The Plunket nurse as a New Zealand icon - Professor Linda Bryder. Department of History, University of Auckland

The Plunket nurse as a New Zealand icon
Professor Linda Bryder.
Department of History, University of Auckland

In the 1960s the Royal New Zealand Plunket Society and its nurses were said to be
‘intimately woven into the fabric of New Zealand society’.1 Bob Tizard, Minister of Health
in 1972 under a newly elected Labour Government, reflected the typical New Zealand
experience when he told Plunket council members, ‘My mother took me through the hands
of a Plunket nurse and my own four children have also been through the very sympathetic
hands of a Plunket nurse’.2 When an interviewer asked a group of New Zealand women,
who had given birth between 1949 and 1971, why they consulted Plunket nurses, the
responses were invariably that ‘everyone knew about Plunket’ and that ‘it was quite normal
to use Plunket’s services’. When asked how she found out about Plunket, ‘Kaye’ replied
that she could not remember, ‘it was just always there’; she used Plunket because it was
‘the thing to do’. ‘Carol’ said it was ‘what everyone did’.3

The Plunket Society had been founded in 1907 as part of a Western-world infant welfare
movement which aimed to improve the survival and fitness of future citizens in the
interests of ‘national efficiency’. The diagnosis of the problem and the solutions put
forward were the same everywhere – mothers were ignorant of the correct methods of
childrearing and needed to be educated. To that end, clinics were set up and nurses
employed to monitor infant health and provide advice. While the movement was medically
inspired, in New Zealand principally by Dr Frederic Truby King, it was generally organised
and maintained by voluntary groups of women, sometimes with government support. In
Britain in 1917 there were 321 voluntary societies known to the Local Government Board
who were operating 446 infant welfare centres.4 When the 1918 Maternity and Child
Welfare Act gave local authorities statutory responsibility for services for mothers and
infants, local authorities and their medical officers took over the services; by 1948 local
authorities in Britain ran 4,700 ante-natal and infant welfare clinics.5 American middle-
class women also had taken up the cause, and the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act gave them
federal support for a system of infant welfare run by nurses and managed by voluntary
committees.6 However, by the end of the decade these women had lost control of infant
welfare to the medical profession. As Sheila Rothman explained, ‘By 1929, the medical

profession had mounted a highly effective campaign that eliminated the program
[Sheppard-Towner] and made obsolete its assumptions about the proper methods of
delivering health care’.7 By contrast, New Zealand women acting in a voluntary capacity
continued to control the movement, which was run by nurses with little medical
supervision. The Plunket Society also remained relatively unique in providing free services
to almost all women without the stigma of charity. Despite ever-increasing subsidies from
the State, from a third of its costs in 1914 to 70 per cent by 1970, and with its many clinics
and six baby (‘Karitane’) hospitals, it remained a body run by women for women.

The Plunket Society and its nurses always had their critics and opponents. The Health
Department in particular resented State funding going to a voluntary organisation over
which it had little control. Returning from an overseas trip in 1939, Director-General
Michael Watt declared that a specialised infant welfare nursing service was ‘wasteful of
time, money and effort’. He wished to combine Plunket nursing with the work of the
Health Department’s public health nurses. The current trend in Britain was to combine the
home visiting for maternal and infant welfare with other forms of health visiting.8 Watt’s
opposition stemmed in part from his belief that the Plunket Society operated without
‘adequate supervision of its work by the Health Department or by the medical profession’.9
He wished to see the nursing service come under the aegis of the Health Department.

Similar complaints about an absence of medical oversight of Plunket nurses emanated from
other health officials and from a new generation of paediatricians. In 1938 paediatrician Dr
Ian Ewart claimed that ‘New Zealand was the only country where nurses prescribed for
babies’.10 In 1958 Dr Harold Turbott, shortly to be New Zealand’s Director-General of
Health, maintained that, ‘It is this virtual exclusion of the medical profession from well-
baby care and its provision mainly through a voluntary organised nursing service, which is
anomalous in our land’.11 New Zealand had developed a nursing service with no official
oversight, unlike Britain where the health visitors were responsible to the local medical
officer of health. Because the Health Department had no supervisory role, it could not
determine which duties the nurses undertook. This was left to the women who ran the
nursing services, and they steadfastly supported a specialised infant nursing system.

