Kōrero: Women’s labour organisations

Sumptuously dressed in fashionable clothing, Mrs Marjorie Coates (wife of politician Gordon Coates) opens a cookery school for unemployed women in Christchurch in 1932. It was generally believed that once trained in the domestic arts, unemployed girls and women attending the school would be able to find work as servants. The extent to which this happened is unclear – in some centres a high proportion of unemployed women were servants. When domestic work was offered to unemployed women it was for low wages, or just their keep.