The Maori Women’s Welfare League and Autonomy

While the MWWL proved reluctant to leave the embrace of the state, ministers and officials were equally reluctant to lose the influence they could wield within it. Their stated wish to cast it adrift from the Crown often amounted to little more than attempts at cost-cutting and/or to a feeling that its usefulness might be impeded if Maori saw it as a lackey of the state. The MWWL’s leaders were well aware, from their own perspectives, of the dangers of such a perception among their people. At the annual conference of the league in 1957, as she departed from the presidency, Whina Cooper affirmed that she was ‘worried about the independence of our organisation’. She saw that it was inevitably a ‘temptation … for government departments with all the good intentions in the world to use voluntary organisations almost unconsciously’ for their own purposes. ‘I know we are dependent on the Maori Department. Without its help we would not have functioned as effectively aspage 77 we have done … In a way that is the price we pay for the assistance given us’.

But, she added, this price was neither ideal nor necessarily long lasting: ‘most of us would like to see our own organisation stand absolutely on its own feet. Quite independent … Let us remember as a voluntary body we spring from the hearts, minds and needs of the Maori people … We have a standing in the world no other Maori organisation has ever achieved. In view of all these things’, she asked, ‘should we not try to establish our real independence … as an autonomous body’? Cooper noted that conference remits had ‘a strong tendency to stress the principle of independence, and also the call for greater freedom for the leagues and also the Maori people … All these remits can be seen as an expression from the Maori side for freedom to express his own soul as a Maori – his Maoritanga’.

As the first Maori organisation to speak with a truly national voice, the MWWL contributed hugely to the growing feeling of ‘Maori’ interconnectedness in post-war New Zealand, to Maoritanga, and to the desire for both modernity and autonomy. Cooper herself, despite her insistence on Crown help for the league, embodied the spirit of the independence from the Crown which she sought for her people. During her six years heading the league, Royal and other officials often had to remind her of the terms of reference of the organisation – as, indeed, did the MWWL’s secretary, Mira Szaszy. However much the functions of the MWWL reflected state aims, both the mere fact of its existence and the work it did inside and (particularly) outside the comfort zone of the Crown helped promote a Maori autonomist vision.

By the creation, endorsement and use of the league, the state had in effect attempted to replicate its wartime appropriation of spontaneous and voluntarist collective energies among the indigenous people of New Zealand. It was generally satisfied with the MWWL’s performance in this light – its work in helping Maori adjust to post-war urban life, for example, or its role alongside the WHL in improving Maori health. Corbett himself believed that ‘the greatest social advancement’ for Maori in the 1950s was ‘due to the Maori women themselves, under the Welfare League’s inspiration’. Such social progress was achieved at little cost to the state. The small amount of state investment, however, was of considerable assistance to the league, which was thereby able to run a year-round operation at national and devolved levels. Maori women working in the league at the flaxroots had the structural framework within which to advance their various tasks, sometimes with the help of the welfare officers and the official committees, but often with only a minimal degree of state intervention or none at all.⁷

In this partnership between Crown and Maori on ‘women’s issues’, both parties had constantly to manoeuvre to assert themselves and/or to create a workable compromise. MWO/Welfare Division officials, for example, wouldpage 78 show periodic concern that the MWWL was acting too independently from the tribal committees, while the league was wont to place considerable pressure on government for reform on matters such as education, child welfare and employment. It ranged far and wide on other topics as the need arose, often stepping in where the DMA’s committees would not venture because of their structure and terms of reference.

The league’s focus on assisting urban migrants and their families both to adjust to modernity and preserve their Maoriness did create some difficulties. As migration sped up, the organisation needed increasingly to rely on the activities of urbanised women for its smooth running. But, with the demands of both the new environment and their own families, their time was at a premium. From the mid-1950s, both MWWL membership and activity were beginning to fall (although monitoring of its personnel and productivity tended to overlook the many informal networks and activities associated with it). Such developments were not just of concern to the MWWL. In 1958, the Minister of Maori Affairs was worrying about the ‘disturbing’ decrease in membership and an apparently ‘waning’ enthusiasm. In view of the fact ‘that the Leagues have contributed greatly to the spectacular surge forward made by the Maori people within the last 10 years’, he wrote to the Secretary, the ‘possibility of disinterest creeping into the work of the Leagues must be guarded against. The organisation is too important to be allowed to drift towards ineffectiveness’. The MWWL must ‘be encouraged and the Movement strengthened’.

