New Zealand Journal of History, 51, 1 (2017)

‘The ’

THE RISE AND FALL OF A SEMI-PROFESSION FOR WOMEN

The Karitane baby nurse is qualified to undertake the care of young children and babies.... [She] will do everything possible to ensure the highest standard of health and happiness for the child under her care ....

Plunket Society, ‘Rules for Karitane Nurses’, c.1960s.1

SHE WAS MATERNAL, but not yet a mother; she was labelled a ‘nurse’ but was not embraced by the profession; she was destined to become a twentieth- century ‘helpmeet’, but was increasingly attracted by the lure of overseas travel and an independent income. In the photographic record she is the epitome of wholesomeness and responsibility, attending to infants in her smart blue uniform with its demure white cuffs and veil. But group poses also convey glamour and allure, and informal snapshots hint at youthful high spirits commensurate with her age. The Karitane nurse — or, as she was sometimes known, ‘the Karitane’ — is more familiar to past generations of New Zealanders than she is to the present, but even in her heyday she occupied an ambiguous occupational space for women. The erratic association of the words ‘Karitane’ and ‘nurse’ in popular and official discourses mirrored a more fundamental, and sometimes acrimonious, professional debate about whether the work of the young women recruits who undertook specialized baby care was ‘real’ nursing. Though their training certainly had affinities with hospital nursing, their paid work after graduation merged with nannying, domestic service and, to a lesser extent, early childhood education. Like nursing, these were all areas of women’s employment that were undergoing change in and around the world during the twentieth century. The role of Karitane nursing as a ‘semi-profession’ exclusive to women gives insights not only into women’s paid work, but into domesticity more generally.2 In the Australian context, Jill Matthews is among those who have charted changing constructions of womanhood over the twentieth century, claiming that: ‘Before the 1880s, a woman’s social value was judged at least as much from her activity as wife, as sexual partner, economic assistant, companion, servant. By the 1960s, this aspect of woman was returning to high evaluation. In the years between, mother reigned.’3 While historians have long acknowledged a disjunction between ideological constructions of womanhood

113 114 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY and actual behaviour, the emergence of ‘the Karitane’ as a specialist baby nurse available to go into homes to assist with mothering can be seen as part of this recalibration of womanhood. The nineteenth-century colonial helpmeet identified by Raewyn Dalziel may have contributed to the family economy through her full cupboards and role in domestic production,4 but she also lost babies to sickness and disease. The twentieth-century version of the helpmeet, although still a wife and mother, needed assistance to rear her fragile offspring to full physical, emotional and citizenship potential. The Karitane nurse was part of a wider infrastructure concerned with family support and interventions.5 Historiographically, the is New Zealand’s most closely studied voluntary social service organization.6 Karitane nurses emerged in the early years of the society, staffing the mothercraft hospitals established by Frederic , the society’s charismatic founder. Karitane nursing was therefore closely linked with the fortunes of the Karitane hospitals, which themselves reflected Plunket’s changing profile in New Zealand society. This article focuses on the period from the late 1950s to the 1970s, a time when there was strong demand for Karitane nurses. It was also a period when Plunket’s hegemonic status within infant welfare was coming into question, and when the Karitane hospitals, in particular, were facing a major decline in usage. At the same time, women’s role in New Zealand was coming under critical scrutiny, with many female professions, including nursing, seeking to upgrade their status. The boundaries between ‘health’ and ‘social welfare’ were becoming more permeable than in the past, making the Karitane’s place in society all the more unstable.

A certain number of girls without previous nursing qualifications are trained as Karitane baby nurses. . . . Whether or not such students pursue the work as a career, the training in practical mothercraft is invaluable and takes its place in the Society’s campaign.

‘Infant Welfare in New Zealand’, 1928.7

Karitane nurses were an integral part of the Plunket Society from its foundation, and the hospitals in which they worked became Plunket flagships. The establishment of the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children (the name under which Plunket was first incorporated in 1908) has been well charted, most especially by Linda Bryder in her comprehensive history, A Voice for Mothers.8 The story of its Karitane nurses has been regarded as an adjunct to the larger Plunket story, and to debates about supposed rigidities in Plunket’s regime for the rearing of infants, and the more highly qualified Plunket nurses’ role in promulgating Truby King’s views.9 Oral histories have nonetheless generated two engaging studies of Karitane nurses’ experiences over time, and of the Karitane hospitals.10 ‘THE KARITANE’ 115

Writing in 1909 as ‘Hygeia’, Bella King explained how she and her husband had first opened a licensed home for infants as a protest against the inadequate police inspection of other homes registered under the Infant Life Protection Act in . Most of these homes took in ‘illegitimate’ children, and the Kings, as the Evening Post reported, ‘set out to prove that even these children were not necessarily foredoomed to death or misery — that for the most part, if given proper care and attention, they were almost as capable as growing up into healthy men and women as the more fortunate children of married parents, and that it was in the interests of the State that this should be the case.’11 The experiment, initially located in the Kings’ holiday home near Dunedin on the Karitane Peninsula, was so successful that further ‘weakling’ babies followed. While not all the Karitane hospital’s charges were born out of wedlock, it is worth noting that ex-nuptial babies feature in both the beginning and the end of the Karitane hospitals, representing then, and subsequently, a conflation of health and social welfare concerns. A more permanent ‘hospital’, with nursing staff, was opened in Anderson’s Bay, Dunedin, in December 1907, in a large house that was first rented from local businessman Wolff Harris, and then donated by him to the Plunket Society. The name ‘Karitane’ stuck, despite the new location. While its initial purpose was to care for ailing infants, the Karitane Hospital eventually provided a facility where mothers could also be supported and trained in ‘mothercraft’. In keeping with Truby King’s belief that the imperatives of modern civilization had caused women to lose their innate understanding of baby care, it was thought that mothers and nurses alike would benefit from training in a hospital setting. Other Karitane hospitals followed in in 1917, Wanganui in 1919, Auckland in 1924, Invercargill in 1926 and Wellington in 1927. The Wellington Karitane Hospital was the first to be purpose-built, and some of those in other centres were later replaced or upgraded, most providing premature babies’ and weaklings’ wards, as well as areas for ‘normal’ babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers, a mothercraft section, milk room and laundry.12 The successful running of the Karitane hospitals depended upon the young women recruited to train in them — and thereby to staff them — to tend to the babies, to assist mothers who ‘lived in’ for a period, and (as in all hospitals under apprenticeship forms of training) to do a fair amount of the domestic work. In 1909 the probationers at the Dunedin Karitane Hospital were described as young women who ‘are paid at the rate of 5s a week, and at the end of twelve months’ training, upon passing an examination set by our medical officers . . . receive our certificate and are called “Karitane” nurses. They are then fully fitted to take responsible positions as children’s nurses in private houses’.13 It is interesting that at this time the probationers appear to 116 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY have been paid; in subsequent years, until the late 1950s, Karitane recruits actually paid a tuition fee, bought their own uniforms and worked without recompense for their year (later 16 months) of training.14 Unpaid trainees were critical to the hospitals’ survival, and the fee, which was £40 by the 1930s, assumed some degree of private support. The payment of a tuition fee has shaped perceptions about the kind of young women who became Karitanes. Philippa Mein Smith, for example, concluded that ‘[i]n effect, the Karitane nurse was a nanny and glorified nursery maid from a privileged or comfortable background whose family paid to have her trained for motherhood so that she would make a suitably groomed wife of a man in the professions or in business’.15 Lesley Courtney’s study of the last generation of Karitane trainees, though, suggests more varied social backgrounds for the Karitane intakes of the 1960s and 1970s.16 At this time a number of bursaries (initially assisted by the McKenzie Trust) were in place to support trainees. By 1972 Plunket was offering 70 such bursaries per year.17

