A subversive state? Domesticity in dispute in 1950s New Zealand

Recently, historians have begun to question whether the 1950s were the high tide of domesticity. They have reconceptualized the 1950s by distinguishing the immediate postwar period from the later 1950s. They have distinguished between groups of women and shown how some contested familialism, albeit sometimes unwittingly. But they have not considered sufficiently how the state is conceptualized. State policies changed in the 1950s. The state was not a monolith, and different agencies worked at cross-purposes. The state did not initially intend to promote disillusionment with the home, but it was an effect of its policies in the 1950s. The New Zealand state is held to be effective in promoting domestic feminism and women's domesticity for much of the twentieth century. This article indicates it also became a powerful, albeit within limits, subverter of women's domesticity during the 1950s.