Settler masculinity and labour: the post-pioneer era gender order and New Zealand’s Great Strike of 1913

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the two and half decades before World War One, a new settler gender order began to emerge. In one aspect of that shift, the man-alone masculine ideal of the pioneer era, though still culturally powerful, no longer represented the practices that characterized this evolving settler society. New competing masculinities highly correlated with the changing landscape of agricultural and industrial labour came to define key nodes in this new gender order. Those masculinities played a powerful role in reshaping the culture and political economy of Aotearoa/New Zealand and other settler societies. This article looks at New Zealand’s Great Strike of 1913 – one of the numerous labour actions by industrial workers in settler societies around the globe in this period – to analyse the competing ideas of settler masculinity embodied by Pākehā farmers, industrial workers, and urban and rural elites. Focusing on the ideology and practices of the different expressions of hegemonic masculinity witnessed during and before the 1913 strike sheds light on some of the more intricate relations of power in the settler gender order. It also illuminates some of the hidden nuances of settler colonial logic imbedded in the gendered concepts of individualism, independence, work, and militarism.