Figure 1: Trainees at Wellington’s Karitane Hospital look glamorous yet wholesome in this image from 1958. Hocken Collections — Uare Taoka o Hākena.

The number of Karitane trainees rose from 330 in the 1920s, to 714 in the 1930s, 1056 in the 1950s and to a total of 1119 in the 1970s.18 By the 1970s, however, alternative employment opportunities were posing a challenge to recruitment, and the entry age for Karitane training was reduced from 20, to 17, and finally, to 16. Moreover, the Karitane hospitals, with which the trainees ‘THE KARITANE’ 117 were so inextricably linked, were in financial strife. In 1959 a Consultative Committee on Infant and Pre-School Services looked more generally at the relationship between government and providers of health services for young children, but it was underwritten by long-standing tensions between the Department of Health and the Plunket Society, and by questions, even then, about the viability of the Karitane hospitals. Government support of the Karitane hospitals had risen from around £5000 per annum in the 1930s to £86,973 in 1959. Despite this, the hospitals’ total debt in 1958 was £40,000.19 The committee’s report recommended that the Karitane hospitals ‘should be maintained — and sustained’,20 and that they should stay in Plunket hands, despite the need for substantial state input. The report also endorsed the hospitals’ role in mothercraft training and in avoiding the cross-infection which was a risk for infants in public hospitals, and recommended that they be licensed as ‘Class B’ private hospitals, a status that would entitle them to a range of benefits, including a per diem payment for babies and mothers admitted. Funding for renovations followed. Significantly, the committee was more hesitant about the utility of the Karitane nurses, especially once they had begun work outside the hospitals. Questioning whether the real demand in the community was for home aids or Karitane nurses, the committee noted that ‘we have had reason to suspect that nurses are not assigned strictly on the basis of need and that affluence and particularly a comfortable home are useful factors in getting Karitane help’.21 The Department of Health had long refused to assist with Karitane training costs on the grounds that graduates were mostly employed by the better-off.22 In terms of official recognition, the Karitanes’ subsequent employment was their vulnerable point. The 1959 Consultative Committee’s recommendations provided a temporary reprieve for the Karitane hospitals. Over the 1970s the hospitals struggled with a shortage of qualified staff, empty beds, a decline in the admission of sick and premature babies (whose needs were increasingly met by specialist facilities in public hospitals) and a perception of their own role, even within Plunket, as an expensive baby-sitting service for infants whose admissions were of a ‘welfare nature’.23 The hospitals had for some years catered for single mothers who could bring their babies with them as ‘normal’, ‘referent’ babies with whom the Karitane trainees could interact. In the 1970s, these women were also allowed to train as Karitanes. But by the 1970s the hospitals were also being used for ex-nuptial babies awaiting adoption or Department of Social Welfare foster care, or for those with ongoing congenital conditions. Most Karitane hospitals closed in 1978, though Invercargill’s Plunket supporters vociferously protected ‘their’ hospital from closure until March 1980. 118 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY

Now that the Karitane trainees were no longer needed to sustain the hospitals, their role and training could alter more substantially than had previously been possible. There was no Karitane training for two years after the hospitals’ closure, and when a new scheme began, it was in association with the more dispersed Family Support Units that replaced the hospitals. Graduates were no longer termed ‘nurses’, but ‘Community Karitanes’. Their training was community-based, supplemented by tertiary-level correspondence courses. They could be recruited and trained as needed by the Plunket Society. Over the 1980s only 55 Community Karitanes were trained; the number increasing to 102 in the 1990s, still well below the heyday of Karitane hospital-based training.24 Plunket kaiāwhina were also trained from the 1990s to assist Māori families.25 However, despite changes made within Plunket since the 1970s, it increasingly, and sometimes unfairly, came under criticism from the Department of Health, feminist groups and competing agencies.26 The fortunes and public profile of Karitane nursing paralleled those of the Plunket Society over the twentieth century. Among voluntary organizations, Plunket was a twentieth-century icon (an overworked term, but one which seems fair in terms of its wide membership of New Zealand women, its claims to have reached over 90% of Pākehā babies by the mid-century and its links with a progressive national identity).27 Karitane nurses, attractive young women in nursing uniforms, holding babies, were part of the Plunket iconography. Whenever a royal visitor or some other dignitary visited New Zealand, there seems to have been the obligatory visit to a Karitane hospital for them (or their spouse), with Karitane nurses in smiling attendance. In the days before in vitro fertilization, the rarity of triplets, quadruplets or higher birth multiples earned the assistance of Karitane nurses, who were invariably photographed alongside the mother, holding the tiny miracles. The society’s Plunket nurses were its more authoritative and mature agents, having gained nursing registration prior to Plunket training. Plunket nurses had direct contact with generations of mothers throughout New Zealand. Internationally, though, Karitane nurses had a profile as a superior kind of baby nurse available for employment. Karitanes were sought after in the United Kingdom, in particular, but employment after the hospital-based training took many of the Karitane graduates to countries all over the world. Their profile and link with Plunket was not only a local one. And yet, Karitane nurses had an ambiguous relationship with the Plunket Society. There was a discrepancy between the tight control exercised over the Karitane trainees and their separation from it once they had graduated and moved on to ‘casing’ in private homes. Karitane bureaux were established in ‘THE KARITANE’ 119

