Past Caring?

Women, work and emotion

Barbara Brookes, Jane McCabe, Angela Wanhalla

• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781988592084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding the history of care requires attention to personal narratives, such as a Maori grandmother's story, a Rarotongan leader's concept of duty to her people, or the sense of service that drove a long-term social worker. The case studies examined focus on the everyday nature of care operating across domestic, institutional and political spaces, and build upon areas of strength in women's history with its interest in family, motherhood, health, welfare, education and employment.

1

CONTEXTUALISING CARING
IN NEW ZEALAND

Barbara Brookes

Richard Cruise, a visitor to New Zealand, remarked in 1824:

[I]n the manner of rearing children, and in the remarkable tenderness and solicitous care bestowed upon them by the parents, no partiality on account of sex was in any instance observed…. The infant is no sooner weaned than a considerable part of its care devolves upon the father: it is taught to twine its arms round his neck, and in this posture it remains the whole day, asleep or awake.¹

Cruise’s observation transports us to a time when, within Māori society, care of the young might be distributed across whānau, and might change with the development of the child. This was greatly at odds with a new model family promoted to Māori society through British law and by example, after annexation by the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. An expansive view of care, or manaakitanga (cherishing and respecting others) was more likely, in nineteenth-century European eyes, to be considered the particular domain of women.

Feminist historians have grappled with how to write about the ‘hidden lives’ of caring; their task is complicated by cultural understandings, and the difficulty of uncoupling caring from gender. From the time of European settlement in New Zealand the economy has relied on the unpaid work of women for social reproduction. Settler society flourished on the expectation that women performed the everyday tasks required to keep families and communities healthy.² Women’s caring – whether for children, a home or the sick – has involved both physical labour and emotional investment.

We could call much of women’s labour in the past ‘loving attention’ or we could call it ‘work’. That naming has implications for how it is viewed by the wider society and how that view has changed over time.³ Care is not necessarily a glamorous subject, involving as it does attending to bodily needs (think of changing nappies), anticipating dangers (for the blind or deaf, for example), or listening attentively to stories (as we might be required to do) told and retold by the elderly. The Society for Research on Women sensitively documented the difficulties of caring in the mid-1970s.⁴ The two images photographer Anne Noble took in the early 1990s of Audrey Thetford and her disabled daughter capture the loving attention and the reciprocal nature of care. Noble’s photographs capture the ineffable nature of caring that is so important to us.

The relational notion of reciprocity – that children returned a duty of care that parents had provided for them – governed Pākehā notions of family in the nineteenth century. Unmarried daughters were expected to care for their elderly parents and, by the mid-twentieth century when marriage rates reached their peak, married daughters with children were expected to provide care for elderly parents. State promotion of the idea of the breadwinner wage enabled many women to offer care services to their own families and to take on voluntary roles in the wider community. In the twenty-first century, where the two-income family has become the norm, the general expectation is that care of the elderly will take place in an institution. This chapter considers some of those shifts over time and what they might mean for a re-evaluation of caring.

Ivan Illich named the emotional work of ‘enhancing the status and wellbeing of others’ ‘shadow labour’ – ‘those unseen efforts, which like housework, do not quite count as labour but are nevertheless crucial’ to our daily lives.⁵ Some aspects of caring are difficult to put into words. Take, for example, caring as simply being available to family and friends. We do not expect to be paid money for our attention to our friends or family; indeed, to suggest we should be paid risks changing the nature of the relationship. But if our family members require a level of care beyond everyday expectations we might ask for societal recognition through remuneration – and in fact home carers have done just that.

