Men, the Left, and the “Women’s Vote”.

On Calvary Street are trellises

Where bright as blood the roses bloom,
And gnomes like pagan fetishes
Hang their hats on an empty tomb
Where two old souls go slowly mad,
National Mum and Labour Dad.

James K. Baxter
Ballad of Calvary Street
1969

JAMES K. BAXTER’S stereotypes, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad”, strike a discordant note in the Twenty-First Century New Zealander’s ear. Most obviously because the political loyalties of men and women have, in the 55 years since Baxter wrote his poem, undergone a dramatic reversal. Labour supporters, today, are much more likely to be women, while National’s support-base has become disproportionately male. How is this dramatic shift in the political allegiances of the sexes to be explained?

The most important driver of the so-called “gender gap” has been the steady erosion of working-class power. Many factors have been at work in this process, but the most important is the slow demise of what was formerly the Left’s most important constitutive myth.

The move to drive women and children out of the paid workforce (which, in the early days of industrial capitalism, they had dominated) was seen (at least by men) as a moral and economic triumph. Not only were society’s most vulnerable members rescued from the ruthless exploitation of capitalist employers, but their return to the “safety” of the domestic sphere, by shrinking the pool of available industrial workers, allowed husbands, fathers and sons to drive-up wage-rates and reclaim the “breadwinner” role so central to the sustainability of patriarchy. Accordingly, setting the price of labour, and growing the political strength that flowed from working-class organisation, was seen as the work of men, by men, for men.

As anyone who has ever heard Judy Collins’ inspiring rendition of the song “Bread and Roses” will attest, the idea that the advance of the working-class was the work of men, alone, is nonsensical. In the clothing and textile industries especially women workers vastly outnumbered men, and their struggles for economic justice were waged no less fiercely than those of their “brothers”.

It nevertheless remains an historical fact that in the vast majority of factories, in the coal mines and the steel mills, in transportation and on the docks, it was overwhelmingly a man’s world. The left-wing project, although conceptually inseparable from the steady advance of working-class power under capitalism, was also presented as a cause in which the qualities and responsibilities of masculinity were constantly made manifest.

Culturally, project and cause came together in the artistic and literary figure of the working-class hero. With every economic and social advance, the pride of “working-men” grew. Their unions and their parties were hailed as the engines of the future, generating a muscular progressivism in which males placed themselves unfailingly at the heart of political action.

So much for “Labour Dad’s back-story. How was “National Mum” created?

Fundamentally, the National Party’s assiduous courting of the female voter is a reflection of the New Zealand Right’s desperation to break the Left’s easy domination of the electorate in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s.

That the “women’s vote” might deviate significantly from that of the men’s was demonstrated with startling force in the British general election of 1931. At the behest of King George V, the British Labour leader, Ramsay Macdonald, joined forces with the Conservatives and the Liberal Party to form the “National Government” – a grand coalition to address the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Predictably, Macdonald’s “treachery” split the Labour Party and divided the working-class.

Appealing to the British people for what he called a “doctor’s mandate” to heal the country’s economic afflictions, Macdonald’s National Government secured the support of an astonishing 67 percent of the voting public. A huge number of these voters were young working-class women, participating electorally for only the second time since the franchise was finally given to all British women over the age of twenty-one in 1928.

That the offer of national unity, over class division, had proved irresistible to so large a chunk of the female electorate was enough to make even dyed-in-the-wool conservative politicians sit up and take notice. In 1931, to the utter consternation of their menfolk, women voters had proved to have minds of their own.

It was a lesson that the New Zealand National Party, formed in the year following Labour’s electoral triumph of 1935, could hardly fail to keep at the front of its mind. After all, it was women voters who had kept National out of power until it undertook to leave Labour’s welfare state intact, and who, weary of post-war controls and shortages, had seated National on the Treasury Benches for the first time in 1949.

Most of all, however, it was women voters who, like their British sisters twenty years earlier, had voted for national unity, over trade union militancy and class war, in the snap-election called by National to validate its handling of the bitter 1951 Waterfront Lockout. National’s share of the popular vote, at 54 percent, secured its most emphatic victory, ever.

Not all women were prepared to break ranks from their families’ deeply ingrained electoral preferences. Indeed, most women, like most men, voted the same way as their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. But, enough of them voted against the familial and marital grain to give National the electoral edge it had been seeking since Labour, with 55 percent of the popular vote, had so decisively shifted the political dial in 1938. Between 1949 and 1984, a period of 35 years, Labour would spend just six years in office.

That long period of National Party electoral dominance was aided by the slow decay and demoralisation of both the New Zealand trade union movement and the Labour Party. The heroic component of the movement, the cream of the nation’s working-class, had been comprehensively defeated and dispersed by the National Government in 1951.

Their defeat could not have been secured without the complicity of the Federation of Labour, whose leaders were happy to see the most radical (and democratic) unions, thorns in their sides for many years, humbled. Not that the “moderate unionists” – as National called them – were unaware of just how comprehensively they had been co-opted by the Right. Twenty years hence, John Lennon would argue that “a working-class hero is something to be”. These guys knew that they weren’t.

What’s more, the impression grew in the minds of at least some working-class men that at least some of the working-class women they rubbed shoulders with also knew that there wasn’t much of the hero left in them.

Increasingly, a crass economism, “bread and butter issues”, came to define the mission of both the trade unions and the Labour Party. Throughout the golden economic weather of the long post-war boom it was enough to keep the wolves of doubt from the door – even if the post-war prosperity, upon which the whole, delicate, socio-political compromise rested, was claimed – and acknowledged – as the National Party’s achievement. Upward social mobility, every aspiring working-class mum’s secret hope for her kids, had become the Right’s most potent promise. They were the heroes now.

Sullen, unadventurous, politically-conventional, and materialistic – that is what so many of New Zealand’s working-class men had become. Kiwis may have joked about being a nation devoted to “Rugby, Racing, and Beer”, but the view from where working-class women were now positioned offered little to laugh at. They chafed for change, for something better. If not for themselves, then for their sons and – why not? – their daughters, too.

In the 1970s and 80s those sons and daughters – especially the daughters – would re-energise and redefine the New Zealand Left. But, across the comfortable, but decidedly unheroic, 1950s and 60s, “National Mum” and “Labour Dad” would continue to cancel each other out … almost.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack on Friday, 4 October 2024.