New Zealand’s four main centres over 1945–1946 to help qualified Karitanes negotiate placements; Karitanes were in short supply at this stage, and the aim was to keep them moving around to meet demand.28 However, most graduates became, essentially, private operators who built up their own clientele and dealt directly with employers. They were a product of the Plunket Society, gained employment on the basis of a Plunket Society qualification, frequently wore a Karitane uniform on the job, especially before the 1970s, and took pride in and wore their Karitane nurse badge, issued by Plunket. But they were no longer monitored or controlled by it and, indeed, once ‘casing’, were no longer of direct utility to Plunket. They were of greatest use to Plunket while training as unpaid labour in the hospitals, and once these had closed, the numbers needed by the society diminished.29 The kind of training needed by a ‘Community Karitane’ was very different from that required in the hospital system. The ‘Community Karitanes’ training reflected the new demands being placed on the Plunket Society, as alternative ‘well health’ non-profit organizations emerged to compete for government funding and public loyalties. Karitane training needed to be community- based and culturally sensitive, as concerned with health education as with nursing. Based in a community and supporting the Plunket nurse in Plunket clinics and family centres, as well as on marae, the Community Karitane was in one sense more visible than her ‘traditional’ Karitane predecessor, but she was far less of a New Zealand institution.

[Karitane nurses should] wear their uniforms with pride, and . . . encourage people to call them ‘Nurse’. They were members of a profession they could well be proud of.

