Māori Women's Welfare League

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The Māori Women's Welfare League ( MWWL ; German  Māori-Frauen-Wohlfahrts-Bund ) is a New Zealand women's organization that works on social and political issues for the interests of Māori women and their families. Meagan Joe has served as the national president since 2008 .

The Māori Women's Welfare League ( Rōpū Wāhine Māori Toko i te Ora ) was founded in 1951 and is an inter-tribal organization with over 3000 members. It is networked with over 130 local subdivisions across New Zealand and has connections that extend as far as Australia , the United States Kingdom and Hawaii are enough. It thus represents the most comprehensive social network of the Māori.

history

background

The urbanization of the Maori population that began in the 1930s was accompanied by the emergence of considerable social problems and grievances. According to the 1936 census, only 10% of the Māori lived in cities, compared to 25% in 1945 and more than half by the end of the 1950s. The closer coexistence between Māori and Pākehā led to tension, prejudice and discrimination against the Maori population. Bad housing, unemployment , alcoholism , violence and crimeon the part of the Māori were among other things further characteristics of the development. While the proportion of Māori among those incarcerated in prisons was 4% in the 1920s, it had grown to 15% by 1940, followed by an annual increase of an average of 8.8% between 1950 and the mid-1970s.

In 1946, with the Māori Social and Economic Advancement Act, so-called tribal committees were formed in the Iwi and welfare officers (civil servants) were named on the government side. These were directly subordinate to the Department of Native Affairs and had the task of acting as mediators between the committees and the government. But the committees in the Māori communes were male-dominated and did not orientate themselves towards the needs of women and children and, as a rule, showed no interest in family matters. In order to improve the social situation of Māori women and their children, it was natural to found a women's organization.

Before the League was founded

In 1936, District Nurse Robina Cameron of Rotorua founded the Women's Health League out of concern for women 's health . In order to build on the experience of the organization and to be able to organize social welfare for Māori, the Department of Native Affairs entered into a collaboration with the Women's Health League at the end of the 1940s with its welfare committee . In 1950, 165 local offices were already looking after the health issues of Maori women. But a purely local orientation of the organization, from which Robina Cameron did not want to deviate, prevented further strategic cooperation.

Foundation of the League

In September 1951, Ernest Corbett , then Minister for Māori Affairs , convened a conference of the Māori Women Committee in Wellington with the aim of creating a national organization under government control that would deal more intensively with the interests of women and children in the Māori families.

The 300 delegates present finally founded the Māori Women's Welfare League as a three-tier organization with Local Branches, District Councils and a Dominon Council (German: local branches, district councils and a national management body ). The government's interest in strengthening Māori women from the Pākehā point of view in the traditional roles of women was expressed in the 5 most important points of the 15 goals.

The five most important goals:

  1. To promote relationships between Māori and Pākehā women, to facilitate understanding and to cooperate with other women's organizations, as well as government agencies and local bodies.
  2. Caring for the health and well-being of Māori women and their children.
  3. Provide guidance on proper infant and infant nutrition, food preparation, and housekeeping; to convey the meaning of fresh air and sunshine (note: the life situations often did not offer that); and to initiate discussions about it.
  4. To give instructions for the creation of vegetable and flower gardens and the cultivation of fruit trees and to educate people about generally more attractive conditions around the house.
  5. To interest young mothers in sewing, knitting and handicrafts, as well as instructing them in the manufacture of women's and children's clothing.

Whina Cooper 1st President

Whina Cooper was surprisingly elected as the first president of the Māori Women's Welfare League . After all, as she once put it, “so many were present ... who were intelligent, educated, nurses, teachers, social workers and the like ...” , she was the only one nominated for the office.

