The Nineteen - Fifties

After World War II the government did everything in its power to push women out of the workforce and into the home. They pushed propaganda portraying women's place as in the home, they sacked married women, who, they said, were taking the jobs of the men who had returned from the war, they emphasised the need to build up the population depleted by war, and closed the child care centers. While it was impossible to remove all the women from the workforce who had joined the workforce during the war, the percentage of women in the workforce dropped significantly.

There is very little evidence of a women's movement in the fifties. Due, I feel, to the partial removal of women from the workforce, and their isolation in the surburbs, the cold war mentality that pervaded New Zealand in the fifties and the serious defeat which the labour movement suffered with the Watersiders Lock-out in 1951.