Labours of love: Marriage and emotion in Aotearoa/New Zealand. 1918 - 1970s

Conceiving of intimate life as a domain of emotional effort, this thesis charts the labours of Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders who lived and loved between the close of the Great War and the late-1970s. It asks how the work of contracting and conducting a marriage was signified, performed, and transformed over that period. If cultures of emotion are founded on reciprocity, the categories of husband and wife designated what feelings were owed or owing. As such, plotting the history of this affective economy may offer a fuller picture of the everyday work of living and loving. Six thematic chapters are based on personal manuscripts, contemporary sources, and autobiographical writings, as well as secondary sources. Chapter one sketches the consolidation of a complex and inequitable emotional regime, underwritten by settler-colonial valuations of the nuclear family, between 1918 and the late-1950s. Chapter two follows the beginning of this regime’s collapse amid rapid social change during the 1960s and 1970s. Chapters that follow showcase love’s labours across the life-course, beginning with the efforts of early love: chapter three follows the migration of courtship’s rituals, passions, and routines from encounters between the unmarried into and beyond marital relationships. Conversely, chapter four observes the ‘marital rite’s’ diffusion into a wider array of pleasure-oriented practices among unmarried and married alike. Chapter five illuminates breadwinners’ and home-makers’ efforts to nurture ‘family life’. Finally, chapter six examines emotional transitions occasioned by the ‘twilight years’, a phase of decline opening new fields of labour to the management of relationship collapse and mortality. This study concludes with the notion, persistent throughout, that emancipation from constraint did not always alleviate the burden of love’s labours. Tracing their lightness and weight against long-term shifts in economic and political power then offers previously unseen views of their deeply human consequences