Cluny Macpherson

book reviews : Politics in New Zealand: a Reader Stephen Levine (ed.), Auckland, George Allen and Unwin, 1978, pp. 437,

The image of the full-time housewife is a lazy, boring, unattractive person dominated or with insufficient training or initiative to get a job. On the other hand she is a ’good’ mother according to the ’old’ norms of passivity, contentment and unselfishness. The respondents’ image of the employed mother is no more favourable. She is selfish (unless) working through financial necessity), ambitious, arrogant, hassled. tired and rushed with little time for her children; she is a ’bad’ mother. The authors see these stereotypes as mirroring the ’new’ norms and values concerning personal development which

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years of age (Department of Education, Annual Report, 1973). The level of formal schooling achieved by migrants obviously has important implications for both the migrants and the host society regarding further schooling, parental support for education, employment etc. In view of the history of Samoan Education it is probably necessary to carry out further research before any very definite conclusions are reached about the overall level of educational attainment of Samoan migrants in New Zealand.

A Reply to 'Samoan Migration: a Note on Educational Levels':

The name of Salvador Minuchin is one of the best known in the field of family counselling. Structural family therapy with which Minuchin is identified, has only been developed in the second half of the twentieth centurv. It is a body of theory and techniques which approaches the individual in his social context. It focuses on individuals within the context of the family and, in doing so. asserts that the site of pathology is the family itself. rather than a designated individual. Structural family therapy assumes that context affects inner proceses and that changes in context will produce changes in the individual. The object of therapy is therefore to effect changes in the internal organisation and communication processes of the family in therapy. Minuchin outlines the theory of structural family therapy and illustrates the techniques employed with verbatim reports of interviews with several families. The latter probably comprise the most interesting and enlightening section of the book. While he emphasises the complementarity of the family and society, sociologists might wish that he had devoted more space to this but, then, as he implies, the line must be drawn somewhere.