Threads of Caring reviewed

 

Mrs Schumacher’s Gems

A few years ago, I recorded an oral history project with three other oral historians with the aim of uncovering some stories of women’s domestic lives in mid-twentieth century New Zealand.

Domestic life as we know it today is very different from the lives led by our mothers and grandmothers whose authority was generally home and community-based.

Everyday life in New Zealand during the mid-twentieth century is a significantly under-researched subject. It is a topic which is considered so ordinary that hardly anyone bothers to record the details in their diaries or letters, but it is the daily routine, so insignificant at the time, that was interesting to us for this project.  While the kitchen was the head office of family life, and home baking was perhaps the norm until the early 1980s, this changed as more women continued to work after marriage – and even at the time, many women felt constrained by those norms.  You could call some of them ‘The Reluctant Housewife’ as they might not have liked or been good at cooking or domestic duties but had limited choice about whether they had to do those things. We wanted to find out just what role these tasks did play in women’s lives and how they responded to the responsibility of having to live up to those norms. We really wanted to avoid a recording of their past tinged with too much nostalgia. These were women who had a managerial role in their domestic lives, and some of them were women whose domestic lives were a very small part of how they saw themselves.

Handwritten recipe books, kept by many women, were a vital resource containing information that was used every day and could not be found elsewhere. We used the recipe books as a focus of the interviews to uncover how these women lived their domestic lives during this period, and whether this aspect of their life changed over the years as their circumstances changed – children growing up and leaving home, changes in the availability of food, changes in technology, such as frozen and dehydrated food – remember Surprise peas? – for example. The title of the project came from a recipe in one of these books.

We aimed for a mix of rural and urban childhood and adult life, but were not really any more scientific than that in choosing who to interview, although we also made sure to interview some women from different ethnic backgrounds – Maori and Croatian, for example. Three of us chose to interview relatives – two sisters and one mother – and we also found a couple of women who had had a professional involvement in food preparation – Tui Flower and Lois Daish. The interviews contained contextualising biographical information but were focused on the women’s life with food. A brief – but not exhaustive – overview of the topics covered includes: learning to cook; daily routines of food preparation; kitchen design; housework, and – using the recipe books – favourite or useful recipes and the stories which accompanied them, and talking about how food fashions changed over the years.

As Alessandro Portelli says, oral history is not only a source of information regarding the events of history, but can be used to discover the interviewee’s attitude towards those events, in other words, how people rationalise and make sense of the past. The women who we interviewed had a wide range of experiences and were reflective about them and what it meant to them to have lived those experiences. As already noted, we were determined that this would not be a nostalgia exercise, but we needn’t have worried about that because the Gems were forthright and honest about their feelings. Some of them had it pretty tough, and some of them didn’t enjoy the domestic experience at all, or put up with it while concentrating on more fulfilling parts of their lives.

History is often thought of as a collective experience, but recording these interviews has added complexity to our understanding – the interviewers, I’m talking about and also anyone who cares to use them in future – of women’s domestic lives during this period. The interviews have also reminded us of the importance of so-called ‘ordinary’ lives in building the picture of how life was lived in the past, because of the way in which they have the power to restore the individual’s experience to those collective historical narratives.

The interviews have been archived at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.