Auckland Karitane Hospital Matron Beurke addressing Karitane graduates, 1970.30

Professions are defined in part by that which they are not, by exclusion as well as the inclusion of those with requisite qualities and qualifications. Karitane nursing and general nursing were mutually constitutive, the first being modelled on the second. Meanwhile, as general nursing engaged with the ‘professionalization project’, it sought to exclude pretenders and to police the term ‘nurse’.31 Internationally, nurses’ moves towards professionalization involved registration, the extension of control over their own knowledge base (rather than its prescription by doctors) and the monitoring of nurses, by nurses. There was an ongoing tension between the ideologies of professionalism and domesticity in the history of nursing over the twentieth century, a tension that, even today, complicates its recognition as a scholarly discipline.32 The casting of the ‘good nurse’ as a ‘good woman’ has been explored by a number of historians.33 This was a construction which gained nurses a high 120 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY level of public approval over the twentieth century, but which restricted the attempt to establish nursing as an independent profession. In New Zealand a first key period for nursing was the 1880s to the late 1900s, when a new generation of matrons and ‘lady probationers’ fought against a negative Dickensian construction of the first paid nurses as dirty, ill-disciplined and unskilled. The subsequent move from work in private homes to a hospital setting saw the emergence of a rigid institutional hierarchy, which undermined cohesion among nurses and made it difficult for them to challenge the often exploitative conditions in hospitals. A second key period for nursing started in the 1970s, when nursing training was reviewed and, after the so-called ‘Carpenter Report’ of 1971, changed from a hospital-based apprenticeship training to one based on study in tertiary institutions.34 Nursing historiography has mostly positioned nursing against medicine, itself a relatively new profession in 1900 but one that became firmly established and increasingly prestigious in twentieth-century New Zealand. However, different kinds of nurses also emerged, some regarded as more ‘advanced’ than others.35 Nursing and midwifery have at various times combined and separated out, their representatives not always in accord. Midwifery focused largely on healthy women and babies; dental nurses and Karitane nurses were principally concerned with what are now termed ‘well-health’ issues, and with children. Their struggle for recognition was complicated by the status of the groups they primarily serviced. Each of the key periods in nursing’s development had consequences for Karitane nursing. The first Karitane nurses were appointed six years after the 1901 Nurses’ Registration Act, and, as the number of Karitane hospitals expanded, their training regime, if not the full body of knowledge imparted, was based upon that for general nurses. By aligning the training with nursing, the Plunket Society was riding on the coat tails of a rising profession and positioning its baby care trainees as nurses rather than nannies. Faced with a request in its early years to train orphans as nursery maids, Plunket’s Director of Nursing said that this would have to be a very different training regime from Karitane nursing. The proposed three-month course could not ‘justify the name of nurse’, but would better be seen as producing a home or mother’s help; Karitane training had to be protected against pretenders to its own standing.36 Alongside legislative protection, general nursing had active agents such as the Nurses’ Association and the Department of Health’s Director of Nursing on its side. Their policing of boundaries was apparent early in Plunket’s history, when the intervention of the Dunedin Trained Nurses’ Association and of Hester Maclean, the Assistant Inspector of Hospitals, resulted in a ‘THE KARITANE’ 121 set of rules specifying that the Plunket nurses (but not Karitanes) were to be state-registered hospital nurses or maternity nurses.37 Even within Plunket the boundaries were drawn between the ‘real’ nurses and the others. Within Karitane hospitals, the regime and assumptions governing Karitane training followed closely other hospital-based nursing. Most detailed information relates to the decades after the Second World War, when hierarchy still prevailed. In these decades, the total number of Karitane trainees in most years ranged from 150 to nearly 200, the young women entering training in their ones or twos over a three-month period, to make up a class. The aim of the hospitals was to have one nurse for every baby admitted, and intake numbers fluctuated accordingly.38 Trainees lived in, the rules in the nurses’ home mirroring those in public hospitals. There were room checks, curfews and accountabilities that went beyond the workplace. In the hospitals routines changed little over the years: Karitane nurses worked eight-hour shifts, six days a week, with blocks of night duty at least three times in their 16-month training (as it had then become). Senior trainees taught the juniors, who gradually moved up the ranks, as in general nurse training. Graduates could become staff nurses, but the sisters and matrons were all registered nurses, generally with Plunket training. This was one part of the hierarchy closed off to those who were only Karitane-trained. Juniors started their training with domestic work and the lowly ‘nappy duty’. In the days before washing machines, this involved stoking the copper, grating soap and donning gloves, aprons and gumboots to physically scrub the soiled products of a baby hospital.39 Routines were important, and 60 procedures were assessed and signed off during the training, some as basic as hand washing and the ventilation and cleanliness of the nurse’s own bedroom. Others involved more specific baby care tasks, such as preparing baby foods, the treatment of skin conditions such as eczema and the care of premature babies, as well as those needing surgery for conditions such as cleft palate. Former Karitane nurses often remembered procedure number 37, the making of a complete baby layette to Plunket specifications, including hand-sewn buttonholes and prescribed stitches. The knitted singlet confounded many.40 Apart from the training regime, which included some tasks common to general nurses, the Karitane trainees wore nurses’ uniforms, blue in colour, rather than white (blue being the next most virginal colour to white).41 The ‘Karitane’ monogram was embroidered on the front. Black or white stockings were required, as well as regulation shoes. Veils, an important part of the ‘costume drama’ of nursing,42 varied more, the Dunedin nurses having a veil which made them look rather as if they had butterfly wings at the side of their heads; Invercargill Karitanes having to learn how to fold a veil which was 122 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY gathered on top of the head with a tail falling down the back.43 Here, frivolity, impracticality and uniformity combined: management of the veil was part of the discipline of nursing in which Karitanes shared, as was the cleanliness and presentation of attire. As in nursing more generally, subtle uniform differences defined trainees’ relations with those above and below them, but also between the different kinds of nurses within the Karitane hospitals. Matrons and sisters wore differently coloured and designed uniforms and veils, but the Plunket nurse trainees, who shared state registration with the senior staff, also had to be singled out. Nonetheless, for the Karitane trainees, the location of training within a hospital setting, living in and the wearing of a uniform and veil were part of the alignment with a nursing ethos, discipline and persona, and part of their own separation from nannying and domestic service. This was reinforced at the end of the training when graduates of the courses enjoyed a formal ceremony, complete with the presentation of the Karitane certificate and badge. Theirs was solely a Plunket qualification, however, and the register of nurses’ numbered badges was held at the Plunket headquarters: it was not under state jurisdiction.44 Externally, there seems to have been popular acceptance of the term ‘Karitane nurse’ over much of the twentieth century, and even the Department of Health sometimes included Karitanes among nurses in recruitment materials. One of its pamphlets from the 1950s placed Karitanes alongside Plunket nurses within a category of preventive nursing, stating that ‘Qualifications for each of these branches of nursing vary only slightly; the same qualities of personality are required with special interest in the particular type of work which is ultimately aimed for’, and that ‘The nurse on qualifying may work as a Karitane nurse’.45 However, the fact remained that Karitane nurses started training with a lower level of educational requirement and at a younger age than general nurses, they had a considerably shorter period of training and they did not practise with state endorsement. Moreover, Karitanes’ sphere of competence was restricted to infants, an association that in health, as in education, was a curb on status. (Usually teenagers themselves, their own youth also saw them aligned with children, one Plunket information sheet claiming that ‘It is the factor of [Karitanes’] youth . . . that counts for their success, for ... they can so easily get down to the child’s level’.)46 Karitanes were associated with a voluntary organization, not the public health system, had no professional association to represent their interests and, once they had graduated, mostly worked independently in private homes. At the same time, nursing itself was entering a new phase of development and leaving such ancillary occupations behind as it professionalized. As ‘THE KARITANE’ 123 general nurses became responsible for a range of new technologies and procedures, their leaders became increasingly concerned with managerial, educational and professional issues, eventually winning the battle to move nurses’ training from the hospital-based apprentice system into tertiary institutions. The nursing elite gained increasing control over the knowledge base and professional domain of nursing, gradually shedding doctor input and separating from the Department of Health.47 The term ‘nursing’ may have had its origins in ‘nurturing’, but such associations were seen as a double-edged sword for the professional nurse of the late twentieth century, especially when associated with self-abnegation and deference to the needs of others. Nursing became more attuned to the notion of ‘repair’ and linked, at least in a hospital setting, with intrusive gadgetry. Karitane nurses, on the other hand, remained associated with an older meaning of nursing as nurturing, especially given their association with baby care.48 Feeding and nutrition, basic hygiene, warmth, the establishment of patterns of sleep and of breastfeeding were core elements in their repertoire of knowledge. They were exposed not only to ailing babies, but to well infants as part of their preparation for work in clients’ homes after graduation. Some Karitanes did eventually work in general hospitals in maternity or children’s wards where they were permitted, under supervision, to undertake more physically invasive procedures, giving injections and inserting tubes into patients. However, these were not within the usual domain of a Karitane nurse.49 The law protected Karitanes’ claims to the title of ‘nurse’, but not from the nursing profession’s increasingly assertive rejection of those on its fringes.50 The Nurses Act 1977 contained the proviso that ‘nothing . . . shall prevent a Karitane nurse or a dental nurse from taking or using the name or title of nurse’, though there were considerable penalties for others who did so without being a state-registered or enrolled nurse.51 Plunket made representations for a separate class of registration under the Act for Karitane nurses, but the select committee considering the legislation ‘was of opinion that Karitane nurses, while doing valuable work and filling a need in the community, do not perform nursing functions comparable to those covered by the register’.52 The advent of the ‘Community Karitane’ in the early 1980s, after the closure of the Karitane hospitals, prompted concern from members of the Nurses’ Association that this development would ‘introduce yet another category of person into the health field’. There was pressure for trainees to at least have a preliminary qualification as state-enrolled nurses. When Plunket’s Director of Nursing, Ann Kerley, sounded out the Nurses’ Association about providing union coverage for the Community Karitanes: 124 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY

Discussions ensued as to whether or not the Community Karitane was a nurse. It became apparent that the concept of the Karitane nurse was that she work in an individual’s home caring for the baby and not undertaking household chores whereas with the Community Karitane every effort had been made to meet the needs of the client and the emphasis was different. The Community Karitane took over the running of the household and the mother cared for the child. This shift in emphasis seemed to indicate that indeed the Community Karitane was not a nurse.53

Shona Carey, Director of the Nurses’ Association, indicated that the association was moving to protect even further the title of ‘nurse’ and did not believe it should be used by persons who were not nurses; to her, the job function of the Community Karitane seemed to be more in the direction of a home aid.54 At this time the association also had within its sights the St John Ambulance Association trained volunteers, who had sometimes been designated ‘nurses’, and dental nurses, who were increasingly termed ‘dental therapists’. The term ‘Community Karitane’ no longer had the word ‘nurse’ attached to it. Pretenders to the title of ‘nurse’ were soon vanquished.

A nice balance must be maintained .... Was the nurse to do the baby’s woollie wash and leave out dad’s socks, make a pudding for the children and not the adults? A nurse could not put home work into watertight compartments.