The infant welfare clinics in Britain, which had been set up from the first decade of the
twentieth century, targeted working-class mothers. As Lara Marks has argued, they
operated on particular assumptions about the poor and their ignorance. While many
medical professionals argued that wealthy mothers needed just as much instruction as poor
mothers, it was assumed that these mothers could not be imposed upon in the same way as
their poorer sisters, for fear of causing offence.12 One of the subjects discussed in the first
issue of Mother and Child, the official mouthpiece of the National Council for Maternity
and Child Welfare, in 1930, was the fact that middle-class women missed out on the
benefits of the infant welfare centres. The editor commented that, ‘Though theoretically the
maternity and child welfare services established under the Maternity and Child Welfare
Act, 1918, are available for any children and their mothers irrespective of class, as a matter
of actual practice it is found that the more or less well-to-do parents do not avail
themselves of the services of the health visitor or the infant welfare centre’.13 The chairman
of a small urban welfare centre suggested a paying day once a week for better-off mothers,
who ‘for obvious reasons’ would not care to attend the ordinary welfare meetings.14 Dr Eric
Pritchard, a leader in Britain’s infant welfare movement, saw this as an obvious gap in
Britain’s welfare services, as did Sir Arthur Stanley, chair of the National Council for
Maternity and Child Welfare and vice-president of the National Baby Week Council.15 The

result was the Babies’ Club movement, a subscribers’ club for mothers, which started in
Chelsea and Kensington in 1927 and which was intended ‘to give the middle-class mother
the same advantages as the poorer mother, who was able to take her child to a welfare
centre’.16 By the 1930s there were three babies’ clubs in London, with varying
subscriptions according to locality and circumstances. The advantages of membership
included a weekly clinic, home visits by a fully qualified nurse, and classes for expectant
mothers. Vera Brittain’s description of the movement stressed that the clubs were not in
any way centres for treatment and there was, therefore, no interference with family doctors,
with whom they co-operated.17 However, this was not the view of the British Medical
Association. The BMA considered that the Babies’ Club movement ‘embodied an
objectionable method’ and ‘rejected the whole thing’. It argued that mothers should be
taught to consult their doctors ‘when advice was necessary and not only when the child was
ill’, and that ‘The financial would soon settle itself – there was not one doctor in a thousand
who would not modify his fees in cases of need’.18 This totally missed the point about
middle-class women not wanting to ask for charity.

In New Zealand the local branch of the BMA (NZBMA) had voiced similar objections to
the nurses providing free services to middle-class mothers some two decades earlier. This
was a time when Plunket was newly formed, when infant welfare was regarded as a matter
of great national importance, and when many influential people were backing the new
movement. In 1910 a resolution was put forward by the Hawke’s Bay division of the
NZBMA, stating that there should be a restriction placed on the ‘unlimited use’ of Plunket
nurses. The South Canterbury division opposed this on the grounds that it would ‘arouse
hostility to the medical profession on the part of the public’ and it was abandoned.19

Plunket stressed that its services were not exclusively for the poor and that they was not
based on charity. As a mark of Plunket’s difference, it noted that Plunket nurses were
welcome in the homes of the medical profession, which pointed to their acceptance among
‘the higher professional classes’. Neville Mayman, commissioned by the New South Wales
Legislative Assembly to examine infant welfare in New Zealand, explained that the Plunket
Society had ‘taken the rather unusual course of appealing primarily to the better-to-do and
more intelligent women of the community’.20 Plunket’s council considered it important to
stress that, while the functions of the Society were ‘broadly humanitarian’, they were not
‘patronising or charitable’, or even in the ordinary sense philanthropic, but essentially
‘patriotic and educational’.21 Unlike their British counterparts, they did not target working-
class women. A universal system, which gave all women access to, and therefore a stake in
the system, united them in their support for it.

