Pida a las y los niños que lean las situaciones y contesten lo que se pregunta

This period encompasses the major focus of this study. Essentially, the intention has been to evaluate and interpret the position of dressmakers in New Zealand’s history from a

consideration of existing studies and from primary research material. Empirical historical evidence was likely to be identified from both sources but, the majority of primary research material for this period has been drawn from interviews with the dressmakers.

There is a considerable body of existing documentation relating to this period and, in particular, to World War Two. The texts seem to fall into three categories: those written by men (and largely excluding women’s experiences); those written by women who served in the armed forces or some related essential service; and those written by civilian women. Of the latter, there are relatively few, and they have generally been published from the 1980s onwards. Montgomerie (2001) says:

Civilians did not write because they did not feel that their experience was a central part of the drama of war. Women did not write because war was still defined as men’s business. Civilian women were least likely to believe their wartime experiences were worth recording. This began to change in the early 1980s, with the development of a self-conscious women’s history of the war…By the early 1980s the model of war history as the history of military heroism was losing its explanatory power. In the 1970s the feminist movement, combined with the development of social history, stimulated the growth of women’s history (Montgomerie, 2001, pp.13-15).

A number of accounts drawn from interviews with women, and edited volumes containing collections of shorter personal accounts of wartime experiences, were published during this period. Later studies include texts, a radio series encouraging listeners to record individual recollections of the war, and a film entitled War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (Preston, 1995). The film, like most of the texts, focuses on wartime relationships, work, family, shortages of commodities, and the pattern of everyday life. None of the existing studies focus on clothing or clothing production exclusively, although many have some reference to the fashions of the day and to how these were acquired.

The Home Front Volume 11, (Taylor, 1986), is part of a series entitled The New Zealand People At War, the official history of New Zealand during World War Two. Taylor

documents the direction of manpower, including women, into essential services and

industries. Clothing manufacturing businesses were among the first to be classed as essential. Women who met the manpowering criteria were directed to work in clothing factories or, if already working in one, were held in that position and unable to leave for a different job. Commodities subjected to rationing are also documented, including details about clothing, hosiery, underwear, and knitting wool. The regulations relating to austerity clothing are listed, with mention of the resourcefulness of women in overcoming the constraints that they imposed.

Both home and professional dressmakers were making smart new clothes out of old ones, cutting up, turning, dyeing and joining new material to old. Home dressmaking classes, with special advice on using remnants, were popular (Taylor, 1986, p.841).

Ebbett (1984) writes of the effect of the war on the lives of New Zealand women, drawn from interviews with women and men who were living in New Zealand at this time. Ebbett looks at the effects of shortages and rationing of clothing and some of the ingenious solutions applied to overcoming them. Edmond (1986) has also compiled a series of women’s

recollections of the effects of the war on their lives, with several referring to learning to sew, sewing as employment, and making new clothes from any fabric that was available, however unorthodox, or re-making old clothes. Nicholson (1998) has written a comprehensive history of knitting and spinning in New Zealand, but many references are made to clothing in general. The sections on the 1930s Depression and World War Two reinforce the impression that the vast majority of New Zealand women had the necessary skills to make or alter clothing. Artefacts of dress from the 1940s and 50s are considered by McKergow, (in Dalley and Labrum, 2000). She refers to the importance of physical artefacts and considers examples of wartime and post-war clothing in New Zealand.

Montgomerie, (in Daley and Montgomerie, 1999), considers the impact of World War Two on family life and on gender relations, particularly in regard to employment. Employment, specifically the industrial conscription of women, is also the focus of Montgomerie in Brookes, Macdonald and Tennant (1992). Brief mention is made of clothing factories as essential industries. Montgomerie expands on this in The Women’s War (2001). She debates the notion of whether employment opportunities for women, created by the demands of the war, had any significant effect on reorganising the gender balance in the workforce in peacetime. She contends that, despite the wartime innovations that saw women working in traditional male occupations such as drivers, tram conductors, and herd-testers:

…most women continued to be employed in occupations conventionally regarded as female (Montgomerie, 2001, p.22).

The New Zealand war effort was geared to the production of food and clothing, not armaments. The main effect of the war was to redistribute women workers within female-dominated areas of employment (Montgomerie, 2001, p.29).

She considers the post-war expectation that women would surrender their employment

aspirations and return to the roles of mother and homemaker, as does Coney (1993), under the heading, Housewife or Human Being?

May (1992) has compared the life experiences of a group of New Zealand women who were rearing their children in the immediate post-war years and a similar-sized group who were rearing their children during the 1970s and 1980s. The study is useful for its comparisons of the economic, historical, political, and idealogical context within which each group of women lived. A study of post-war New Zealand life (King, 1988) summarises the essence of each decade from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, and provides a sociological, political and domestic context for each period.

Phillips (in Daley and Montgomerie, 1999) reflects on the gender separation of leisure

activities in post-war 1950s New Zealand and poses questions about whether men and women are still involved in separate leisure pursuits. He includes data from the 1970s that records that sewing was still an important leisure activity for women at that time. He also discusses the effect that women’s increased participation in the workforce, from the 1950s to the 1990s, had on their involvement in leisure pursuits.

