PIONEERS IN PETTICOATS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 7

PIONEERS IN PETTICOATS

By

EILEEN L.

SOPER

W HEN the women of Scotland began emigrating to Otago with their husbands and families during the 1840's, the skirts that billowed out beneath their closely fitting bodices covered some times as many as seven petticoats which, hidden under warm-coloured cashmere or diaphanous muslin, swayed with a charming femininity. These garments, not only by reason of their grace, but also because of their bulk, demanded for their wearers certain elegances of living-carriages on finely paved roads, lofty rooms in solid houses and furniture to balance their voluminous silhouettes. In short, they required a settled environment where children might be decently reared and educated and a woman could fulfil her proper mission as mistress and mainstay of the home. But times were hard. Scotland could not provide that necessary environment. Otago, on the contrary, might prove to be an Eldorado, giving men a better livelihood, children the opportunity they needed, and women a means of realising to the full their domestic tapabilities. So the great decision was made, and, wearing the apparel of ease and stability, wives accompanied their husbands into the adventure of change and upheaval that was known as emigration. If the fashion of the day was unsuitable for emigration, how much more so was it unsuitable for pioneering; for (continued on next page)

Otago Centennial

PROVINCE AND PEOPLE

(continued from previous page) pioneering was never intended for women. The word. derives from pionnier, a foot-soldier, who, with spade and axe, made the roads and prepared the way for the main army. Yet, literally, pioneering was what the women of ‘the 1840’s found that they had to do when they came to Otago. _ They arrived, after their long and often terrifying sea-voyage, accompanied by their possessions. Furniture, hangings, utensils, garments-all these spelt home, and home was what the women on the first ships had been visualising for months. But, though the promised land was reached at last it had no home to offer. The long grass © barracks, hastily ¢rected as a temporary shelter were communal dwellings; the tents, the other alternative, were too small and flimsy for permanency. Wives, many of them gently nurtured and none of them used to such*conditions, found not only that they must wait until a house was actually built for them before they could begin home-making, but that, in many cases, their own husbands would have to act as builder and, what is more, that they themselves would have to help. * * ee O, despite their petticoats, the women of Otago became pioneers. Like the foot-soldiers of old they armed themselves with spade and axe and assisted their husbands in preparing the way. Whey helped to mix clay and tussock and water for wattle-and-daub walls, to cut sods for sod houses, or mould clay into bricks to be dried by the sun. They dragged posts from the bush for doorposts and uprights and made shelters from such material as they could com-mand-in some cases merely a piece of

sail-cloth or tarpaulin-until such time as there was a roof overhead. In wet and cold weather their lot was indescribably miserable. They were often at their wits’ end trying to keep clothing dry, finding wood to light a fire in the open, and cooking the meal that their. hungry family was in need of-for, though they helped in their husband’s work, women also had their own affairs to attend to. Nor was their’ pioneering finished when the house was completed, for some of the new tasks they now found before them were as foreign to their previous experience as the spade and axe had been. Women who had hitherto never done a hand’s turn for themselves, or who had bought everything ready-made from a Scottish shop, or who were so young that they looked more like children than adults, now had to adapt themselves to a new way of life. They learned to make slush lamps, soap and candles, to bake bread in camp ovens, and produce butter and cheese from home-made churns and presses. . They patched and mended, or made new clothes when the old could last no longer, and they laundered and ironed their voluminous garments under conditiops that nowadays would seem imposssible. In the midst of it all, they dealt with sickness and the trials of childbirth. When there were no doctors or midwives

available, women shouldered a new responsibilty and assisted one another in the birth of their babies. But, in isolated areas where the nearest neighbour was miles away, even that was impossible on occasions, and many a young mother was unattended. Sometimes her baby died. Sometimes her own life was the price demanded. "ook we.