Being a single mother is never easy. In the days before state benefits, life could be very tough. Women relied on their families and friends, church or community groups to help financially or to mind the children while they went out to work. Public disapproval was strong – society expected children to be born within marriage and raised by two parents.
From childcare to baby farming
'Fearful slaughter of the innocents'
Minnie Dean
The 'Winton baby-farmer'
In 1895 Southland's Williamina (Minnie) Dean became the first – and only – woman to be hanged in New Zealand. Her story exposed the stark realities of paid childcare and the lack of choice that many women faced in this period.
1923 - key events
The Newlands baby farmers
Karitane nurses and babies in 1929
Karitane nurses holding babies and toddlers outside the Karitane Hospital, Whanganui, in 1929. The Karitane movement, like the Plunket Society, had been founded by the renowned health reformer Frederic Truby King, whose strong eugenic beliefs helped set the public health agenda in the 1920s. He urged New Zealanders to do all they could to breed an ‘Imperial race’ and condemned birth control and abortion as instruments of ‘race suicide’.
Family benefit cartoon
In 1926 Parliament passed the Family Allowances Act, which provided for the payment of a means-tested benefit to families with more than two children aged under 15 whose breadwinners earned less than £4 a week. As the image of the stork in this cartoon from The New Zealand Observer (25 August 1926) suggests, the initiative was partly motivated by concern about the birth rate, which had been falling for decades.
1926 - key events
DSIR established
Kids at the Wilson Home for crippled children, 1943
Children lying in their beds in the solarium at the Wilson Home for crippled children in Takapuna, Auckland, 1943.
The crippling disease Paralytic Poliomyelitis (Polio) affected hundreds of children before it was virtually eliminated by a mass vaccination campaign in 1962. It wasn't until 2000 that New Zealand was officially declared Polio free.
Domestic Purposes Benefit demonstration
Demonstration relating to the Domestic Purposes Benefit outside the Department of Social Welfare, Wellington in 1977.
The DPB was introduced in 1973 with the aim of helping women with a dependent child or children who had lost the support of a husband, or were inadequately supported by him. While men could claim the DPB the vast majority of those claiming the benefit were women.
Salvation Army Boys' Home in Eltham
Salvation Army homes were the only option for many 19th-century orphans and abandoned children. Institutional life could be highly regimented: in this image residents of the Salvation Army Boys' Home in Eltham line up to salute a visitor to the institution.
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