AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

It could reasonably be argued that the misfortune or troubles that occur throughout  your life play a dominant role in making you what you are today. But to fully understand your own experience, you must possess “sociological imagination”. This essay explains how I have arrived at university today as a mature student rather than at eighteen years of age, as is the norm. Instead of focusing on past troubles but rather by examining the social and historical contexts of my life, I am better equipped to “see” the greater picture of myself and my role in society.  C.Wright Mills considers that:

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and their intersections within a society, has completed its intellectual journey (1959, p.5).

Therefore, to fully grasp my own biography, I must also examine the historical context.

Mills wrote these words when I was nine years old and living on a dairy farm with my family. Village life was thriving – there was a post office, grocery store, drapery, petrol station, butcher, dairy and primary school. There was also a dairy factory in which many of the local men were employed. Even though there must have been differences between the living standards of say, the factory workers and the farmers, these were not evident as most people owned cars and their own homes – rental properties were unheard of in the village. Some consider that New Zealand society of this era was “classless” but Belich (1996, p.23) argues that it is rather that the working class had a relatively high standard of living so that although the class lines were there, they were less visible, and certainly not to me, then. Even if some of the villagers were poor, they were able to take advantage of the generous welfare benefits of the Keynesian styled government of the time.  I couldn’t have known that this era in which I was living is now considered by some to be New Zealand’s “golden age”; unemployment was almost non-existent - it was immediately post-war and servicemen (my father included) had returned home, looking for a sanctuary.

When I was twelve, I went away to an all girls’ boarding school. Pupils were graded into three classes – Professional, Commercial and General, groups that other schools sometimes referred to as  A, B, and C. The girls in the Professional classes were taught the subjects that might prepare them for further education but mainly the pupils expected they would take up traditonally feminine roles such as nursing and teaching. The Commercial stream was for the future secretaries – they learned typing, shorthand and english of course but no languages, sciences or mathematics. The General class fared worst of all – they were more blatantly New Zealand’s future housewives; their lessons included cooking and sewing along with the compulsory English.  Since this was the era in which ideas of theorists such as Talcott Parsons held sway, the education we were all receiving was as it should have been, since ideas of “instrumental functionalism” proposed that women were better suited for “expressive” roles anyway (Parsons and Bales, 1955). Hence we were being steered towards our vocations of wifery and motherhood in which we would deal with the family’s needs in the home.  Presumably the young boys we knew were learning “instrumental” ways in their schools so that they could deal with the outside world through their jobs.

When I left school at sixteen, I did not expect to go to university. I always say that I did not want to go but in fact, it never occurred to me. Even though there were seven children in my family, the expense of further education probably would not have presented itself since there were not the fees of today. Looking at my society as a whole, I see that I would have been unusual amongst my peers if I had continued into tertiary education.  None of my classmates from the village school went to university. When I started work in the Public Service, because of my “professional” education I worked in the main office, one of only two young women amongst about twenty men. Upstairs was the typing pool – the end result of the commercial course in the schools. Eight young women, all single, sat at typewriters the entire day, typing in time to selected music, under the beady gaze of a “spinster” aged thirty-five. This seems totally bizarre today of course but now I can see that the gendered education system of the time just did not allow for anything different. We were all biding time for our most important roles in life and after a year or so most left to get married – in their late teens or early twenties. As did I.

I like to think that some of those typists will reach university as I have; society has changed so  much that this is possible now. Mature students are encouraged at all universities, no ageism here, and I find it a small irony (as does she) that one of my old schoolfriends from the commercial class is finishing her Master of Arts degree this year, taking her lecture notes in shorthand and typing her essays at  breakneck speed. I still visit my hometown since my sister now owns the farm – bypassing my brother who was the only consideration at the time. Women farmers were unheard of in the 1950s; even though the landgirls of the Second World War kept the farms going (efficiently) and women often worked just as hard as the men on the farm (and harder in the home), it was always the man who was considered the farmer and the woman his helpmate, as immortalised in the nursery rhyme “The farmer and his wife”. My sister faced considerable opposition in the family since she was going against the traditional wishes of our parents but eventually she was able to buy out all her siblings.  Today her job description is farmer and she successfully keeps her business running, having turned the old farmhouse into a Bed and Breakfast when farming subsidies were dropped in the government reforms of the 1980s and she needed to diversify.  (Collins, p.19).

