Abstract:
New Zealand mental hospitals faced a crisis of unprecedented proportions at the end of World War II. Nursing shortages were at such a level that it became almost impossible to provide basic services. Desperate circumstances led the New Zealand Government to reach for an ‘instant solution’ - in April 1946 Cabinet approved funding to recruit 200 ‘suitable girls’ from Britain. This paper tells the story of the subsequent assisted immigration scheme in which young British women enthusiastically signed up for the opportunity to move across the world, but were not so keen to stay in the work once they realized the realities of New Zealand public mental hospital nursing. Two historical discourses are disturbed in the telling of this story: first, the assumption that the government and society valued women primarily as wives and mothers in post-war New Zealand and second, the belief that health officials strove for professionalisation of psychiatric nursing during the 1940s. Faced with a female workforce crisis, officials of the Departments of Immigration and Health, prioritized singleness above attributes of domesticity and refocused on employing unqualified, working class migrant women to do the ‘dirty work’ of healthcare that local women were unwilling to do.
