Abstract
From 1939, the start of World War II, to the end of the post-war period around 1959, significant changes occurred in women's role in New Zealand society. This is a study, not of the churches per se, but rather of Christianity struggling to come to terms with the twentieth century. The two organisations on which it is based, the nondenominational New Zealand League of Mothers (L.O.M.) and the ecumenical National Council of Churches in New Zealand (N.C.C.), are examined as expressions of liberal Christianity. Two chapters on World War II show that leaders in both organisations argued that despite wartime upheavals women's primary role in a democracy remained in the home, forming the character of future generations. Four chapters spanning 1945-59 examine the ways the N.C.C. and L.O.M. both initiated and resisted changes in attitudes towards women's role, when, in contrast to other Western nations, the average rate of population increase was high and female labour force participation was low. The relationship between religious ideology and social ideology is examined through literary sources, complementing the statistical approach. This study argues that these organisations show the beginnings of a change in social awareness regarding women's role in society. Earlier assumptions that women had to choose between either following a career and therefore remaining single, or marrying and having a family, by the late 1950s were increasingly displaced, given that women were both raising families and contributing usefully to society through paid employment and/or unpaid work in the community. Women's voluntary work was changing in nature. As older middle class married women demonstrated their ability in the voluntary arena, it became increasingly difficult to defend practices excluding them from the responsible use of power in paid positions, both in the churches and society. During the post-war years the L.O.M. became more pragmatic, showing little of its former interest in theorising about the differences between the sexes. In contrast the N.C.C. sought a thorough demographic and sociological understanding of women's changing role, replacing earlier alarmist approaches. Responding to changes within marriage and the family, the N.C.C. played a socially innovative role in pioneering family life education and marriage guidance. By the late 1950s the L.O.M. began to recognise the increased labour force participation of married women, particularly in urban areas, and its ageing leadership was to become increasingly unresponsive to the needs of women in a rapidly changing society. By this time there was a resigned acceptance among women ecumenists associated with the N.C.C.' s Women's Committee that post-war economic developments, rather than Christian teaching, had done more to bring about improved conditions for women.