Poor Men in the Land of Promises

Abstract

Married men and breadwinning were mutually implicit in Pakeha narratives of masculinity in nineteenth-century New Zealand. This article explores the idea that an implicit but important promise held out to immigrants from the mid-century was the promise of sole male breadwinning, and that this promise was so central to gender relations in the colonial economy that when it was defaulted on at the century's end, many men's failure to maintain sole breadwinning was understood to mark their failure as men. The economic and cultural organisation of masculinity around breadwinning had important implications for the lives of failing men and their families in the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century, and these implications can be traced in the records of failure: welfare records, court records, and suicide inquests.

Notes

I wish to thank Erik Olssen and Barbara Brookes, who each read drafts of this article and made very helpful suggestions for its improvement; also the organisers of the British World Conference in 2006 and the Australasian Welfare History Workshop in 2008, the reviewers for AHS, and Kathy Lothian and Jock Phillips. The research for this article draws on data from Phase II of the Caversham Project which was supported by a grant from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

² Otago Daily Times (ODT), 10 March 1898, 3; 15 March 1898, 6.

³Otago Benevolent Institution Outdoor Relief (OBIODR) Casebook, DAHI D 284 60–68, Archives New Zealand (ANZ), Dunedin, Vol. III, p. 1184, Vol. V, 2278, Vol. VI, 2808, Vol. VII, 3390; St Vincent de Paul Catholic Orphanage for Girls Admission Register 1899, Sisters of Mercy Archive, Dunedin; Magistrates Court, Dunedin Criminal Record Book 1896–97, DAAC D437 143 (2) ANZ Dunedin; Magistrates Court, Dunedin Criminal Record Book 1897–98, DAAC D437 143 (3) ANZ Dunedin; ODT, 6 November 1897, 3, 26 February 1898, 10 March 1898, 15 March 1898, 17 March 1898, 10 May 1898, 9 June 1898.

⁴Jock Phillips, A Man's Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), Chs. 1 and 2.

⁶Keith McClelland, ‘Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan” in Britain, 1850–80’ in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 83.

⁵Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State’, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19, no. 21 (1994): 309–36.

⁷McClelland, 84.

⁸Angelique Janssens, ‘The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate’, International Review of Social History (IRSH) 42 (1997): Supplement, 1–23.

⁹Sarah Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Britain’, IRSH 42 (1997): Supplement, 25–64.

¹⁰Wally Seccombe, ‘Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male-Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Social History, 11, no. 1 (1986): 53–76.

¹¹Janssens, 13–14.

¹²Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1993), 66.

¹³Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 55. See also Foundations of Arbitration: The Origins and Effects of State Compulsory Arbitration 1890–1914, eds. Stuart Macintyre and Richard Mitchell (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989).

¹⁴James Belich notes that until the 1880s, although prices were about fifty per cent higher than in Britain, wages were twice as high. Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), 377.

¹⁵Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 22. On p. 47 she continues: ‘The Arbitration Court took a particular view of men as independent economic agents whose wages were needed to support family units and dependants.’ The arbitration system was pioneered in New Zealand with the introduction of the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, 1894. There is no clear equivalent to Australia's Harvester Judgment which set the wage at a sum which would support a family with three children, but as James Holt shows, Judges Sim (in 1912) and Frazer (in 1925) clearly took it for granted that the wage should be sufficient to support a family. James Holt, Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand: The First Forty Years (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986), 105, 157. See also Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham, 1880–1920 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), and Annabel Cooper and Maureen Molloy, ‘Poverty, Dependence and “Women”: Reading Autobiography and Social Policy from 1930s New Zealand,’ Gender & History 9, no. 1 (1997): 36–59. The gender wage differentials, and the policy emphasis on the breadwinner, are evident earlier, however: in 1857 Charles Hursthouse noted that a ‘good’ manservant earned £40 a year, a ‘good’ female domestic £20. Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, Vol. II (London: Edward Stanford, 1857, 573). Nolan observes that the Employment of Females Act 1873, while ostensibly protective of women, affirmed ‘working women's difference from male workers and their breadwinning role’. Other legislation was more overt in its protection of men's work against the threat of female and boy labour. Nolan, 42.

¹⁶Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society 1850-1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), Ch. 2. Fairburn is alert to the unnoticed irony that ‘the family unit they revered was based just as much on dependent relationships as the patron-client relationships they hated’, 57.

¹⁷Belich, 329–32.

¹⁸Hursthouse, New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, Vol. II (London: Edward Stanford, 1857), 425.

²¹Vogel, 119.

¹⁹Julius Vogel, The Official Handbook of New Zealand: A Collection of Papers By Experienced Colonists on the Colony as a Whole, and on the Several Provinces, 2nd edn. (London: Wyman & Sons, 1875), 118–19.

²⁰Margaret Arnold notes that the returns of average wages and prices, first published in 1873, are likely to have been begun with the Vogel emigration drive of the 1870s in mind. M.A. Arnold, ‘Wage Rates, 1873 to 1911’, Discussion Paper No. 11, Department of Economics, Victoria University of Wellington, April 1982, 1.

