Ladies in the backroom : a study of women party activists in the National and Labour parties

The findings that men and women participate differently in political activities of all kinds - from voting to membership of parties, to interest in politics and political attitudes is one of the most thoroughly substantiated in political science. Women have been found to vote less than men, to have less interest in politics than men, and to be more conservative than men.[…] Given the interest in the woman's movement in New Zealand and overseas, and the systematic overseas evidence of widespread differences in the political behaviour of men and women, I decided in my research to look more closely at the role women played in the two major New Zealand parties - the New Zealand National party and the New Zealand Labour party. To do so, I interviewed a group of fifty women activists - twenty five women from the Auckland Women’s branch (the only functioning women’s branch in the Auckland city area) and twenty five women-from the National Party's Remuera Electorate, where activists were selected from the five women’s branches in the Electorate. […] One of the objectives of this thesis given its comparative basis, was to ascertain to what extent the political behaviour of women party activists was shaped by the different party structures, and different constitutional procedures within which women party activists operated and to what extent their political behaviour was shaped by factors of sex (as found overseas) which transcended party lines. [extract from Introduction