Book Review

Melanie Nolan's book is a wide-ranging analysis of the role of the state in shaping the position of New Zealand women — Maori and Pakeha — from late last century until 1984. It examines 'domesticity' in relation to what Nolan terms its 'antithesis': wage earning.	1
Nolan distinguishes her book from others by arguing that she brings together three different interpretations of domesticity, rather than focusing on a single aspect. These are: the actual patterns of women's lives within the family; a set of beliefs that normalises women's role within the family; and an ideal in which the two spheres of the family and paid work are never entirely separate. It is this ideal which allows the state to use women as a reserve army of labour.	2
The book's chapters are organised around a number of themes which explore the various ways in which the state has shaped the position of women in New Zealand. Those themes include equal pay, protective labour legislation, family allowances, widows of various kinds (industrial, civil, war and 'grass') and the domestic education debate. Not all chapters cover the same time period, as the debates on different issues waxed, waned and sometimes died.	3
The author has a careful and meticulous approach to research, a readable style, and in conjunction with her editor has produced a book that is well laid out graphically, with a very diverse range of pictorial material which is very engaging and beautifully integrated with the text. As an aside, there is some irony that a book that analyses and criticises the state is strongly state-supported; New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs (Historical Branch) deserves to be congratulated for funding this venture.	4
The book's central argument is that the state has played an ambiguous role in relegating women to the domestic sphere. Nolan states that class and gender accounts tend to promote one-sided notions that the state conspires to relegate women to the domestic sphere, rather than recognising that some of its strategies enabled women to gain independence in the sphere of paid work. To add to the complexity of the state's role, she also argues persuasively that some of the state's strategies intended to uphold domesticity, actually undermined it.	5
Nolan suggests three different views may account for these 'contradictory tendencies': state pluralism, shifting objectives that may make it expedient to promote women's domesticity at some times but not others, and the effects of the broader societal environment. Hence, while the NZ state introduced a family allowance to shore up the male breadwinner role in times of economic crisis — thus supporting domesticity — in later years this strategy had the unintended consequence of undermining the male breadwinner role in the context of a successful equal pay campaign. Nolan argues that class and gender explanations of the role of the state in women's employment are too 'general' and that, following Jessop, one must develop a 'strategic-relational' account of the state in which various interests — capitalist, patriarchal, feminist — compete.	6
Nolan, however, side-steps theoretical debates, leaving the subject of theory in the first chapter and 'getting on with' the story. While agreeing with her premise that detailed histories are needed to explore the contingent nature of state power, Nolan's historical account, while clearly illuminating the ambiguous activities of the state, alas fails to feed back into either debates on the state, and class and gender explanations of women's role. It is unarguable that the state 'did a bit of both' in supporting domesticity and breadwinning in a fragmented way, but Nolan asserts rather than explores this. This is a lost opportunity, as the careful scholarship of the book could have illuminated theoretical debates about gender and the public and private spheres.	7
For readers outside New Zealand, the book offers very little in the way of comparative references, which mean that the more informed reader is left to construct their own comparisons, and the less informed reader is none the wiser. In addition, the notion of women's agency, and the role of various groups in both promoting and thwarting the state's varied views on domesticity, gets rather lost in the text. Yes, that role is revealed in each chapter for that particular issue, but an additional chapter that analyses the overall role of those who, in particular, contested orthodox notions of domesticity would have been welcome and would have added to the book's usefulness.	8
The position of women in paid work in relation to their position in the domestic sphere is a subject almost completely ignored by scholars in contemporary industrial relations. Historians such as Nolan are however willing to tackle and illuminate this complex subject matter. The book has particular value for those teaching feminist studies, industrial relations (the chapters on equal pay and protective labour legislation are especially valuable), EEO policy and practice, and modern and labour history, both in New Zealand and those elsewhere teaching on a comparative basis. Implicitly, of course, the book is as much about male advantage as female disadvantage, using Joan Eveline's words. Nolan provides a very comprehensive view of gender, welfare and work in New Zealand, with narratives and pictures illuminating the interrelationship between women's paid and unpaid work.	9
Griffith University JANIS BAILEY

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