Women cheese-makers part of Taranaki life in WWI

Women cheese-makers part of Taranaki life in WWI

One hundred years ago it was not considered respectable for farmers’ wives to work on the land. But heavy duty farming tasks and cheese making in local factories became women’s work during the First World War, says Massey University historian Associate Professor James Watson.

He is giving a public lecture on June 24 at New Plymouth’s Puke Ariki Museum as part of its’ exhibition, Bringing it Home: Taranaki and World War One.

Dr Watson says the ‘home front’ in Taranaki reflected some of the major issues that affected New Zealand during the First World War. His lecture, Keeping the home fires burning in Taranaki during the First World War, 1914-18, will explore aspects of local life during the war.

“As a major farming area, particularly in dairying, it was forced to adapt to shortages of labour while benefiting from high wartime prices,” he says.

With around 100,000 mostly young, single men from a total population of just over one million volunteering for military service in the First World War, farming regions such as Taranaki underwent significant changes and challenges in order to adapt to the loss of male workers, he says.

With many men gone, women had to turn their hands to the tough jobs in the absence of farmworkers, sons, brothers and, sometimes, husbands.

The wartime labour shortages also meant other women abandoned badly paid work as domestic help or in factories to step into better paid, more pleasant clerical and shop jobs. Some even moved to Wellington – a boomtown during the war – for clerical jobs in the public service. And others learned to become cheese makers in local factories – work that had been a male-only domain until the war.

While fewer Taranaki Māori volunteered for military service than in other parts of New Zealand due to a legacy of the bitter conflicts and land confiscation of the previous century, many were able to get jobs previously done by single Pākehā men who’d gone to war in Europe, Dr Watson says.

Another feature of wartime life was small bush camps in remote areas around Mount Taranaki. These were refuges created by young men escaping conscription from 1916 who didn't want to forgo their freedoms by joining the army. Some had political or moral beliefs that were incompatible with going to war.

Among other themes he will cover will be the severe popular discontent over issues such as the spiralling cost of living that led to an Independent Labour candidate winning the Taranaki by-election in 1918.

A specialist in the history of the First World War, Dr Watson is currently seconded to the Centenary History of New Zealand and the First World War Project run jointly by Massey’s School of Humanities (led by war historian Professor Glyn Harper), the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, the New Zealand Defence Force, and the Returned and Services’ Association.

Dr Watson has been researching the impact of the war through diaries, letters and other archives held at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and the War Memorial Museum in Auckland, as well as newspapers from throughout New Zealand.

Free public lecture: Keeping the Home Fires Burning in Taranaki during the First World War, 1914-18.
Venue: Puke Ariki Museum, New Plymouth
Date: Wednesday, June 24
Time: 5.30pm - 7pm

ENDS

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