Despite attempts to define their respective responsibilities, whereby nurses were involved
in preventive medicine and doctors in curative, boundaries were blurred. The New Zealand
Observer suspected the two sectors were in competition when it asked in 1908, ‘How Drs
Bedford and McKellar [who were on the local Plunket Advisory Board] can brave the
frowns of the BMA by championing the cause of the budding maternity nurses, to bring
new competitors into the field?’22 Divisions of responsibility were laid down at a
conference in 1910. It was agreed that the doctor was to be called ‘in cases of serious
illness only’. The words ‘serious illness … are not intended to include mere infantile
ailments, eg simple diarrhoea, indigestion or colic, such as would ordinarily be dealt with
by the mother or grandmother, without calling in a doctor’.23 Yet, particularly in the early
days, nurses did sometimes look after sick babies. Plunket nurses were explicitly instructed
to delete references to babies’ ailments (other than dietetic) and to deaths in their annual

reports. Plunket’s secretary Gwen Hoddinott explained in 1934, ‘it is not considered
advisable, in view of the criticism sometimes made by the medical profession in regard to
the treatment of disease by Plunket nurses, for such references to be published in the
reports of Plunket Nurses presented to the public by Committees.’24 An outright admission
of competition came in 1922, when the Auckland branch secretary, Eileen Partridge,
claimed it would be ‘fatal’ to move a ‘weaker’ nurse to the Remuera or Epsom districts,
‘These mothers would be away to Dr Sweet at once,’ she explained.25

Paediatrics before the Second World War was primarily about infant nutrition, first to
avoid gastro-enteritis or infant diarrhoea, the major killer of babies, and then by the 1930s
to provide adequate nutrition for what was judged to be satisfactory growth. Discussing the
Plunket Society in 1938, the editor of the New Zealand Medical Journal claimed, ‘No
nurse has, or can be expected to have, any real grounding in nutrition as science’.26 This
was at the height of a dispute with the medical profession over Plunket’s infant feeding
advice. A new generation of paediatricians argued that Plunket Society advice was causing
malnutrition owing to the low level of protein in the feeding formulae and because it
encouraged prolonged breast feeding (even to the ninth month, complained one
paediatrician). In 1933, the Matron of Auckland’s Karitane Hospital, stated that ‘many of
the Doctors in Auckland ...think we tend to underfeed the babies with sugar.’27 The dispute
was about more than feeding advice, however, it was about status and control. Dr Vera
Scantlebury Brown, who visited New Zealand in 1924 before taking up the post of Director
of Infant Welfare in Victoria, Australia, assessed the work of the nurses as ‘generally
good’, though she added there was ‘a tendency for them to overestimate their
responsibilities, and to underrate the knowledge of the medical profession’.28 Dr
Montgomery Spencer of Wellington, who took the dispute to the press, complained to
Plunket’s executive in 1937 that, ‘It is not at all uncommon for mothers to be told by
Plunket nurses that my methods of feeding will prove harmful to their babies’.29 Another
paediatrician, Dr Bruton Sweet of Auckland, had the same complaint in the 1920s.30 Unlike
the British health visitors, Plunket nurses were not directly responsible to a medical officer
of health. While they were governed by rules, they had very little supervision. One doctor
in the 1940s complained that some nurses used ‘astonishing mixtures’ for infant feeding,
‘bred from their own fancy’ (others might say ‘experience’).31 During the 1930s
discussions about Plunket’s feeding advice, the Society’s acting medical adviser, Dr Ernest
Williams, alleged that the heart of the medical criticism was that Plunket nurses kept in
contact with sick children ‘for an unnecessarily long time’.32 Wanganui paediatrician Dr
Herbert Robertson added that, ‘the biggest grouse in the profession is that they are not
getting the cases referred back to them, and are losing pounds, shillings and pence.’33

Another highly publicised attack on Plunket occurred in the 1970s, when a future Director-
General of Health, Dr George Salmond, compiled a report on infant welfare services in
Wellington, based on interviews with 468 mothers. He set out to discover whether Tudor-
Hart’s ‘inverse care law’, that in an unregulated health system people received health
services in inverse proportion to their need, applied to Wellington’s infant health services.
He found it did. He concluded that, ‘Many traditionally trained Plunket nurses must find if
difficult to communicate with and to relate to the needs of working-class mothers’. He
believed this was confirmed by the fact that 29 per cent of Plunket-supervised mothers in
the lower socio-economic status area of Porirua stated that the nurse had been unable to
help them.34 From the series of interviews he chose to highlight the response of a Cook
Island mother with eight children living in a poor part of Wellington:

