Abstract:
This essay written by Jacqueline Leckie was first published in Women Together: a History of Women's Organisations in New Zealand in 1993. It was updated by Rachel Simon-Kumar in 2018. Most of the organisations discussed in this book catered mainly to Pākehā women, all of them immigrants or descendants of immigrants. However, by the early 1990s a large number of women in New Zealand – 284,862, or 16.5 percent, at the 1991 census – belonged to or were descended from ethnic groups and cultures not identifying as either Pākehā or Māori. Most of these groups have at some time formed their own associations, but not all have had separate women's organisations. It is not possible to determine the precise number of immigrant or ethnic women's groups in New Zealand, or locate much evidence of their early development. Many have been informal and have left few written records. By the start of the 1990s, studies of immigrants and ethnic minorities within New Zealand had generally ignored women's experience as migrants, and the extent to which migration had been a gendered process. With the exception of some Pacific Islands organisations, male dominance of official positions within most ethnic associations led many researchers to assume, wrongly, that women's roles had been marginal.