The women’s movement and its more radical analysis saw the family as a place of oppression for women, and during the 1970s and 1980s the increasing visibility of the changing structure and function of the family appeared for some a further evidence that the days of the ‘normal’ , ‘traditional’ family were numbered. There was an acknowledgement that the family was sometimes a place of abuse and violence for women and children. Rape crisis centres, vocal on the issue of rape within marriage, and women’s refuges were established in many towns by feminist women. As early as 1971 Dr Fraser McDonald, superintendent of Auckland’s Kingseat Psychiatric Hospital, suggested that the ‘sick society’ was not just imported theoretical jargon, but one in every five New Zealanders suffered from some mental illness. Concern ran deep; one viewpoint linked the apparent increase in mental illness and violence within the family to a breakdown of traditional family values; others saw it as symptomatic of deeper ills reflecting the changing roles between men and women; another view felt that such dysfunction had always been a part of family life but had been hidden behind a code of silence.
It was apparent that the family was changing its appearance and was a more diverse unit than traditional prescriptions had allowed. The inter-census period from 1976 to 1981 showed a 31.7 per cent increase in one-parent families and the 1981 census showed that only 34.9 per cent of households were made up of couples with children. Families became smaller, with the fertility rate dropping to the average of 1.92 children per childbearing woman by 1986. Marriage and motherhood were being delayed for a growing number of women. The changing aspirations of women who wanted a life apart from motherhood also affected fertility. Changing economic circumstances meant that women were reluctant to take too many years away from the paid workforce and living on one income was difficult for both working- class and middle-class families to sustain for long periods of time.
These trends had roots in the early post-war years and did not happen as a result of changing lifestyles and attitudes in the 1970s and 1980s. The Social Development Council’s report, Families First, summed up the dilemma: ‘Government needs to decide whether its resources should be concentrated on the traditional nuclear family or allocated so as to support the many different sorts of families now in society’. There was a growing view that strengthening the family also meant accommodating diversity as opposed to outlawing it. Small shifts in government attitude were made, such as increased support for childcare services and the introduction of the Domestic Purposes Benefit. In terms of social policy, evidence of a sexual relationship was justification of a man’s responsibility to support a woman financially. This meant that there was little change in the assumption that women were economically dependent on men and would or should be at home rearing children while men were in fulltime employment. They key to government initiative was in promoting the desirability of stable families as a means of fostering acceptable behaviour and values. Diversity was tolerated and supported if it was seen to chance stability; otherwise government policy was cautious.
The new kind of sexual partnership heralded in the 1970s was one in which the roles and responsibilities of woman and men would not be so separate. One expression of this was unisex clothing and appearance, and the media feasted on the bizarreness of the arrangement. Canon Bob Lowe wrote in this Woman’s Weekly Column: "I for one wasn’t made for the unisex world. I like the old divisions with girly girls (but not boyly boys). Recently I had to perform a marriage in which it was impossible to distinguish one from the other….I had to ask “would one of you kiss the bride". There was nevertheless still a considerable gap between the ideal and the reality of women’s financial independence. A 1981 study on women’s access to money in marriage by the Society for Research on Women showed that while 77% of women stated that they had personal money to spend the remaining 23% still had no access to money in cheque or savings accounts and no personal spending money. The report suggested that many women still accepted a ‘trade off’ by settling for substitutes such as trust and security.
Government was cautious in encouraging increased independence for women at the expense of men. The 1971 Commission of Enquiry into Equal Pay expressed concern that the move away from the traditional relationship of husband as breadwinner and wife as dependant might necessitate a total review of family and domestic law. When the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security recommended increasing the amount of the family benefit paid to women, with the revenue coming from removing tax exemptions for fathers on children, there was consternatin that taking money from a man to give to his wife could cause marital problems. The issue of whether a wife was a dependant or a partner in marriage was clarified somewhat with the passing of the Matrimonial Property Act in 1976. The act recognised that while a woman may be financially dependent she was also an equal partner in the marriage; in the case of divorce, therefore, a woman’s contribution was seen to be equal and the property was to be equally shred between the separating couple. It was the issue of economic independence and sexual independence that posed a challenge to the relationship between men and women.
Most feminists still argued that the institution of marriage was outmoded and oppressive to women, as it reinforced economic dependence and compulsory monogamy. The issue was much discussed. In 1975, Thursday magazine interviewed feminist women to see whether it was possible to be a feminist and to be married. Connie Purdue argued that: ‘For a woman who takes up the cause of women’s equality the marriage relationship is at risk’, but the article showed that there was no consensus, except insofar as feminist women believed that a successful relationship with a man depended on his ability to accept their right to independence. Marriage as an institution was changing rather than collapsing, as some forecasters were predicting. In 1983 the Women’s Weekly reported that 90,000 New Zealanders were ‘living together’, although it reassured its readers that this presented ‘just a drop in the bucket to the 1.3 million Kiwis who are married to their partners’. In fact, de facto relationships were not necessarily liberating for women. While there was often economic independence, there was little security, and lawyers cautioned against the lack of legal protection for women in de facto relationships.
It was increasingly hard to ignore the evidence that marriage was frequently unhealthy for women, and that the home was the most unsafe place for women to be. Concerns about the ‘alarming plight’ of married women at home had received extensive media coverage in 1971 when psychiatrist Dr Fraser McDonald argued that the ‘phony values and false expectations’ of marriage were at the centre of the problem. The National Council of Women found such criticism of marriage ‘sad and dangerous’, and chose instead to point out that while there were undoubtedly genuine cases of stress and strain amongst women in the home, ‘for every such one, there are hundreds of happily married women who are rearing children in the best traditions and who regard happily married life as a vocation’. Dr McDonald, however, replied, ‘If my comments on the matter are dangerous, then marriage must be in a pretty fragile state’.
All of this information came from Thursday Magazine at the Auckland City Library. This is accurate and reliable because it was an original copy and well looked after so there were no issues with misread words.