I don’t like nurse - She hard - We give her smile, but she no smile. Me Cook
       Islander. Pakeha nurse hard - she not help - Me not like. She not sit on my chairs -
       She stands and counts flies. She does not show a nice face to us- She never talks to
       us - Just weighs baby and goes. We like people to talk and be friendly to us.35

This was extensively cited in the medical and daily press. This criticism of insensitivity by
Plunket nurses came at the very time academic historians, influenced by social
constructionist models of history and the 1970s feminist movement, were arguing that
health professionals had imposed ‘scientific motherhood’ upon mothers and undermined
their confidence as mothers. Plunket nurses were implicated. As Rima Apple wrote,
scientific motherhood was imposed by physicians ‘or a physician-surrogate such as a
Plunket nurse’.36 The first article by an academic historian to be written specifically on
Plunket appeared in the New Zealand Journal of History in 1981. It was all about Truby
King’s prescriptions and dictates, and, according to the author, Plunket’s ‘fast-growing
cadre of nurses helped impose the conception of ideal character’.37 Others too
conceptualised the middle-class nurses in the clinics as tyrannising their working-class
clients.38

Yet the Plunket Society survived the onslaughts – from the paediatricians, the Health
Department and academic historians. Plunket’s ability to survive in the face of public
opposition must be sought in the relationship between the nurses and mothers. Without any
involvement from medical officers of health and without any statutory or other
responsibility to inspect and report upon conditions found in the homes, Plunket nurses
could establish an intimate and unthreatening relationship with mothers. This rapport was
built up through regular home visits in the first three months of the baby’s life. Health
visitors in Britain, on the other hand, were responsible to the medical officer of health, and
were required to report any insanitary conditions or other problems to that officer.39 Repeat
visits were generally to those regarded as more ignorant and inexperienced and whose
homes were seen to be more dirty and neglected.40 Judgements therefore had to be made,
which was not the case in New Zealand.

If the 1934 comment by Dr Henry Mess, an English medical officer of health, was at all
typical, then the absence of medical officer input possibly made Plunket nurses more
attractive than their British counterparts. Mess urged frequent supervision by health
visitors, claiming that the latter must say, “Scrub this floor –Wash that bedding – Clean
Susan’s head – Take baby to the Centre – Cut Lancelot’s finger nails – Did you comb all
the girls’ heads last night? - Clean the windows – Swill the yard.”’ Nothing less than this,
he said, would keep these families in a reasonably satisfactory condition.41 The fact that the
Plunket nurses did not have to report to a medical officer meant that they assumed less of
an inspectoral role. Although Plunket nurses were taught to look over mothers’ homes in
order to check that they were providing everything needed by the child, at least one nurse
believed that they should not do this. Ruby Pierson said she did not like walking through
people’s houses as if on an inspection, and so would always wash her hands at the kitchen
sink, in order to avoid having to walk through the entire house to get to the bathroom. She
also said that she taught her young nurses to do the same thing.42

Local Plunket committee reports suggest that Plunket nurses established close relations
with many mothers. The reports generally spoke very highly of the nurses. Indeed, local
committees kept an eye on the nurses, and negative feedback led to the nurses’ dismissal.
Committees were fully aware of employing sympathetic nurses. The report of the

Wellington branch’s first annual general meeting noted, ‘The Society was to be
congratulated on the personality of the nurse who did not only good to the babies but to
other members of the families by the interest she took’.43 Not all reports were so
favourable. In 1919 Dr Hilda Northcroft, who was then on the Auckland Plunket
committee, reported having received complaints from mothers about nurses. The
committee seconded Mrs Wilson to ‘speak to the nurses about being more tactful with
parents’.44 Two ‘country women’ complained, when consulted in 1934, that though they
were educated, ‘the Plunket nurse would not credit them with an ounce of brain between
them, so they ceased calling on her’.45 Women could of course vote with their feet – this
happened in one place in 1919, where attendances at the clinic dropped owing to an
unpopular nurse. The committee replaced the nurse and attendances went up again
immediately. 46

