Abstract
The period from 1945 to 1972 in New Zealand was one of subtle social revolutions that shifted women’s understandings of what constituted a ‘rewarding life’. This thesis investigates the way in which the working lives of female clerical workers embodied these changes, arguing that work experience of this nature paved the way for ‘second wave feminism’ much more than has previously been realised.
Young women leaving school in 1945 after at least two full years of secondary education expected to spend time in the paid workforce before marriage and motherhood. One third of young women would head into offices, mostly into highly gender-segregated occupations such as typists or stenographers. Their wage packets were tangible evidence that their work was valued at slightly more than half of a man’s. By 1972 most young women still envisaged matrimony and childcare as a part of their futures but paid work was increasingly a lifetime reality. Wages had become more individualistic, and women had won the rights to be renumerated equally for their work. Women were now challenging the workplace structures that had restricted their career ambitions.
Young women’s aspirations for their futures, whether in 1945 or 1972, were shaped by both gendered and contradictory social expectations. This thesis argues that educational reforms in the 1930s and 1940s raised the prospects of equality along with the ideas of personal fulfilment through paid work. At the same time however, education also reinforced a gender segregated workforce by funnelling young women into accepted ‘women’s’ occupations such as clerical work.
This thesis explores the importance of the time young women spent in paid work during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Command over a disposable income meant that young working women became a distinctive consumer group and the resulting image of the glamorous business girl came to present an alternative vision of ideal womanhood. Work, and the opportunities such as travel that their wage created, broadened women’s horizons. This overlooked aspect of women’s lives was central to changing women’s aspirations and shifting gender relations that underpinned the more overt systemic challenges in the workforce and beyond in the 1970s and 80s.