Margaret Tennant

Fun and fundraising: the selling of charity in New Zealand's past

Fancy bazaars, gala dinners, games evenings, fashion shows, television spectaculars and sponsored walks, relays or bicycle rides: all have been used to raise funds for the less fortunate. The combination of fun and fundraising has harnessed the ‘giving’ dynamic to a group activity, taking it beyond the operations of individual conscience. The motivations behind charitable giving have generated a considerable historical literature and more recent deliberations on how to promote generosity in the modern world. A range of motivations behind charitable giving is usually acknowledged, from altruism at one extreme, where no returns to the giver are sought, to instant reciprocity, where givers receive a material benefit. In between, giving may involve the expression of identity or reputation, with intangible returns to the giver in the form of feelings, through to community connectedness, where giving may be expected, or even required. The charity fundraising event tends more towards the self-interested end of the spectrum, but it potentially brings together those with a deep belief in the cause being promoted, and a majority with a more peripheral interest. Those analysing charity events in the recent past have suggested that the fundraising event may actually be one of the least productive methods for a charity to generate income, but that comparatively low financial gains may be counterbalanced by other returns – publicity for the cause and widening the donor base, for example. Since they involve the giving of time, as well as money, charity events have also been important in generating internal solidarity.

Making girls modern: pakeha women and menstruation in New Zealand, 1930–70[1]

Abstract This article is about the experience of menstruation, a function which many women spend much of their lives concealing. It is a topic which many regard as intensely private. Some, men and women, consider it distasteful and others still, historically unchanging and inconsequential. The authors argue that menstruation has played an important role in the twentieth-century construction of ‘womanhood’, and in constituting women as ‘the other’ in the eyes of male non-menstruators. This New Zealand study draws principally on two narratives about womens bodies. One is derived from cultural representations of the modern feminine body through sanitary product advertising, some of it international in origin, covering the time span 1935 to 1969. This is considered alongside the practical lives of bodies, the personal narratives given to us by 50 women relating their experiences of menarche and subsequent periods.

‘Magdalens and moral imbeciles’: Women's homes in nineteenth-century New Zealand

Abstract The potential for womens charitable work in nineteenth-century New Zealand was restricted by colonial womens initial isolation from each other and involvement in domestic life, and also by early government assumption of responsibility for welfare. Rescue work provided one of the few outlets for womens voluntary charity, and reflected the sanction given to womens role as a moral, civilising force in colonial society. It illustrates womens role in the development of social work, the limitations of this role in nineteenth-century New Zealand, and modifications to it in the space of three decades. The arguments used to justify womens involvement in rescuing ‘fallen’ members of their own sex were similar to those used in the later nineteenth-century, when women activists sought wider involvement in public life. It is argued that a power based upon moral influence was narrow in scope and ultimately restrictive in the New Zealand context.

Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth Century Australia

Trivialised by many contemporaries and largely disregarded by historians, nineteenth-century charity bazaars made vast amounts of money for philanthropic causes, using techniques that transcended national boundaries. As Shiell suggests, they also represented microcosms of life at the time, illuminating a range of themes in Australian social and cultural history during the years of their ascendancy. Looking at both the British origin of the charity bazaar and its adaptation to Australian circumstances, Shiell charts, in some detail, the class, gender and economic implications of the charity bazaar and its ‘fancy work’ products in colonial Australia. Shiell takes further the arguments of Frank Prochaska and others that bazaars provided an ‘intermediary space’ for women and a site of ‘genteel performance’ between the public and private spheres. Bazaars attracted opprobrium for their apparent loosening of gender constraints, for putting women on display in ways that capitalised on their sexual allure, and, sometimes, for encouraging raffles and gambling. At the same time, they financially supported many colonial charities and churches; charitable institutions such as hospitals and orphanages providing a particular focus for the meticulous planning that was required. This tension between respectability and transgression is engagingly explored in the book, illustrations from contemporary publications reinforcing the ambivalence around women’s conduct at bazaars. A particular strength of the book is its examination of the relationship between the charity bazaar, consumerism and the marketplace. Shiell shows how bazaars anticipated many of the selling techniques of department stores: the display, under one roof, of a range of items at a fixed price from which the purchaser could make a choice (rather than asking a shopkeeper for a predetermined article, or haggling over price); selling by women; and the use of supplementary attractions such as food, music and other entertainments to attract consumers and to encourage the impulse buying of ‘luxury’ (or useless) items. The commonalities were most marked with the large ‘grand bazaars’ of the later nineteenth century, which were often open for long periods of time and which offered an even greater variety of experience in specially designed exhibition sites. A contribution to the history of material culture is made most strongly in the chapter on ‘fashioning the fancy work’. This surveys the changes which occurred in response to the bazaars’ popularity, most especially the appearance of faster, easier and more universal forms of fancy work, some of it drawing upon commercial patterns. The women contributing to the array of decorative items stitched, glued, moulded and otherwise fashioned a range of threads, feathers, mosses, pine cones, animal parts and even seaweed into decorative items whose non-utilitarian nature was in itself a sign of the producer’s and the purchaser’s status. The expansion of fancy work was enabled by technological innovations such as the home sewing machine, which reduced the time spent in ‘plain’ sewing of unembellished items for the household. Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork shows the imprint of the doctoral thesis on which it is based. Its many examples and a certain repetition of argument would have benefited from a tighter editorial hand, while an index is lacking (the chapter on ‘fancy work’ would have provided some interesting challenges for an indexer, however). Shiell has nonetheless shown that charity bazaars (and their associated commercial and semi-commercial counterparts) need to be taken seriously by scholars of welfare, of business, of gender and of wider social and cultural history. Even at the minutely local level the Australian bazaar was part of a broader transnational enterprise, changing over time as the colony itself became more complex and closely settled. It provides fertile ground for cross-disciplinary analysis.

History and the non‐profit sector: Parish pump meets global constellations

Abstract The New Zealand leg of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project followed the parent study by including a substantial historical dimension. This paper reflects upon the role of history in a comparative, increasingly quantitative project which is itself a product of time and place. The historical synthesis that emerged drew upon numerous small, local studies to locate New Zealand within the wide‐ranging models of state/non‐profit sector relations generated by the Johns Hopkins study. At the same time, it attempted to tell a story to a local audience. The result was a productive tension between axes of analysis—the internationally comparative, across geographical boundaries, informed by detailed statistical analyses; and comparisons across time, where the focus was on that other “foreign country”, the past, and the research, of necessity, more qualitative and impressionistic.

Welfare interactions: Maori, government and the voluntary sector in New Zealand

This article first examines Maori welfare interactions with government, mainstream voluntary sector organisations, and Maori service providers. It then discusses definitional, methodological and political issues which arise from a consideration of welfare and voluntarism across cultures in the New Zealand context. These are complicated by the selective, and sometimes contradictory application of different articles of the Treaty of Waitangi to social policy over time. This article has been peer-reviewed.