This was about the time when I went to live in Europe and I didn’t return until 2002. The era of “Rogernomics” completely passed me by but my old hometown was not so lucky. Margaret Wilson suggests that the election of the fourth Labour Government in 1984  “saw the beginning of a period of radical change in New Zealand that left no aspect of life untouched” (cited Holland and Boston, 1990, p.8). The abrupt changes wrought by the switch from a welfare state to a government “committed to market economies”(Denemark, ibid, p.287) meant that alongside the removal of farmers’ subsidies, public services were streamlined or privatised.  I can understand how people might consider the busy village life of the 50s as our heyday since the town is all but deserted now. Many of the smaller farms have amalgamated, resulting in farmers being part of the urbanisation trend and moving to the cities. The dairy factory has closed, along with the drapery and butcher; the restructuring of the public sector put paid to the local post office.  The closure of small dairy factories meant that their workers too had to move to bigger cities for work and the rolls on the tiny schools that held communities together plummeted.  The government today has continued ringing the death knell for small communities with neo-liberal reforms which have included cuts to education spending. My old primary school narrowly escaped the chop but all the neighbouring ones were shut. These closures are of concern to families left in the area since schools “are physically and socially a major part of the ‘social glue’ that keeps the local population in touch as a functioning community” (Kearns et al; p.219).

The villagers who lost their factory jobs at the time would have considered their misfortunes to be the personal troubles that C.Wright Mills suggests the average person focuses on, without realising that privatising of public works nation-wide meant it was beyond their control. The so-called “urban drift” that happened at that time suggests that people just wandered off to town for something better to do but the closing of all the coastal dairy factories to be replaced by Fonterra’s massive industrial unit in Hawera meant they were forced to move for work. When I came back to New Zealand with my daughters, I chose to live in Auckland for its opportunities as the business centre of New Zealand and its proximity to the international airport since most holidays my daughters would be travelling to visit family. When looking at this particular personal trouble of mine with the insight of sociological imagination, I can now see my situation against a backdrop of one in three marriages bound for divorce. I understand why I didn’t leave earlier – my options were limited without a formal education and I was totally dependant on my husband. Divorce for a long time had a stigma attached to it – that is all but gone now. Back in Auckland, I decided to join my old schoolfriend at university and finally study for the degree that was out of reach before.  My new sociological imagination means I can fully understand why I didn’t go to university as a young person; it had little to do with my personal circumstances. I would have been swimming against an invisible but powerful tide called society.  It can be a little frightening to consider the strength of social forces.  C. Wright Mills writes that to understand your own history from a personal viewpoint at the same time as an historical one can be a “terrible lesson: in many ways a magnificent one” (p.6). For me it is a bit of both.

1642 words.

Bibliography

Belich, J. (1996). Making peoples. Auckland: Penguin.

Collins, S. (1987). Rogernomics; is there a better way? Auckland: Pitman.

Easton, B. (1997). In stormy seas: the post-war New Zealand economy. Dunedin: University of Otago.

Holland, M., and Boston, J. (1990). (Eds.). The fourth labour government. (2^nd Ed.). Auckland: Oxford University.

Kearns, R. A., Lewis., et al. (2010). “School closures as breaches in the fabric of rural welfare: community perspectives from New Zealand”. Welfare Reform in Rural Places: Comparative Perspectives, 15:219–236.

Mills, C.W. (1959).The sociological imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Parsons, T., and Bales, R. (1955). Family socialization and interaction process. New York: Free Press.