Class, Gender and the Vote
Perspectives from New Zealand History

Edited by Miles Fairburn and Erik Olssen

With the rise of the study of social history in the second half of the twentieth century, the focus of many historians shifted from politics, high culture and foreign policy to new areas, including health, demographics,  families, crime, women and immigration. But with this new historical work came a problem that threatened coherence in the field: how to deal with the detail of so many different pasts amongst the people of New Zealand?

The editors of this book set out to show that a quantitative approach to history can help to rectify this problem. The essays they have chosen address some potent themes – class, mobility, gender and how people vote – and also represent some of the work that has been produced by two major research projects: the Caversham Project, initiated by Erik Olssen in the late 1970s and based at the University of Otago, and the New Zealand working class conservatism project, founded in 1998 by Miles Fairburn and S.J. Haslett at the University of Canterbury. The book is divided into five sections: class, segregation and religion; class and mobility; class, gender and voting behaviour; class imagery; and a final section on best practice in quantitative historical research. This makes the volume a rich and rewarding read.

Contents

Introduction
1 Stability and Egalitarianism: New Zealand 1911–1951
2 Residential Segregation and the Interwar Christchurch Experience
3 Church, Occupation and Class in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1940
4 'For Better or Worse': Marriage Patterns in Dunedin's Southern Suburbs, 1881–1938
5 Apprenticeship or Proletariat? Social Mobility in Rural Nineteenth-Century Canterbury
6 'Educating the Elite?: Otago Boys' High School Fathers and Sons, 1863–1903
7 Was Gender a Factor in Voter Participation at New Zealand Elections?
8 Did Farmers Really 'lurch towards the left' in 1935?
9 The Unlikely Incumbent: Clyde Carr in Timaru, 1928–1954
10 'Class' in the Eye of the Beholder in 1930s and 1940s New Zealand Society
11 Visual Constructs of Wealth in The Maoriland Worker, 1911–12: Cartoon and Intertext
12 Past Lessons: Best Practice in Quantitative Historical Research
Notes 

Contributors

Howard Baldwin, Lydia Bloy, Eleanor Cottle, Miles Fairburn, S.J. Haslett, David Hood, Steve Kerr, Steve McLeod, Linda Moore, Erik Olssen, Michael Smith, John Stenhouse, Seren Wendelken.

About the Editors

Miles Fairburn is Professor of History at the University of Canterbury.
Erik Olssen is Professor Emeritus and former head of the History Department, University of Otago.

Publication Details

ISBN 1 877372 02 1, 230 x 150 mm, 288 pages, $45.00 
Release: December 2005