“ There were people there from all over New Zealand, and so many of them were clever, so many were educated, nurses, school teachers, social workers and the like. And I only had my proficiency. I couldn't believe that I was only nominated. ”

Her first task was to give the organization a broad base with local offices - spread across the whole country - and to give equal help to all women affected in the country. Her second task, which she immediately tackled with courage, was to eliminate the catastrophic living conditions in the Freeman’s Bay slum in Auckland . With a courageous appearance to the responsible minister Ernest Corbett , she achieved the dissolution of the slums and the construction of new houses for the Māori families.

Whina Cooper's tenure was six years. At the League's congress in 1957, she stopped running after voices criticized her dominance and the League was only associated with her. In the six years of her presidency she was involved in her main topics of health, education, crime and discrimination and thus set slightly different accents than those that were in the foreground when the League was founded. In her closing speech, she also called for the Māori Women's Welfare League to be organized more independently of the state and more independently and to work more closely with other women's organizations.

Its success was that in 1956 the organization had 300 offices, 88 district councils and more than 4,000 members across the country. The Māori Women's Welfare League was the first Māori organization that spoke nationwide with one voice and campaigned for social issues, especially for the urbanized Māori.

Māori Women's Development Fund

In 1986, the Māori Women's Welfare League established the Māori Women's Development Fund . The aim of this fund was to use the money to give unemployed Māori women a way into self-employment. Today the Māori Women's Development Fund is administered by the Māori Women's Development Incorporation (MWDI), which operates independently from the Māori Women's Welfare League but was all board members who were former presidents of the Māori Women's Welfare League . The Fund is independent even from the government, but were supported by state money for his work since 1986 and regularly has a monitoringundergo. In the two financial years 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 the budget for the fund was NZ $ 1.867 million each .

literature

  • Michael King : Whina - A Biography of Whina Cooper . Hodder and Stoughton , Auckland 1983, ISBN 0-340-33873-3 , Chapter 9 - Māori Women's Welfare League , pp. 166-187 (English).
  • Michele D. Dominy : Māori Sovereignty: A Feminist Invention of Tradition . In: Jocelyn Linnekin, Lin Poyer (Ed.): Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific . University of Hawaii Press , Honolulu 1990, ISBN 0-8248-1891-1 , pp. 237-257 (English).
  • Miraka Szaszy, Anna Rogers, Miria Simpson : Te Ropu Wahine Maori Toko i te Ora : Early stories from founding members of the Maori Women's Welfare League . Ed .: Māori Women’s Welfare League . Bridget Williams Books Ltd. , Wellington 1993, ISBN 0-908912-35-8 (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Women on the move . In: Ministry of Women Affairs (ed.): Pānui . December 6, 2008, ISSN 0112-9716 (English).  
  2. ^ Our Partners - Māori Women's Welfare League . (No longer available online.) In: National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women . Department of Labor , archived from the original on June 5, 2010 ; accessed on May 3, 2019 (English, original website no longer available).
  3. ↑ Aroha Harris : NGA tāone nui - Māori and the city . Māori migrate to the cities . In: Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand . Ministry for Culture & Heritage , March 11, 2010, accessed July 16, 2010 .
  4. ↑ Fact Sheet 8 - The Imprisonment of Māori . the Howard League for Penal Reform, Canterbury , accessed July 16, 2010 .
  5. ↑ Michele D. Dominy : Māori Sovereignty: A Feminist Invention of Tradition . In: Jocelyn Linnekin, Lin Poyer (Ed.): Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific . University of Hawaii Press , Honolulu 1990, pp.  242 f . (English).
  6. ^ King : Whina - A Biography of Whina Cooper . 1983, p.  171 .
  7. ^ Margaret McClure : Urban renewal, Freemans Bay . In: Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand . Ministry for Culture & Heritage , August 5, 2016, accessed May 3, 2019 .
  8. ^ King : Whina - A Biography of Whina Cooper . 1983, p.  175 f .
  9. ^ Māori Women's Development Fund (M46) . (No longer available online.) The Treasury , archived from the original on September 3, 2014 ; accessed on May 3, 2019 (English, original website no longer available).