²²Joanna Bourke, ‘Housewifery in Britain, 1850–1914’, Past and Present 143 (1994): 167–97.

²³Raewyn Dalziel, ‘The Colonial Helpmeet: Women's Role and the Vote in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History 11, no. 2 (1977): 112–23. See also Phillips, p. 226.

²⁴Helen Leach, however, in a discussion of home preserving in New Zealand, demonstrates that it was practised extensively, more so than in Britain, and more widely and over a longer period, even when it might have been cheaper to have bought commercially-made products. This seems to argue for a high intrinsic value placed on women's labour in the home. Leach, ‘Fruit and Vegetable Preservation in 20th Century New Zealand Homes: The Evidence from Recipe Books’, draft.

²⁵This claim was substantiated in 1966 by Dowie, who followed Knight in asserting an average income of £78 for New Zealand, compared to £50 for Britain and the United States. ‘Pending the research necessary to produce a superior estimate, the Knight figure appears sound enough to bear at least one significant conclusion: that New Zealand was the country with the highest standard of living in the world at this point of time.’ J.A. Dowie, ‘A Century-Old Estimate of the National Income of New Zealand’, Business Archives and History, 6, no. 2 (1966): 117–31; 123–4.

²⁶This was certainly the case in southern Dunedin: the married women of this area signed the 1893 suffrage petition in extraordinarily high numbers, but most of them eschewed the lure of factory and shop work. Annabel Cooper, Erik Olssen, Kirsten Thomlinson and Robin Law, ‘The Landscape of Gender Politics: Place, People and Two Mobilisations’, in Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1939, ed. Barbara Brookes, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 15–49.

²⁷Dalziel, ‘Colonial Helpmeet’.

²⁸Dalziel, ‘An Experiment in the Social Laboratory? Suffrage, National Identity, and Mythologies of Race in New Zealand in the 1890s’, in Women's Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (London: Routledge, 2000), 87–102.

²⁹As Erik Olssen observes, feminists had taken the initiative in the emergence of a consensus on the centrality of motherhood and domesticity. Olssen, ‘Women, Work and Family: 1880–1926’, in Women in New Zealand Society, ed. Phillida Bunkle and Beryl Hughes (Auckland: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 159–83.

³⁰The figures for married women's participation rates available for the twentieth century indicate the low base from which the rise began: 3.5 per cent in 1926, rising to 3.7 per cent in 1936, 7.7 per cent in 1945, 9.7 per cent in 1951, 12.9 per cent in 1956, 16.0 per cent in 1961, and 19.9 per cent in 1966. Even after participation rose, the figure remained low by international standards. Miriam Gilson, ‘Women in Employment’, in Social Process in New Zealand, ed. John Forster (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1969), 183–97. It is not clear how adequately these figures represent the participation of Maori women, who may have been involved more informally in the labour market.

³¹Belich, 377.

³²John E. Martin, ‘Unemployment, Government and the Labour Market in New Zealand, 1860–1890’, NZJH, 29, no. 2 (1995): 170–96. My thanks to Erik Olssen for assistance on this point.

³³Arnold, 3.

³⁴Erik Olssen, A History of Otago (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1984), 90–91. For discussions of the extent of the setback, see Gary Hawke, The Making of New Zealand: An Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 82–83; and Arnold, 3.

³⁵Hawke, 55.

³⁶OBIODR Casebooks, Vols. I–III, VI–X (Vol. IV is missing). The records document the period 1889–1911.

³⁷David Thomson, A World Without Welfare: New Zealand's Colonial Experiment, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998), 24–26

³⁸See also Margaret Tennant, Paupers and Providers: Charitable Aid in New Zealand, (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1989) for the gendered organisation of relief.

³⁹The government responded to unemployment (and had done so for some decades prior to the depression) by establishing relief works programs (railways, road-building, and forestry). A few such works were local, but most men were sent off around the province to relief camps. There was some attempt to allocate local relief work to married men, and to send single men away to camps, but many married men nevertheless spent months at a time away from their families. See Martin for a discussion of the interrelationship of unemployment, immigration and public works policies.

⁴⁰Ashley Hogan's discussion of the broadening of conceptions of fatherhood in 1880s Victoria provides something of a contrast to this evidence; but unlike New Zealand, Victoria was still enjoying a booming economy at this time. Hogan, ‘“I Never Noticed She was Dirty”: Fatherhood and the Death of Charlotte Duffy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Victoria’, Journal of Family History 24 (1999): 305–16.

⁴¹Phillips.

⁴² Otago Workman (OW), 16 Jan 1892.

⁴³OBIODR Casebook, Vol. I, pp. 238–40.

⁴⁴ ODT, 1 June 1895, 8.

⁴⁵ ODT, 30 April 1890.

⁴⁶ ODT, Suicide in Manor St, 17 Oct 1890, 2.

⁴⁷ ODT, 11 April 1893, 2.

⁴⁸ OW, 4 December 1890.

⁴⁹ OW, 14 March 1891, 4.

⁵⁰See particularly the OBI Outdoor Relief Casebooks of 1889–91.