Before They Were Brides

Racial and gender stereotypes typified how New Zealanders saw the war brides. While the media played up the romantic whirlwind nature of the relationships between servicemen and their new partners, featuring detailed descriptions of engagements and weddings and of brides who stowed away on ships or were smuggled out of war zones, the characters of the women were always commented on within the framework of the “feminine” quali­ties they supposedly possessed.¹¹ Typical of the commendations expressed in this way was that of Reverend Father Leo Spring of Timaru, an army chaplain, returning on the Tamaroa¹ The Italian brides were, he said, “girls [who] would make very good wives.

A young woman who had been aboard the Rangitiki, which arrived yesterday left the ship during its enforced hold-up at Panama and married a US Canal Zone policeman. She was en route to New Zealand to marry a New Zealander who had paid her fare.¹⁴

News items of this nature, therefore, portrayed some of the incoming women as capricious and unfaithful, bawdy rather than bridelike.

A notable example of these hostilities and of what Ingrid Bauer calls “antithetical pairing” of loyal wives and perfidious war brides can be plainly seen in the following example published in late 1945 and circulated among soldiers attached to the Second New Zealand Division (2NZEF) stationed in Trieste, Italy.¹⁵ In a poem titled “If the Cap Fits,” written by a member of the New Zealand Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACs) attached to 2NZEF in Italy and addressed to New Zealand servicemen, Italian women were depicted as femmes fatales or seductresses and were contrasted with the faithful, long-suffering New Zealand girlfriends and wives back home.

Soldiers were discouraged from fraternization by a cautionary tale reminding them that Italian men would not approve of their associating with local women and that a number of Germans “came to an untimely end through trying.”¹⁸

Choosing foreign partners, especially from former enemy populations, threatened to disrupt postwar hopes for harmony and order. As symbols of this potential disruption, war brides became “the other,” and they and the men who wanted to marry them were often marginalized as a result.¹⁹ There was a pervasive view that men and women had to be protected from rash decisions, and by extension, New Zealand needed to be protected from the imposition of “undesirables.” Suspicions about the trustworthiness of Italians persisted well into the postwar period although they were not the only ones who suffered as prejudices toward nationals of other ethnic and cultural backgrounds were also apparent. Interestingly, British war brides were often intentionally disparaged as “working-class,” typified by a mother-in-law repeatedly telling neighbors that her son had married a “bus-conductor's daughter from Birmingham.”²⁰ Japanese war brides were stigmatized as having been “bar girls,” and many a British war bride arriving in New Zealand found that smoking alienated her from her mother-in-law in ways reminis­cent of how the habit had raised “concerns about women's sexuality” during the First World War.²¹ Negative comment could stem from prejudice based on nationality, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background, but in essence any woman associating with servicemen and becoming a war bride could be targeted.