At the end of the Second World War, banner headlines in the New Zealand and Australian press proclaimed the regular arrival of troopships packed with returning servicemen.

Also on board these ships were parties of women and children; the wives, fiances, and offspring whom New Zealand servicemen had acquired while on active duty overseas.¹ These foreign-born “dependents” of soldiers were transported in their thou­sands to their new homeland at government expense.

The war brides and their children were a topic of fascination and gossip even before they reached New Zealand's shores. News about them and their journeys filled newspapers, although not all of it was positive or laudatory. While, on the one hand, the war brides were heralded as wives and mothers and as brand-new “New Zealanders,” on the other hand, the expectations of the receiving families and wider New Zealand society were underpinned by suspicion of the wives' domestic abilities and their “foreignness.” Particularly fascinating to the gossipmongers was the supposed promiscuity of these women, who had “wheedled” their way into the hearts of “their” boys. Such rumors implied that the women had taken advantage of the young New Zealand soldiers while they were in a “helpless” or “vulnerable” state when serving their country in a war a long way from home. The reception war brides received on arrival in New Zealand was a reflection of the labels given to the ships transporting them. The names —Bride Ships, Stork Ships, Hell Ships, and Brothel Ships—mirrored the multiple roles projected onto the new arrivals.

The incongruous pairing of “war” and “bride” epitomized the conflicting ideas and images about foreign-born brides that circulated in the immediate postwar reconstruction years in New Zealand. The dia­metrically opposed representations of war brides—as perfect wives, on the one hand, and as flighty, unreliable, hypersexualized women, on the other—reflected the hopes, doubts, and multiplicity of roles incoming women had foisted on them.

This chapter places the experiences of the women who married New Zealand soldiers within the wider scholarship of war and its diffuse impacts.³ The problems of subsuming individual identities and personal histories under the label “war brides” parallel, in many ways, the effacing of individuality so important to the functioning of twentieth-century armies. War-bride marriages are poignant illustrations of the social upheaval brought about by the Second World War. This upheaval opened the most personal relationship between a man and a woman and the intimacies of the family up to invasion by the military, media, and state. Most New Zealand service­men would not have had an opportunity to meet foreign women except for the war.⁴ Even for women not directly “at war” or even “near war,” it was war service that brought them in contact with their husbands and ultimately with a new society and lifestyle that proved challenging and often alienating.

Furthermore, the polarization of gender roles that has been attributed to war mobilization is clearly visible in the war-bride experience. Concerns about the reassimilation of New Zealand women into “normal” peacetime pursuits were amplified by the presence of the newcomers. War brides, with their own histories of war work and war service, generated doubts in a society in flux—their “wifely” qualities and willingness to relinquish war­time roles were questioned. Bridging the gap typified by the New Zealand public’s representations of the war brides as the ideal woman versus the femme fatale complicated their transition into their new homes. Even after the initial publicity around their arrival subsided, the fact that their marriages emerged out of a world at war, where normal life for many had been turned upside down, left a legacy associating many war brides with loose morals, prostitution, and a lack of domestic capability.

Still, even though the marriages of the women were born out of the wartime turmoil, their journeys to New Zealand coincided with genuine efforts by the New Zealand government to return social and economic stability to the country and its residents. To this end, besides being expected to fill caring and nurturing roles as wives, mothers, daughters-in-law, and homemakers, New Zealand politicians cast war brides as economic assets serving national and international purposes. In particular, they were described as a tradable commodity in exchanges between Great Britain and New Zealand, as ambassadors between Commonwealth countries, and as contributors to the strengthening of “the Empire.” Sir Patrick Duff, the British High Commissioner in New Zealand, said of war brides leaving Britain that

[t]he whole question [of migration] is rather a delicate topic. So far as Britain is concerned we have a great deal of [reconstruction] work to do and we shall need every pair of able hands.

Conceptualizing the traffic in war brides in this way paradoxically recog­nized their migration as part of a worldwide economic and political exchange while simultaneously assigning them to a reproductive role. The migrants boosted population numbers and, to the eyes of the government at least, represented a “good investment.” In recognition, the government paid the passage of servicemen’s wives, widows, and children. In contrast, servicemen requesting passage for a fiancee had to pay a deposit against the transport costs of their intended bride, which was refundable on marriage.⁶ The government’s policy vis-à-vis servicemen’s fiancees suggests the extent to which marriageable women were reduced to commodity status, blurring the lines between bride and brothel further.