Work or care? One is usually paid for and the other usually not. Much legal time has been spent debating the issue of ‘natural support’. The Ministry of Health in 2012 unsuccessfully opposed paying family members as caregivers on the grounds that this would amount to ‘professionalising or commercialising family relationships’. Such relationships, the ministry argued, should be regarded as ‘natural supports’ – defined as:

Anne Noble, The Thetfords cooking together, from the exhibition Hidden Lives: The work of care.
0.027961/3, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

Anne Noble, Audrey Thetford assisting Gladys Thetford with washing her hair, from the exhibition Hidden Lives: The work of care.
0.027961/2, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

supports that can be accessed by all people who live and work in any community within New Zealand. They are readily available and reasonably easy to access. They describe the personal resource an individual has within them. They describe the support that is available from family members, neighbourhoods and community/social groups, schools, church groups, Scouts, Girl Guides, service groups, sports clubs and so on. They are supports that people access on a very informal basis and in reality are accessed by most New Zealanders.⁶

Despite the carefully gender-neutral language of public policy documents, the fact is that women provide much of that support.

We have seen important transitions in caring. The care of children and the elderly – which, in the past, was expected to be the responsibility of families and to take place in the family home or in some benevolent or church institution – might now take place in a commercial context. My own career has been made possible by that very context: my children were all in daycare from infancy, in after-school care at primary school, and my mother spent her last years in a small rest home near our house. My academic work took priority over caring in a way that would have been unimaginable in my mother’s life.

I am not nostalgic for a past where women did the bulk of unpaid caring – if that is indeed in the past – but I want to honour the importance of caring by discussing it in a variety of historically specific contexts. I also want to think about the resources women drew on to make their empathy possible.⁷ Those resources included the training in caring from a young age, beginning with dolls and prams, and the care of younger siblings; there were examples of older women engaged in caring work; and there was, what one woman described as ‘an inner knowing’. Perhaps most importantly, up until the 1960s there was often a commitment to a church that placed an emphasis on women’s selflessness as central to family and community life – and praised such commitment. Women’s work might be validated in public weekly in a sacred space, and this empowered them to continue. It was, after all, the religious conviction of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union that filled women with confidence that they could ‘do anything’, including seeking the vote, which they achieved in 1893.

It often seems that we have to move beyond any notion of caring for work to be valued. In order to seek professional respect, childcare had to become ‘early childhood education’, for example. Somehow this feels like an uncomfortable yardstick of ‘progress’. Why is caring not enough? Historian Emily Abel suggests we are seeking ‘to create the illusion of independence by disregarding the care on which we depend’.⁸ This desire to appear independent is also shaped by gender: traditionally, to be considered a ‘good woman’ meant putting others first; to be a ‘good man’ was to put work first.⁹

Arlie Hochschild noted in The Managed Heart that there is no real male equivalent for the term ‘mothering’: ‘fathering’ is usually used in the biological sense of ‘fathering a child’, whereas ‘mothering’ is a much broader concept. How do we think of this unpaid labour of a ‘highly interpersonal sort’?¹⁰

The value of caring to the first people of Ōtākou, a settlement on the Otago Peninsula, was clearly on display in the Hākui: Women of Kāi Tahu exhibition at Otago Museum in 2016. Hākui ‘are the mothers, grandmothers, aunts and caregivers of whānau (or the wider group)’.¹¹ The exhibition was a celebration of the caring that Kāi Tahu women have done over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to ensure the continuity of their culture. Pani Wera, for example, married in the mid 1800s and had several children who accompanied the family on the traditional mahika kai, or food collecting, expeditions. Pani was a gifted weaver – samples of her work were on display in the exhibition – and she passed on her skills to her daughter Hana Te Ururaki.

Nationally, by 1896 the Māori population was less than 40,000 and, of those, only 18,260 were female.¹² By 1900 the Māori proportion of the total population had fallen to 5.5 per cent.¹³ One estimate suggests that by the 1890s, 50 per cent of Māori girls died before the age of seven and just 42 per cent reached adulthood.¹⁴ Women such as Hera Te Wahia helped reverse the downward spiral: married in 1883, Hera bore 14 children. For women working for the survival of their communities, the future of their children became paramount. The Kāi Tahu women celebrated in the exhibition focused on that future – they helped build churches and schools; they taught their children to weave and to collect traditional foodstuffs, and to care for their marae. They rebuilt their communities by combining elements of modernity – establishing schools for example – while holding on firmly to traditions.

At the same time as the Māori population was in cris...