Mrs D.J. Riddiford, wife of the MP for Wellington Central, to Karitane nurse graduation, Wellington, 1962.55

When she addressed the Karitane graduates in the early 1960s Yvonne Riddiford was speaking as a mother of four and a consumer of Karitane services. In the process she acknowledged the blurring of roles that occurred when the nurses undertook ‘casing’ in private homes. The early stages of nursing’s ‘professional project’ had seen general nurses move from duties in private homes into a hospital setting — for them, any reverse movement had its dangers. Most Karitanes, on the other hand, were destined to move from a hospital setting into home-based child care, a change which provided opportunities as well as challenges. Their role was to reside temporarily in private homes to assist new mothers who had babies with health problems (or who were themselves harassed or unwell), mothers who had had multiple births and mothers who could simply afford to pay for assistance as they rested and bonded with their new babies. It was a role that in the past might have been carried out by the new mother’s own mother or extended family. Mrs Riddiford also suggested another contribution of the Karitane nurse to twentieth-century family dynamics. She noted that the average mother and father had little time on their own as husband and wife; with a nurse as a member of the household, the couple could enjoy time together.56 The ‘THE KARITANE’ 125 affluent, at least, could buy respite from their ‘baby boomer’ progeny for the companionate marriage that had become an ideal.57 Although Karitanes had all the accoutrements of nurses while in a hospital setting, their work after leaving the hospitals often had affinities with domestic service and with nannying in particular. Despite the Nurses’ Association suggestion that the original Karitanes cared for babies rather than undertaking household chores, oral histories suggest that their ‘casing’ duties frequently involved household labour, and, indeed, the washing of ‘dad’s socks’ alongside the baby’s woollies. The reality of their low-status domestic service was at odds with the image of Karitanes as young women from comfortable backgrounds. Domestic servants were ‘strangers at the hearth’, a threatened breed in New Zealand even before Karitane training commenced. They were, as Charlotte Macdonald has pointed out, members of households ‘not through sociability or familial ties, but as employed subordinates’. Domestic service failed to become ‘a central means for managing household work’ in New Zealand, partly because the supply of young women for such work was never equal to demand. Macdonald argues that what emerged instead was a tradition of independent householding sustained by a pride in independence from reliance on the labour of others.58 There were certainly women who were exempt from such sturdy independence, either by wealth and social or professional standing, or through failure of health or other family stresses. Even for these groups, supply was never equal to demand, despite periodic attempts to recruit servants from overseas or to organize a state-run home aid service. Various attempts to raise the status of domestic work, including the introduction of domestic science into the education system over the early twentieth century, were largely unsuccessful. Despite the establishment of a Chair in Home Science at University in 1909, and regulations which, in 1917, required all girls holding free places at post primary schools to have some degree of domestic training, domestic service was increasingly unpopular as an occupation for young women. Karitane training was nonetheless cited as an example of what could be done to raise the status of a ‘domestic’ job. In 1942 the Dominion Executive of the YWCA stated, for example, that practically nothing had been done to make domestic service attractive to girls and women, or ‘to raise it to the dignity of a profession’. The ‘one interesting exception’ was the Karitane nurses, who were no longer ‘mere nursemaids’ but had the ‘dignity of a trained career’.59 Plunket occasionally implied the professionalizing of a form of domestic service. In 1942 its Dominion Council claimed that ‘[t]he Karitane nurse is placed on the 126 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY same professional footing as the hospital nurse, but at one time the children’s nurse in the house was relegated to the servant’s quarters. Now all that is changed. The children’s nurse is now a professional woman’.60 By placing the Karitane trainee in a nurse’s uniform and subjecting her to training which reflected that of general nurses, while requiring her to pay for the privilege, Plunket succeeded in turning what might otherwise have been perceived as a menial job into one with considerably more standing. That Karitane nursing was further seen to attract nice girls from ‘good homes’, who joined a waiting list to train, was a bonus. When the ‘stranger in the home’ was a Karitane nurse, she may have confounded some of the traditional assumptions on which domestic service was based, being closer in social standing to her employers (and therefore more safely entrusted with their children) than the usual run of domestics. She had the additional advantage of hierarchical hospital training aimed at inculcating habits of order and hygiene popularly thought lacking in New Zealand servants. If deference was part of the training, it was tempered by Karitanes’ sense of responsibility and pride in their identity as Karitane baby nurses. Karitane nurses’ reminiscences about their experiences of ‘casing’ in private homes show instances of exploitation, the expectation of housework which went beyond the needs of the children cared for, sexual harassment and other interpersonal difficulties for which they, as young women, mostly only in their late teens on graduation, were ill-prepared. But others returned to the same families several times and forged life-long friendships with the parents of their small charges. Some even became godmother to a subsequent baby in the family.61 Strangers no more, the relationship here was one of ongoing closeness and connection. In oral histories Karitane nurses often compare their ‘casing’ in private homes with the work of a nanny, though the average placement in the 1960s and 1970s was two to four weeks, either to help mothers around the time of a birth, or to take sole charge of small children when parents were ill or away. Plunket itself discouraged cases of more than six weeks.62 These shorter-term placements did not challenge mid-twentieth-century assumptions that made the mother central to her children’s daily care. They were rather different from the more recent, longer-term use of nannies by working parents, and different also from the traditional nanny in countries such as the United Kingdom. The traditional British nanny was usually a superior servant who had risen through the ranks from nursery maid, and who was likely to anticipate long- term employment in a household. Even in the United Kingdom the position of nanny underwent a rise, decline and late-twentieth-century reconfiguration, and New Zealand-trained Karitanes are a small part of this story.63 ‘THE KARITANE’ 127

