Join us for a special ANZAC Day talk on Thursday 25 April at 2pm to celebrate our new exhibition Home Front Heroines.

From January 1942 the New Zealand Government was able to direct women to work in essential industries. This saw many women working in jobs which prior to the war had been seen as male occupations. However the gender norms of the 1930s and 1940s had already been called into question in 1940 when the Women’s Land Corp was set up. Land girls often took on farm work which had previously been considered the domain of men.

Elizabeth Ward’s talk ‘Manpowering’ women and the challenge to gender norms during the Second World War will examine how the ‘manpowering’ of women upset gender norms and the issues this raised for New Zealand society. Elizabeth Ward is the manager of the Marlborough Museum. She has a PhD in History and specialises in the interwar period.

Image | A Land Girl driving a Caterpillar Crawler. Canterbury Agricultural College, Lincoln, 1941. Photo album of Joyce Throp.