Nurses, too, spoke of the relationships they built up with mothers. One Plunket nurse, who
qualified in 1947, reflected, ‘The best thing about Plunket was the friendships I made with
the mothers. They were wonderful to me. Mothers I knew stop me today and talk to me….
Plunket was my life.’47 Auckland Plunket nurse Mary Carmichael, who joined the service
in 1923, looked back at her experiences as a Plunket nurse on her retirement in 1950. She
had affectionate memories of the tramwaymen who never passed her by even if the chains
were up. ‘They recognised the grey uniform of the Plunket nurse and always stopped,’ she
said. ‘In fact they often recognised me personally for I had been to the homes of many of
them to care for their babies’. She reflected ‘with rather a shudder’ on the hours she
worked: ‘There was no limit to the time given. The nurse had her “round” to do and then
had to be prepared to go out at call’. Another Auckland Plunket nurse, Ivy Margaret
Johnson, who worked from 1925 to 1946, ‘had made herself available to mothers and their
babies during the day, at night and during holidays’.48 In 1921 one nurse described a very
serious case of mastitis which the doctor had left entirely in her hands; she reflected that
morning and evening visits greatly increased her workload.49 Ruby Pierson recalled an
occasion when she stayed all night with a baby suffering from pneumonia.50 ‘Plunket
father’, writing in support of Plunket in 1934, claimed, ‘I have known the Plunket nurse to
take precarious little patients to her own home, and lose nights of sleep with them.’51
Another Plunket nurse, Joan Meyer, remembered occasionally taking children home for the
weekend if the family was not coping.52

Jane Lewis has argued that in England the clinics were probably the most successful part of
the infant welfare services, since women could choose whether or not to attend.53
Descriptions of Plunket clinics, where mothers brought their babies after three months,
suggests that they were well patronised. The Wellington branch committee described the
local Plunket rooms in 1915 as ‘very crowded during the times the nurses attend’.54 In an
Auckland suburb in 1926 one nurse expressed concern at the number of women who,
having seen the crowds waiting, left the clinic before the nurse had a chance to see them
(an appointment system was not generally used until after the Second World War).55 When
new central rooms were opened in Auckland in 1927, the secretary wondered how they had
managed in their old quarters, ‘where, on busy days, it was impossible to find seating
accommodation for the many waiting mothers, babies and their friends’.56

Mothers were not victims; their interaction with the nurses was a two-way process. For
example, ‘Rosaleen’ explained how just after she graduated as a Plunket nurse in 1957, the
mothers would sometimes laugh at her if she was too dogmatic about ‘sticking to the
book’, declaring that babies never stuck to rules. ‘They’d tell me “You’ll learn as you
mature”, and I did’.57 ‘Mary’, another Plunket nurse who trained in the 1960s, claimed,
‘My mothers were my best teachers. They always told me what had worked for them
hoping I would pass it on to other people’.58

In rural New Zealand, Plunket nurses were respected community figures, who performed
multiple functions. One nurse recalled, ‘I’d walk in the door and they’d say, “Nurse, the
baby’s okay but could you help us with the children’s correspondence lessons?” So, I’d do
a bit of both, check the baby and help with the correspondence lessons.’59 Another nurse
was asked, “Would you like a cup of tea?” “I’ve just had one,” she said. “You always have
time for everyone but me,” the mother replied. She learned that she had to have to drink a
cup of tea at every house. This nurse flew once a month from Hokitika to Haast on a two-
seater plane. Once there, ‘We’d sit around and talk and laugh while I weighed and checked
the babies. It was very nice. I stayed a couple of nights... There was no doctor down there...
I think they came to see me because it was someone coming in from outside to see them
and talk to them.’60 Another recalled that, ‘A number of families were miles from the
nearest doctor. Many times a Plunket or Public Health Nurse was the first person to see or
diagnose an urgent situation.’ 61