Kiwi Baby Boomers are the subject of McGill’s (1989) book with that title. The text is

comprised of statements from members of the baby boomer generation that reflect their experiences of 1950s and 1960s life. There are several sections that include statements about clothing and fashion that provide, often amusing, insights into the nature of New Zealand fashion during this period:

Mother made all my clothes – pure polished cottons, organdy party dresses, boleros of fluffy white stuff or pastel pink and lemon with puffed sleeves, Peter Pan collar jerkins and milkmaid blouses (McGill, 1989, p.14).

Judson (1999) has drawn together data about the number of people working in the clothing and textile industries in 1950s New Zealand, and the proportions of locally produced clothing in comparison to imported clothing. In her study of the Mollie Rodie MacKenzie collection of 1950s garments held by Canterbury Museum, she makes some observations and

evaluations of the services provided by dressmakers during this period.

In order to ascertain the competition that dressmakers faced from the opportunity to buy ready- made fashion, a brief study of retailing in New Zealand has been made, with particular reference to the establishment and growth of the major department stores. In nineteenth century New Zealand, these businesses frequently sold imported ready-to-wear fashions, fabrics, and haberdashery, but also maintained dressmaking departments, catering to private

clients, on their premises. Several of these stores remained in business for decades; a small number of them are still trading.

Millen (2000), in Kirkcaldie and Stains, documents the history of this Wellington department store from its establishment in 1863. Auckland department store Milne and Choyce

established its dressmaking department in 1875. This is recorded in Tucker (1968) in a publication of the store’s one hundred year history, from 1867 to 1967. Caughey (1980) records the history of Smith and Caughey Ltd, from 1880 to 1980. This iconic Auckland department store is still trading. The story of the Farmers department store, now a large organisation with stores in many New Zealand towns, is slightly different. This organisation began as a mail order business in Auckland in 1909, and its progression to the establishment of a department store and garment manufacturing workrooms is recorded in Kay (1953).

Christchurch Street, (Smith, 1998), presents a brief history of the first stores in the city of

Christchurch, including a corset-maker, and drapers and clothiers, J. Ballantyne and Company, a department store that remains in the hands of the same family today. Further insights into the Ballantynes of the 1930s and 40s are provided by Eldred-Grigg in his book about the 1947 fire that destroyed most of the shop, including its dressmaking, tailoring and millinery departments.xii

References to the retail sale of apparel in New Zealand from the 1940s onwards are recorded in Wolfe (2001). He also briefly records the introduction and growth of clothing boutiques in the 1960s and the history of a few of New Zealand’s most enduring clothing manufacturers. He mentions dressmaking, as part of a chapter entitled Dropping Stitches: The Dearth Of

knitting, rather than as an occupation. His record of apparel retailing includes the growth of suburban shopping malls and bargain clothing stores from the early 1980s.

Old Money (2000), a documentary produced by Television New Zealand, provided an insight

into the establishment of several of the dynastic family businesses that grew out of the needs of the increased population generated by the discovery of gold in the South Island in the 1860s. The documentary included the Hallenstein family (clothing manufacturers and retailers since 1863), Sargood, Son and Ewen (importers of goods, including apparel, since 1862), and the Hannah family (footwear manufacturers and retailers since 1874).

Written information about the resources available to dressmakers is scarce; much of the relevant information in this area has been drawn from primary sources, the interviews with the dressmakers. However, some magazines of the period offered patterns and carried advertisements for dressmaking and patternmaking courses. The experiences of the interviewed dressmakers suggest that, as professional dressmakers, many of them adapted purchased patterns or were capable of making their own. About half of the group attended additional skills courses, such as patternmaking. Wolfe (2001), Ebbett (1981), and Else (1993) refer to the education curriculum in New Zealand schools during the early to mid- twentieth century, the period covering the school years of the interviewed dressmakers. Their information has relevance in recording that sewing was part of every New Zealand

schoolgirl’s education until the 1960s.

Data about the importation of textiles in the 1940s and 50s can be found in Judson (1999). The importation of textiles and haberdashery in earlier decades is referred to in Caughey (1980), Kay (1953), Millen (2000), and Tucker (1968). References to warehouses that

received imported goods and sold to local retailers can be found in Old Money (Television New Zealand, 2000) and Wolfe (2001). Newspapers of the nineteenth century frequently carried advertisements for shipments of goods that the warehouses had received, often mentioning the ships that had transported the goods (Gisborne Herald, 30 December 1899, p.2). A search of the literature has not revealed any information that was available during the period of the study to assist and advise women how to set up a business.

However, from personal evaluations, the most useful information regarding the competition facing dressmakers, and the attainment of their resources and expertise, can be obtained from primary sources: advertisements placed in the newspapers and magazines of each era and in each region, and from the responses of the dressmakers interviewed. The sources listed have been useful in indicating primary records to be further investigated and evaluated with reference to this research.