A leading voice in women’s and welfare history
Margaret Tennant is a Professor Emerita from Massey University and part of our alumni community.
Her area of expertise is women’s history and welfare history. Margaret edited City at the Centre: a history of Palmerston North which is in the City Library collection.
Tell us about yourself:
I grew up in Feilding where, as a baby boomer, I was a first day pupil at two schools and then attended ‘Feilding Ag’ (as it was then). It was a fantastic school, where girls as well as boys were challenged to succeed, and high standards were set. I was in a very competitive class and pretty much a girly swot.
Tell us about your career:
I attended Massey University as a student in the 1970s, living first in a hostel and then flatting. Massey at that time was expanding, and it was an exciting, innovative place to study, and then to work. Bill Oliver, the Professor of History, was open to new developments in the discipline, and was supervising research students studying our local area – many of these projects are now in the Heritage section of the City Library, and they provide a wealth of historical insights.
Professor Oliver was – somewhat unusually for the time - supportive of women’s history and social history, meaning the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. I did a Masters’ thesis on women’s organisations in New Zealand after women got the vote, and then a PhD on social welfare in New Zealand between the 1880s and 1920s. This attempted to challenge the existing ‘top down’ approaches to welfare focusing on legislation and politicians by using actual case records from the time to look at the experiences of welfare applicants – the people who were unemployed, disabled, solo parenting, or simply old and ‘worn out’ (as they were often described). It formed the basis of my first sole-authored book, on charitable aid in New Zealand.
In subsequent years I lectured in a combination of history and social policy, ending up as Professor of History. Again, it was a great time to be a staff member in the heyday of the university, especially since Massey had the extramural teaching component. My students included 18 year olds straight from school, teachers gaining their first degrees, and retirees who had had jobs such as as the head of nursing in New Zealand’s Health Department, or as senior military officers, for example. There were even a couple of former All Blacks. It was a real privilege, and I was lucky to have had such a rich experience.
I retired early in 2011 to become a public historian, and wrote commissioned histories for bodies such as the New Zealand Red Cross.
How long have you lived in Palmerston North?
I’ve lived permanently in Palmerston since the 1980s. I like its size, livability, centrality and the wide variety of people here. I always found it affordable in that even when I was living alone I could manage a mortgage and still have funds to travel overseas and also to enjoy all that a provincial city has to offer.
What do you do for fun?
I garden, sew, read, walk – more relaxation than riotously fun activities, though time with grandchildren is always joyous, and even gets me dancing!
What is something that people don’t know about you?
My connection with Feilding goes beyond my own life there as a child. My great-great grandparents came out as a multi-generational family of 18 in 1874, part of the initial group of settlers in Feilding – and found it so awful that they promptly wanted to leave, but were refused. Then my great-great grandfather at some point broke his leg and couldn’t work and was eventually bankrupted, so this is no glorious story of pioneering achievement – but it did spark my interest in the precariousness of colonial life, and in the so-called "down and outs" of our settler society.
Which Palmerstonian do you most admire?
The late Merv Hancock was one of our city councillors in the 1980s, but he was also well-known as a private counsellor with his own practice, and as the initiator of the Social Work programme at Massey University. He was a great supporter of a number of social initiatives in the city, and had a profound sense of the importance of Palmerston North’s history and heritage. Some of his historical research is in the City Library, along with some 40 hours of interviews I did with him.
Any projects in the pipeline?
In recent years I’ve turned from national and international topics to the study of our local history. A group of us contributed to City at the Centre: A History of Palmerston North and also write for the Manawatū Journal of History. I’m currently doing some work on the social history of the railway in Palmerston North – not the locomotive side of things, but its impact on the way people worked and lived, and how the city was organised around it.