry fruits ripened and had be to picked and made into jam. Blackcurrants ripened in most gardens around Christmas and had to be picked, most often on Boxing Day. But this wasn’t all. It was the time of the great New Zealand shut-down when many firms closed down and their staff went on holiday with their families. This meant that the mother in the family was also making ready the clothes to be worn on holiday, and often packing up and preparing the food to be taken to a holiday camping in a tent or staying in a bach. There were no freezers to allow for preparing well in advance.

Read on to Part Three…