Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University Of ...

Workers and settlers were encouraged to be self-reliant and pragmatic and were rewarded for their hard work, thrift, and independence. These ideals became a part of the national discourses⁵¹ that reinforced the gendered norm of the male breadwinner and cemented the notion of the single-income family being dependent on the unwaged labour of women as wives and mothers.⁵²

Settler society did offer opportunities for new and emerging traditions to be forged—traditions that gained New Zealand a reputation, accurate or otherwise, as a social laboratory⁵³ due in part to a number of progressive and experimental policies that were implemented. Ostensibly, these policies, some of which were the first of their kind in Western democracies, contributed to the tradition of social and political egalitarianism that created the myth of inclusiveness and fairness. New Zealand was, however, a deeply paradoxical nation. Despite a number of legislative changes that appeared to offer a level of social and political emancipation for women, administrators were highly selective about which changes they championed.

Political, industrial, social, and educational changes for women that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served to uphold patriarchal institutional and family structures and further accentuated the male breadwinner culture.⁵⁴ These changes would simply not have been supported at a public level if there were an anticipated threat to gender relations or social norms. The conscious promotion of the ‘cult of domesticity’ was evident at historical rupture points when advantages for women, such as the extension of the franchise or the expansion of higher education, were being secured.⁵⁵ Calls for changes to women’s roles and status were ultimately a signal that the ‘natural order’ could potentially be overturned. The fear was that ‘new women’ who could vote and were university educated could threaten the foundations of society. What was required, therefore, was a bifurcated argument that educated and politically emancipated women were needed as equal partners in the task of building colonial society.⁵⁶ Campaigns for the extension of the franchise to women that linked woman’s redemptive nature with her social and familial roles⁵⁷ reinforced the ideal of the domesticated