While the number of Karitane graduates who worked overseas cannot be ascertained, the tendency to travel increased after World War II, most Karitanes apparently going to the United Kingdom or Australia, where Plunket’s methods already had a profile thanks to Truby King’s earlier proselytizing. In 1968 complaints were registered from British agencies and Mothercraft Clinics that not enough Karitanes were available, and individual nurses reported that rates of pay there were ‘practically double’ those in New Zealand for casing work.64 Like au pairs, Karitane nurses probably helped fill a gap left by the decline of the traditional long-term nanny, but they had the additional advantage of being trained. Their status as ‘colonials’, from a former white British settlement, may also have been to their benefit, once again complicating class assumptions and giving them an appearance and advantage — in some households — of cultural affinity.65 In the history of domestic service, the Karitane plays a transitional role between the live-in servant/nursemaid and the daily nanny or ‘help’. A perception of Karitanes as nannies to the privileged, in New Zealand and overseas, was a factor in the Health Department’s refusal to provide bursaries for their training. However, in 1975 such perceptions were challenged when the Department of Social Welfare decided to subsidize necessitous families who might benefit from the skills of a Karitane nurse, or from respite care. The Accident Compensation Corporation also started to fund Karitane help for its clients. The link with Social Welfare was more likely to involve ‘day casing’ and work with underprivileged families, being likened, even, ‘to more of a social worker’s role’.66 Lesley Courtney, who returned from overseas in 1976, found the work ‘quite different from the live-in, well-off-home work’ that was available previously. And it involved ‘decent wages’ benchmarked to state norms rather than private employers’ expectations.67 The kinds of families benefitting from Karitane assistance were much more various than in the past, and single parenthood was also recognized as needing such backing. Raewyn Dalziel’s comment about the Society for the Protection of Home and Family applies more generally: family support personnel had to adjust to a new order, ‘accepting that they could not reconstruct ideal families but must try to help people co-exist in the family arrangements they had created’.68 The advent of the ‘Community Karitane’ in the 1980s was a further step in this direction, with its emphasis on support for stressed families and preventive health. Plunket’s Director of Nursing commented in 1981 that ‘[w]e’re there to help support families, not to provide home help for the upper classes’.69 The ideal recruit was now a more mature woman, possibly married, who would train in a community-based setting and work alongside Plunket nurses. This late-twentieth-century descendant of the 128 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY

Karitane nurse still went into the homes of others, but to supply help and support on a daily basis, mostly as an employee of the Plunket Society, and with an awareness of wider social issues. What of the view that Karitanes were ‘mothers in training’, their destination a domestic realm of their own, which they would grace and manage according to best Plunket principles? Karitanes spanned the worlds of home and work, operating as paid adjunct ‘helpmeets’ in the homes of others while they moved towards marriage and their own role as a twentieth-century helpmeet to a male breadwinner. For much of its history, the Karitane training was unapologetically presented as an excellent preparation for marriage and family life. A Plunket booklet from the 1950s noted that ‘many [Karitane nurses] look on it as a finishing touch to their general education . . . their training admirably fitting them to becoming efficient wives and mothers’.70 A recruitment pamphlet, probably from the late 1960s, mentioned the prospects of private casing after graduation, general and Karitane hospital employment, travel and marriage: ‘You will be prepared for the ultimate career for all women — by being a capable wife and mother’.71 Bryder notes that of 20 Karitanes who trained at the Auckland hospital in 1949, only two were still working two years later, the head of the Karitane Bureau explaining that ‘long hours, broken sleep, sudden emergencies and, ultimately, marriage caused many to give it up’.72 Oral history interviews and reminiscences collected by Lesley Courtney and Joyce Powell suggest that while many former Karitanes acknowledged their love of babies, the expectation of marriage and motherhood was implicit rather than explicit, and that opportunities for travel featured more in the recollections of those who trained after World War II. Many nonetheless acknowledged how helpful their Karitane training had been in bringing up their own families. Most of the 36 contacted by Courtney worked for approximately 18 months as certificated Karitanes before travelling or moving on to other activities.73 As a form of employment it was never going to be a lifetime calling, and, given expectations of marriage over most of the century, it was never intended to be.

The history of Karitane nursing reflected changes in attitude towards motherhood and domesticity more generally. It was a product of the more intensive ‘scientific’ motherhood promulgated by Truby King and other ‘experts’ over the early twentieth century. Karitane nurses were needed to staff the Karitane hospitals, to which ‘weakling’ babies and stressed and ailing mothers alike could be sent for nurture and training in routines. Research by Bryder and others has complicated the view of Plunket’s inflexible dictates, acknowledging more the genuine support it provided to mothers and their ‘THE KARITANE’ 129 ability to adapt routines. Assessments of the Karitane hospitals should also allow for this. Nonetheless, the hospitals and the trainees who staffed them were overtaken by social and technological changes. Families became smaller, motherhood lost its exalted status and a new feminist movement provided a critique of the old Plunket certainties, separating womanhood from motherhood. By the 1970s highly technical intensive care neo-natal wards in public hospitals had taken over the care of the premature babies who had once been nursed to health at Karitane hospitals. Mothers were no longer willing to stay in a hospital setting to learn mothercraft, and increasing costs, alongside a whole anti-institution movement, struck at the viability of many such facilities and residential homes. Karitane nursing had outlived its usefulness even to Plunket. Training for home support workers could be achieved in other ways. After the closure of the Karitane hospitals in the late 1970s, Karitane nurses were gradually dispersed into various new or revised services, such as community family health and special education and day care services. The Karitanes lost their distinctive identity.74 The credentials required to work in other occupations dominated by women were increasingly high. Karitane nursing in the post-war era had elements of nursing, early childhood education and social work, but these were all upgrading their professional standing and requirements for training, and did not need such an ambiguous occupational ally. New, less gender-specific occupations were also opening up for young women under the catch-cry of ‘girls can do anything’. Increasing numbers of ‘working mothers’ provided renewed opportunities for nannying, but this was no longer thought to require a training aligned with nursing; rather, early childhood education was seen as having more to offer. The proliferation of centres made day care more accessible and affordable to families. Rather than having an outsider come into the home to assist a full-time mother, as in the past, the working parents of the late twentieth century were more likely to take their pre-school children outside the home, to drop them off at early childhood facilities as mother and father each went off to their place of employment. The role of the Karitane contained many ambiguities. She was a lesser kind of nurse, her claim to the title under increasing challenge by the 1970s. She worked in both a hospital and a home setting, negotiating the delicate complexities of employment in the homes of others after experiencing the more certain hierarchies of hospital residential training. She was perceived over the twentieth century as a nice young girl undertaking appropriate work until marriage, but her post-graduation ‘casing’ role essentially positioned her as operator of her own business. Competition for her services then meant 130 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY that she had some control over where she worked, while providing her with opportunities for travel. In the end, her standing was undermined as other female-dominated occupations strengthened their professional identity, as parental needs changed and as Plunket, the voluntary organization that had sponsored her development, reshaped its services in the face of critique and competition from other service providers. Ultimately she became, in the words of one Karitane, ‘a thing of the past’.75

MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY Massey University, Palmerston North City Library ‘THE KARITANE’ 131

