Useful Assets
Representations of war brides were an interesting mixture of commerce and domesticity. Side by side with gendered representations of war brides destined for domestic and child-rearing futures were welcoming speeches incorporating trade images made to war brides and delivered against a backdrop of Plunket nurses providing care facilities on the arrival wharfs for infants and their mothers.82 Just as war had, for many, quite literally blown apart the walls of the domestic sphere and military and government officials intervened in personal relationships, the domesticity so longed for in the postwar era also exemplified the blurring of the private and the public.
Housekeeping and child-raising abilities were scrutinized by receiving families backed up by the Red Cross and Plunket Society, a voluntary organization for the improvement of the health of mothers and infants.83 Newly arrived war brides were introduced to the Plunket philosophy at the earliest opportunity, and photographs of Plunket nurses showing off the “new New Zealanders” were regular features in the press.84 Inexperienced in infant care and bereft of family support, war brides made good use of Plunket nursing services although conflict sometimes resulted because of the disparity between routines promoted by the Plunket Society and war brides’ own heritage.85Some war brides found that culturally specific knowledge about childrearing and wifely roles did not transplant well.86 The rearing of children according to the strict “Plunket way” went against the ethos of those whose cultural norms favored a more inclusive nurturing style of infant care.87 Or, as an English bride found, it was possible to get on the off-side with the Plunket nurse merely by purchasing a feeding formula other than that recommended by the Society.88 War brides appear to have coped with the mandates of the Plunket nurse in similar ways to local women—when they disagreed with Plunket they simply ignored the advice given or ceased attending Plunket clinics.
However, whereas local women could often fall back on family or friends for advice, war brides faced pregnancy and childrearing without natal family support and were more isolated in this respect. The lack of infrastructure and support networks of their own kin was sorely felt. In her story of caring for her firstborn child, John, Kath Adams encapsulated how the absence of natal family affected her: “I can remember John howling and howling. He's just six weeks younger than Prince Charles. And I said, at least the Queen doesn't have to put up with this! Someone [in the Royal household] would know what to do, and I didn't.”89Although she could not, or would not, recall homesickness per se, there is poignancy in Kath's account of having to cope on her own. This was a common reaction among war brides. Their sense of alienation and dislocation was often most vividly described in connection with pregnancy, infant care (and death), and housekeeping, especially cooking and keeping the cantankerous wood-burning ranges alight. The gendered nature of their roles as housewife and mother served to suggest that they could perform these tasks irrespective of location, whereas the reality was that the absence of familial support networks deprived them of vital, culturally specific, and familiar routines.90 New Zealand's war brides often faced extreme hardships, especially initially, because of housing shortages, old-fashioned cooking facilities, and lack of household appliances. They knew that their lack of skills in coping with New Zealand conditions was a matter of conjecture and recognized that they were viewed as falling short of the ideal. It was at this point that mothers-in-law, intolerant of their failings, often openly used derogatory terms linking the newly arrived bride in no uncertain way with brothels and loose living. There was a concerted effort to present incoming war brides, including those from former enemy territories, as attractive, feminine, mastering the English language, and as capable of discharging their duties as mothers. But running parallel with efforts to portray war brides as ideal wives and mothers was a pervasive idea that they were morally suspect, sexually available, and inept housekeepers.