In the event, the league was to remain powerful and significant for its own, autonomist reasons. At an MWWL conference in 1957, while members were ‘not yet ready to take over the responsibilities of running the organisation without Departmental assistance’, there was resistance to constraints on the use of the government’s administrative funding: members were determined to utilise their resources in ways they thought best for promoting Maori aspirations. Increasing numbers, moreover, did not believe in accepting any funding because of the actual or perceived dangers of creating a dependency relationship. When those who argued for full league independence gained ground, especially given disappointment with the Nash government, renewed enthusiasm ensued. As part of efforts to claw back credibility within Maoridom, in 1960 Nash changed the funding and accountability arrangements. The league became an incorporated society, no longer tied directly to administrative support from the DMA – which itself felt that it might not need to rely on the league so much in the future in view of the prospective changes to the Welfare Division’s system of official committees. Many in the MWWL rejoiced at the new independence, although some viewed with ‘trepidation’ the fact that officials had ‘severed their connections with us’. In the event, ‘the Maori Affairs’ would continue to loom large in the affairs of the MWWL,page 79 which needed state support for general funding and project-specific grants.

That same year, the acting Secretary for Maori Affairs, on the basis of officials’ investigations, made an assessment of the league’s 358 branches and 3200 members as part of his stocktake of the state of Maoridom. He concluded that the MWWL was ‘generally more alive than the tribal organisation’, and saw its independent status as a boon. It was now time for the Crown, he argued, to entrust the MWWL to take on extra, specified tasks for Maoridom in the fields of ‘welfare and culture’. This high-level public approval of its importance for both Maori and government was couched in language which also endorsed the accelerating sense of a national ‘Maori’ identity. In Maori eyes, this latter development had helped counteract the harmful ethnic consequences of the detribalising forces of urbanisation, and meetings of the MWWL and other pan-tribal organisations served to promote Maori identity. For its part, the Crown too was positively encouraging ‘shared ethnicity’ or ‘Maoriness’, appreciating the need for some form of transitional indigenous substitute for the tribalism it was working to displace.

But in the Crown’s eyes, as the history of relations with the MWWL indicates, non-tribal embodiments of rangatiratanga, as much as their tribal counterparts, needed to be carefully controlled. In some ways, this would now be more difficult to achieve with the MWWL, given its independence of the Crown for administrative support. But it would be easier in other ways, since the grants the MWWL now relied upon could be made conditional. They could even dry up in the event of extreme difficulties in the relationship between league and state, although a modus vivendi would generally be worked out: officially-sourced grants and subsidies would be made available to the MWWL to further the interests of Maori in ways which, at the very least, the state could live with. Such a system persisted in the decades which followed. In the early 1990s, indications that the MWWL’s ‘ability to apply to the Government for assistance [was] in effect being withdrawn’ raised concerns among both rank and file and leadership. In the end, government funding continued, and the league both continued to maintain its distance and represent Maori women on many state and other committees.

Ever since its inception, the MWWL had repeatedly raised issues for debate, and pressured government (and sometimes tribes) for change. It helped very many individuals and whanau, and other elements of Maoridom, adjust to ‘the modern world’ in ways that would both preserve Maoritanga and allow for gendered expressions of self-determination. Many Maori women, especially radical activists from the 1970s, came to see its structures and policies as passé or even to view it as helping perpetuate gender differentiation. In Maoridom, it was often argued (although not without much contestation, including from Maori women), women continued to be subordinated in decision-makingpage 80 processes, paralleling the position traditionally allocated women in the patriarchal society of the pakeha. Such critical scrutiny reflected a number of trends – demographic, feminist, socio-economic, educational, ideological and ethno-cultural. These were all to have profound implications for many aspects of Maori being and being Maori.⁸