NOTES

1 Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children, ‘Rules for Karitane Nurses, Scope and Duties’, c.1960s, AG-145-27, Hocken Collections, Dunedin (HC). 2 Sociologists have applied the term ‘semi-profession’ to ‘a group of new professions whose claim to the status of doctors and lawyers is neither fully established nor fully desired’: areas in which participants have a shorter training than in recognized professions, a less specialized body of knowledge and ‘less autonomy from supervision or societal control than “the” professions’. Amitai Etzioni, ‘Preface’, in Amitai Etzioni, ed., The Semi-Professions and Their Organization: Teachers, Nurses, Social Workers, Free Press, New York, 1969, p.v. Since the term was first coined, some of the ‘semi-professions’ examined in such earlier works, including nursing, would claim to have moved to a fully professional status. 3 Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, p.87. 4 Raewyn Dalziel, ‘The Colonial Helpmeet: Woman’s Role and the Vote in Nineteenth- Century New Zealand’, New Zealand Journal of History (NZJH), 11, 2 (1977), p.115. 5 This is discussed further in Margaret Tennant, ‘“Missionaries of Health”: The School Medical Service During the Inter-War Period’, in Linda Bryder, ed., A Healthy Country: Essays on the Social History of Medicine in New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington 1991, pp.128–48. 6 At first the popular name of the society, and now part of its official title (Royal New Zealand Plunket Society), the term ‘Plunket Society’ stemmed from the patronage and active support of Lady Victoria Plunket, the wife of New Zealand’s Governor-General 1904–1910. See Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘“Hidden Under Many Bushels”: Lady Victoria Plunket and the New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children’, NZJH, 39, 1 (2005), pp.22–38. 7 ‘Infant Welfare in New Zealand’, 1928, pp.195–6, AG7-8-30, HC. 8 Linda Bryder, A Voice for Mothers: The Plunket Society and Infant Welfare 1907– 2000, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2003. See also, Jim Sullivan, I Was a Plunket Baby: 100 Years of the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society Inc., Random House New Zealand, Auckland, 2007; Oppenheimer, ‘“Hidden Under Many Bushels”’; Lloyd Chapman, In a Strange Garden: The Life and Times of Truby King, Penguin, Auckland, 2003; Linda Bryder, Not Just Weighing Babies: Plunket in Auckland, 1908–1998, Pyramid Press, Auckland, 1998; Lynne Giddings, ‘Royal New Zealand Plunket Society’, in Anne Else, ed., Women Together: A History of Women’s Organisations in New Zealand, Historical Branch/Daphne Brassell Associates Press, Wellington, 1993, pp.257–61; Gordon Parry, A Fence at the Top: The First 75 Years of the Plunket Society, Royal New Zealand Plunket Society, Dunedin, 1982. 9 Erik Olssen, ‘Truby King and the Plunket Society: An Analysis of a Prescriptive Ideology’, NZJH, 15, 1 (1981), pp.3–23. Later works suggested a more complex reading of mothers’ responses to Plunket and of Plunket nurses’ interactions with mothers. See Philippa Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby: Infant Survival and Welfare in an Imperial World: Australia 1880–1950, Macmillan Press, London, 1997; and Bryder, Not Just Weighing Babies and A Voice for Mothers. 10 Joyce Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies: Karitane Hospitals and Nurses, New Zealand and Overseas, 1907 to 2007, Heritage Press, Palmerston North, 2007. Both Powell and this chapter draw upon a thesis by Lesley Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation for Marriage and Families of Their Own: Karitane Nursing in New Zealand, 1959–1979’, MA thesis, Massey University, 2001. The titles of both works draw upon quotations suggesting in one case the propriety of the job and in the the other its trajectory into marriage and motherhood. Sullivan, I Was a Plunket Baby, ch.5, also discusses and illustrates ‘The Karitane Story’. 11 Evening Post, 27 November 1909, p.15. 132 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY

12 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, pp.24–25; Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, pp.17–20. 13 Evening Post, 27 November 1909, p.15. 14 Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, p.32; Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, pp.190, 192. 15 Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby, p.99. 16 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, pp.54–55, 67. 17 Plunket News, April 1973. 18 Leigh Whale, Secretary Plunket Society Ethics Committee to Lesley Courtney, 20 November 2002. It is difficult to gauge the total number of Karitane nurses through sources such as the census, as the basis on which they were counted shifted. Sometimes they were classified with Plunket nurses and even district nurses, or categorized by location of work (within or outside hospitals). 19 Report of Consultative Committee on Infant and Pre-School Services, Wellington, 1960, pp.22, 43. 20 Report of Consultative Committee on Infant and Pre-School Services, p.28. 21 Report of Consultative Committee on Infant and Pre-School Services, pp.18, 26. See also Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, pp.155–6; Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, ch.3. 22 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, p.193. 23 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, p.197. 24 Leigh Whale to Lesley Courtney, 20 November 2002. 25 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, pp.143–6. 26 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, pp.xv, 270–3. 27 Margaret Tennant, The Fabric of Welfare: Voluntary Organisations, Government and Welfare in New Zealand, 1840–2005, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2007, pp.210–12. 28 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, p.133. 29 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.153. 30 Plunket News, October 1970, p.13, AG-7-8-15, HC, quoted in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.154. 31 For further on the ‘professionalization project’ in New Zealand see Susan Haas Jacobs, ‘Advanced Nursing Practice and the Nurse Practitioner: New Zealand Nursing’s Professional Project in the Late 20th Century’, PhD thesis, Massey University, 2005; and Mary Ellen O’Connor, Freed to Care, Proud to Nurse: 100 Years of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2010. More generally, see Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987; Helen Sweet, ‘Establishing Connections, Restoring Relationships: Exploring the Historiography of Nursing in Britain’, Gender & History, 19, 3 (2007), pp.565–80. 32 Linda Hughes, ‘Professionalizing Domesticity: A Synthesis of Selected Nursing Historiography’, Advances in Nursing Science, 12, 4 (1990), pp.25–31. 33 See, for example, Jan A. Rodgers, ‘Nursing Education in New Zealand 1883 to 1930: The Persistence of the Nightingale Ethos’, MA thesis, Massey University, 1985; Patricia Ann Sargison, ‘“Essentially a Woman’s Work”: A History of General Nursing in New Zealand, 1830– 1930’, PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2001. 34 Patricia French, A Study of the Regulation of Nursing in New Zealand 1901–1997, Victoria University of Wellington Graduate School of Nursing & Midwifery Monograph Series, Wellington, 2001, pp.52–53. There had been a previous attempt to establish a university-based course in nursing as a diploma programme at the University of Otago in the 1920s, but this was unsuccessful. See Beryl Hughes, ‘Nursing Education: The Collapse of the Diploma of Nursing at the University of Otago, 1925–1926’, NZJH, 12, 1 (1978), pp.17–33. 35 Jacobs, ‘Advanced Nursing Practice and the Nurse Practitioner’, ch.3. ‘THE KARITANE’ 133