Plunket nurses were sometimes the only outside visitors in urban areas as well. As Frieda
Massey, a Plunket nurse in Auckland from 1967 to 1986 and Nurse Adviser for the
Auckland Area from 1970 to 1975, explained, ‘We get to meet a very wide range of people,
and for some, we may be the only visitor a mother has for days’.62 An article in the New
Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 1984 noted that some families were reluctant to ask for help
or did not know where to find it. ‘Often, Plunket is the only outside help tolerated’, it
stated. There was no stigma attached to Plunket, as they visited everyone. Plunket’s
Director of Nursing Services in the 1980s explained, ‘Roll a social worker, housing officer,
arbitrator, chauffeur, home economist, nurse and friend into just one person and you’ll get
an idea of the work the nurses do’. One nurse, who worked in an area of high
unemployment in the 1980s, explained that her activities included writing letters in support
of housing applications and dealing with council health inspectors over problems caused by
a lack of maintenance, such as leaking toilets, rats, holes in the floor, ‘mainly on behalf of

people who have little command of English and less understanding of their landlords’
responsibilities!’63

In his 1975 report Salmond chose to highlight a negative view of Plunket from a Pacific
Island mother. He could equally well have chosen to highlight some of the positive
comments quoted in the report itself, such as the following: ‘Baby had a rash – “lots of
babies get that”, she said and I didn’t feel so bad then. She is so nice and does not boss you
round’. This comment was found in the category coming ‘mainly from mothers resident in
the city core and Porirua areas’, lower socio-economic areas.64 Mothers were also surveyed
on their responses to Plunket nurses in South Auckland, another area with a significant
number of Maori and Pacific Island residents of low socio-economic status, in the 1980s.
Maori mothers regarded some Plunket nurses as helpful and others as far too officious and
judgmental. Some said they felt uncomfortable because the nurses were generally white
and middle-class, and they distrusted nurses without children of their own.65 Pacific
Islanders appeared to have a more positive view of the nurses than did Maori. They
explained that many Pacific Island people did not need help with child rearing because they
were brought up from an early age to care for younger brothers and sisters. However, they
admitted that many new arrivals to New Zealand, lacking self-confidence and the ability to
cope with a new culture, turned to the Plunket nurse.66 Nurses themselves found working
with people from different cultures and classes challenging. Some suffered from what was
called at the time ‘reality shock’; approaching the task as a mission they were soon
disillusioned when their presence was resented.67 Others, however, had more positive
experiences, and sometimes helped parents to access the system. ‘Felicity’ explained that
she became involved with a Child Abuse Protection Team for South Auckland, and found
this a problem, ‘Some families distrusted you if you brought in Social Welfare. They felt
you had betrayed them and it was very difficult for you to work with them and give help.’68
Others found their involvement in this delicate situation more appreciated. As one nurse
explained, ‘When the child was brought to the house I had to be there as an observer to
note how the father treated the child. The mother relied on me a lot. She’d come to the
Clinic when I was there and tell me her troubles.’ 69

Despite being subjected to attacks from the Health Department and from some members of
the medical profession, Plunket’s nursing services survived and flourished whilst claiming
more and more support from the state. Director-General of Health Michael Watt wrote in
his unpublished autobiography, ‘I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that
Governments in their approach to the matter [Plunket] were in no sense deterred from
proferring financial aid by knowledge of the fact that the Society had very wide
membership and if so inclined could have exercised considerable political pressure.’70
Women did indeed exert considerable political pressure; they fought hard to retain Plunket.
Why were women so committed to Plunket? One major factor was the relationship between
Plunket nurses and mothers at a significant and vulnerable time in their lives, most
commonly just after they had their first child. In Britain the tendency to combine infant
health visiting with other public health services culminated in Section 24 of the National
Health Service Act 1946 which required local health authorities to make provision ‘for the
visiting of persons in their homes by visitors, to be called ‘Health Visitors’, for the purpose
of giving advice as to the care of young children, persons suffering from illness and
expectant or nursing mothers, and as to the measures necessary to prevent the spread of
infection’.71 Public health officials in New Zealand would have liked to follow a similar
course, but were prevented by the women who ran and supported Plunket and who had
considerable political influence. The mothers did not agree with Watt’s assessment that the

services were ‘wasteful of time, money and effort’, and these women had more access to
political power and to public support than did the Director-General of Health. A specialised
infant welfare service was a luxury but it was one that the women of New Zealand were
prepared to defend – at least until the 1980s when cutbacks to the services, as part of the
restructuring of New Zealand’s welfare state, meant they were more targeted and
consequently not so universally supported.

