From War Bride to Conscientious Housewife

In New Zealand, the gender order had been preserved in spite of the upheav­als of war and expectations were that after the war, returned servicemen would quickly reintegrate into family life and that women would resume domestic responsibilities.³⁷ War brides, therefore, disembarked into a society geared up for the reestablishment of family where the “rhetoric of gender” contributed to the postwar return to normality.³⁸ In 1944, Frederick Wood, a professor at Victoria University in Wellington, described the postwar ideal as “a straightforward conventional life” in which a woman's role was to be “an excellent and conscientious housewife.”³⁹ Although most war brides had prewar and wartime jobs, they were collectively described as “housewives” by the shipping companies transporting them to New Zealand and as “repa­triated dependents” by the Defence Department that paid their fares.

That war brides were destined to fulfill domestic roles as wives and mothers is suggested by the dominant images of them in both government and popular media sources. Yet the wartime careers of these women included service in the British WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) and Navy, fire­fighting in the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) in London, transport driving in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), and for Voina Stewart of Trieste, four years as a dispatch rider in the Yugoslav army.⁴² Servicewomen had to take their discharge from their military service before sailing for New Zealand, thus distancing themselves from their war careers and war service and neu­tralizing any possible “visible challenge to existing gender roles” when they arrived in New Zealand.⁴³ In stark contrast, their husbands were demobilized only after landing in New Zealand, so that rank and uniform were still significant markers of status on disembarkation.⁴⁴ War brides had also been office workers, nurses, dressmakers, shop assistants, factory workers, agricul­tural workers, interior decorators, and students before and during the war.⁴⁵ Nonetheless, a beauty specialist, an RAF (Royal Air Force) nurse aid, an Austrian kindergarten teacher, and a science graduate from Aberdeen University were all listed on ships manifestos entering New Zealand as “British housewives.”⁴⁶ Two war brides, who between them spoke half a dozen languages and had been educated at the School of Economics in Paris, were also described on shipping lists as “housewives from Egypt.”⁴⁷

By the time they arrived in New Zealand, war brides' roles in, and understanding of, war had been subsumed by their new definition as wives—a definition that assisted their entry to a society and a country intent on working to return to “normality.” There was, however, a gap between the brides and the nation of which they were to become a part: a liminal space created not only by the physical distance between a woman and her place of origin. This marginality of displacement was exacerbated by a lack of familial support and connections upon arrival in New Zealand, by official policy, and by the reality that did not always match the warmth of the initial public welcome.