36 Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children, General Conference Reports: Condensed Summaries of Reports for 13 Years (1914–1926), p.39, MS7/3, Box 1, Museum Archives, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.32. 37 Hester Maclean, Nursing in New Zealand: history and reminscences, Tolan, Wellington, 1932, p.94; Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, p.37. 38 Annual Report, Council of Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children, Dunedin, 1972–1973; Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, pp.66, 68. 39 Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, p.39. 40 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, pp.70–71; Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, p.38. 41 During the early twentieth century blue or blue and white stripes seem to have been popular for trainee nurses’ uniforms internationally, especially when worn with a white apron. For a detailed study of nurses’ uniforms which includes their role in material culture, see Christina Bates, A Cultural History of the Nurse’s Uniform, Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, 2012. 42 Jane Brooks and Anne Marie Rafferty, ‘Dress and Distinction in Nursing, 1860– 1939: “A Corporate (as well as Corporeal) Armour of Probity and Purity”’, Women’s History Review, 16, 1 (2007), p.41. 43 Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, p.37. 44 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.126. 45 Department of Health, ‘Nursing as a Career’, recruitment pamphlet reprinted 1959, H1 33295 1/8/1, pp.12–13, Archives New Zealand Wellington (ANZ), cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.38. 46 ‘Love for Children Inspires Work’, Plunket information sheet c.1960s, AG-145-27, HC, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.63. 47 For further on this, see Jacobs, ‘Advanced Nursing Practice and the Nurse Practitioner’, especially chs 6–8. 48 We would like to thank Basil Poff for this observation. 49 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.122. 50 For a discussion of the control, and then exclusion, of another group of claimants to the appearance and title of ‘nurse’ within the voluntary sector, see Margaret Tennant, ‘Charity in Uniform: The Voluntary Aid Detachments of the New Zealand Red Cross’, NZJH, 50, 2 (2016), pp.1–25. 51 Nurses Act 1977, Section 52 (3)a. State-endorsed ‘second-tier’ nurses began in 1939 when the Nurses and Midwives Board opened a new register for hospital-trained nurse aides. This was superseded in 1965 by registered ‘community’ (later ‘enrolled’) nurse training in a hospital setting which was shorter and more basic than that for the registered general nurses. Jacobs, ‘Advanced Nursing Practice and the Nurse Practitioner’, p.239; O’Connor, Freed to Care, pp.78, 136; Marie Burgess, A Guide to the Law for Nurses and Midwives, 4th edn, Pearson New Zealand, Auckland, 2008, pp.206–7. 52 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 1977, 415, p.4286. 53 Meeting of NZRA with Ann Kerley, Plunket Director of Nursing [1981], New Zealand Nurses’ Association Records, 15/7/19 Plunket Society 2/1978 – 17/9/82, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (ATL). 54 Meeting of NZRA with Ann Kerley. On the Nurses’ Association response to St John see New Zealand Nurses’ Association Records, 15/7/16, ATL. 55 Dominion, 24 March 1962, p.16. 56 Dominion, 24 March 1962, p.16. 57 For discussion of this, see Kerreen Reiger, ‘The Coming of the Counsellors: The Development of Marriage Guidance in Australia’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of 134 MARGARET TENNANT AND LESLEY COURTNEY

Sociology, 23, 3 (1987), pp.375–87, and for reference to the development of Marriage Guidance in New Zealand see Tennant, The Fabric of Welfare, pp.135–41. 58 Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Strangers at the Hearth: The Eclipse of Domestic Service in New Zealand Homes c.1830s–1940s’, in Barbara Brookes, ed., At Home in New Zealand: Houses, History, People, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2000, p.44. 59 ‘Domestic Service: Conditions of Training and Employment in New Zealand’, April 1942, E2 32/1/60, ANZ, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.34. 60 Plunket Society submission to YWCA ‘Domestic Service Survey’ sent to Director of Education, April 1942, E2 32/1/60, ANZ, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.33. 61 For further on this, see Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, ch.6; Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, ch.7. Most oral histories relate to the post-World War II period, and to the 1960s and 1970s in particular. 62 Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.98. 63 Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, Orion Publishing Group, London, 1972; Nicky Gregson and Michelle Lowe, Servicing the Middle Classes: Class, Gender and Waged Domestic Labour in Contemporary Britain, Routledge, London, 1994; Katherine Holden, Nanny Knows Best: The History of the British Nanny, The History Press, Stroud, 2013. 64 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, pp.189–90. See also Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, ch.8 for reminiscences. 65 This was especially likely with a resurgence of migrant domestic workers from many parts of the world to places such as the United Kingdom in the late twentieth century. On the global dimension of domestic work see Raffaella Sarti, ‘Historians, Social Scientists, Servants, and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work’, International Review of Social History, 59, 2 (2014), pp.279–314. 66 Karitane Nurses Bureau Monthly Report for Branch Meetings, October 1978, AG- 509-10, HC, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.118. 67 Lesley Courtney, Personal communication to Margaret Tennant, 15 June 2009. 68 Raewyn Dalziel, Focus on the Family: The Auckland Home and Family Society 1893–1993, Home and Family Society, Auckland, 1993, p.75. 69 Anne Kerley in New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 30 November 1981, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.144. 70 Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children, The Origin and Development of the Work of the Society, Stone, Son, and Co., Dunedin, 1953, p.24, cited in Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, p.14. 71 Karitane nursing promotion sheet, AG-145-27, HC, reproduced in Powell, A Suitable Job for Young Ladies, p.31. Pay rates of $19.50 to $25.00 per week are cited. 72 Bryder, Not Just Weighing Babies, p.86. 73 See Courtney, ‘An Excellent Preparation’, pp.98–99. 74 Nanny training courses have been a growth area for polytechnics and private providers since the 1970s, providing formal qualifications for nannies and a bridging qualification to higher-level early childhood education courses. While nanny training courses still focus on infant care, their curricula includes more on the care of older children than the former Karitane nurse training, and on education as well as physical care. 75 Yuen Wong, interviewed by Lesley Courtney, 17 June 2001.