   1. Marshall W. Raffel, ‘A Consultative Committee on Infant and Pre-school Health
       Services’, New Zealand Journal of Public Administration, 28, I, 1965, p.78. Plunket
       Society Submission to Consultative Committee on Infant and Pre-school Health
       Services 1959, Hocken Library, Dunedin, p.37. Also described as such by Prime
       Minister Keith Holyoake in 1970: K. Holyoake to Mrs P.L. McKenzie, Pahiatua, 14
       August 1970, H1 127 37391 box 59, National Archives. The Society’s official name
       was the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children until
       1980 when it adopted its colloquial name, the Plunket Society.
   2. Plunket Society Council minutes, 10-11 April 1973.
   3. Sean J. Maxwell, ‘Mothers and Plunket : a study of infant care in Auckland, 1950-
       1975’, MA research essay, University of Auckland, 1993, p.56.
   4. Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood, Croom Helm, London, 1980.
   5. Charles Webster, The Health Services Since the War. Volume 1. Problems of Health
       Care. The National Health Service Before 1957, London, HMSO, 1988, pp.7, 378.
   6. Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890-
       1930, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.177.
   7. Sheila Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place. A History of Changing Ideals and
       Practices, 1870 to the Present, New York, Basic Books, New York, 1978, p.142.
   8. Annual Conference of Women Public Health Officers, London, 1934, p.4, SA/HVA
       Box 71, D1/3, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library for the History and
       Understanding of Medicine.
   9. Cited in Watt’s unpublished autobiography, pp.124-5. M.H. Watt, Report of the
       Director-General of Health Reviewing Public-Health Administration in North
       America, the UK and Scandinavia, with Consequent Proposals for the Development
       of the New Zealand System, Wellington, 1940, pp. 30-1.
   10. Vida Jowett to Daisy Begg, 6 September 1938, Plunket Society Archives (PSA)
       239, Hocken Library.
   11. Raffel, ‘A consultative committee’, p.48.
   12. Lara Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in
       Early Twentieth Century London, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1996, p.168.
   13. Mother and Child, 1, 1, 1930, p.17.
   14. E.B. Turner, Mother and Child, 1,1, 1930, p.19.
   15. Mother and Child, 1, 4, 1930, p.123.
   16. Mother and Child, 3, 5, 1932, p.158.
   17. ibid.
   18. Mother and Child, 1, 1, 1930, p.18.
   19. New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ), 8, 1910, pp.78, 80.
   20. Report of the Commissioner, Mr Neville Mayman, on the Inquiry into the Welfare
       of Mothers and Children in New Zealand, New South Wales Parliamentary Papers,
       vol.5, 1918, 291, p.10.
   21. Plunket Society, Annual report, 1912-13, p.8.

22. New Zealand Observer 27 June 1908.
23. Honorary Secretary BMA Otago Branch, to Plunket Society, 29 August 1910, PSA,
    AG7 11-5.
24. Hoddinott to Tweed, 30 April 1934.04.30, PSA 231.
25. Partridge to Pattrick, 16 November 1922, PSA 722.
26. NZMJ, 3, 1938, 186.
27. Nora Fitzgibbon to Anne Pattrick, 21 February 1933, PSA 375.
28. H. Main & V. Scantlebury, ‘Report to the Minister of Public Health on the Welfare
    of Women and Children’, Department of Public Health, Victoria, 1926, p.30.
29. Spencer to President and Council, 18 December 1937, PSA239.
30. Bruton Sweet to Partridge, 22 November 1928, PSA 1186.
31. Quin to Deem, 25 October 1950, PSA 595.
32. Report of meeting of Medical Advisory Committee to Re-examine Plunket Feeding,
    17 June 1938, p.41, PSA AG7 11-49.
33. ibid.
34. George C. Salmond, Maternal and Infant Care in Wellington. A Health Care
    Consumer Study, Department of Health, Special Report Series 45 (Salmond
    Report), Government Printer, Wellington, 1975, p.76.
35. Salmond Report, p.85.
36. Rima Apple, ‘The Medicalization of Infant Feeding in the United States and New
    Zealand: Two Countries, One Experience’, Journal of Human Lactation, 10, 1,
    1994, p.25.
37. Erik Olssen, ‘Truby King and the Plunket Society: An Analysis of a Prescriptive
    Ideology’, New Zealand Journal of History, 15, 1, 1981, pp. 3-23. My emphasis.
38. See discussion by Claudia Knapman, ‘Reconstructing Mothering: Feminism and the
    Early Childhood Centre’, Australian Feminist Studies, 18, 1993, p.122.
39. Marks, Metropolitan Maternity, p.173.
40. ibid., p.177.
41. Fourth Annual Conference of Women Public Health Officers, London, 1934, p.9,
    SA/HVA Box 71, D1/4, Wellcome Library.
42. Elizabeth Cox, ‘Plunket Plus Commonsense:’ Women and the Plunket Society,
    1940-1960’, MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1996, p.97.
43. Plunket Society, Wellington Branch, minutes of AGM, 7 May 1909.
44. Plunket Society, Auckland Branch minutes, 4 December 1919.
45. Dominion, 10 February 1934.
46. Plunket Society, Auckland Branch minutes, 2 October 1919, 6 November 1919.
47. Joan, cited in Beryl Powell, ‘Keep Pumping those Brakes Nurse’, unpublished
    manuscript (first names only are used by Powell).
48. NZ Herald (NZH), 11 August 1962.
49. Plunket Society, Auckland Branch minutes, 7 April 1921.
50. Oral History Project 1992, cited in Cox, p.100.
51. NZH, 30 June 1934.
52. Oral History Project, 1992, cited in Cox, p.100.
53. Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood, Child and Maternal Welfare in England,
    1900-1939, Croom Helm, London, 1980.
54. Plunket Society, Wellington Branch, minutes. 2 December 1915.
55. Plunket Society, Auckland Branch, Eighteenth annual report, June 1926, p.28.
56. Plunket Society, Auckland Branch, Nineteenth annual report, June 1927, p.28.
57. Rosaleen, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.
58. Mary, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.

59. Iris, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.
   60. Joan, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.
   61. Gwen, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.
   62. Adele Follick, ‘Frieda Massey: Far from a Battleaxe!’, New Zealand Woman’s
       Weekly (NZWW), 6 October 1986, p.17.
   63. Claire O’Brien, ‘They see the darker side of NZ life’, NZWW, 22 October 1984, pp.
       33-35.
   64. Salmond Report, p.55.
   65. Michael Clinton ‘Child Health Services in South Auckland Project: Report to the
       Hon Mr David Caygill, Minister of Health. June 1988’, Victoria University of
       Wellington, Wellington, 1988, p. 43. Maori constituted 17.1 per cent of the
       population and 12.7 per cent were Pacific Islanders.
   66. Clinton, p.45. Many Pacific Islanders had immigrated to New Zealand during the
       1960s, at a time to fill manual jobs at a time when New Zealand had full
       employment. With the downturn of the economy from the late 1970s they were the
       first to suffer.
   67. Clinton, p.17.
   68. Felicity, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.
   69. Patty, in Beryl Powell, manuscript.
   70. Watt, J.M., unpublished autobiography, pp.56-7.
   71. Health Visiting in the Seventies and the staffing of the Health Visiting and School
       Nursing services, D2/11 1975, Wellcome Library.

© Linda Bryder. August 2002. Department of History, University of Auckland, New
Zealand.

Recommended citation format
Bryder, Linda. "The Plunket Nurses as a New Zealand Icon." 2002: 20 pars. Online
UKCHNM. Available at: http://www.ukchnm.org/ [Accessed: 24 August 2007].