Settler Masculinity and War: Military Service versus Home Front Work in World War I New Zealand

World War One was central to New Zealand’s claim that it was Britain’s paradigmatic colony and its men were the most exemplary settlers. Those men, the story goes, responded enthusiastically to the call to arms and their colonial skills made them unmatched as warriors. The documentary record tells a more complex story, one that is deeply revelatory of evolving settler beliefs about the relationship between war and gender. This paper focuses on the controversies surrounding the Second Division League (SDL), a large, influential, but virtually unstudied New Zealand wartime organization. The debate between the SDL and their critics centered on how a man best protected his family, the dominion, and the empire, and, thereby, what practices constituted ideal settler masculinity.

Almost all men that voluntarily entered or were early conscripts into the military believed doing so was the sine qua non of ideal settler masculinity. In contrast, many married settler men argued their breadwinner responsibilities to family came first. Only after those were met could they rationalize going into uniform to protect Britain and the British Empire. Other married men believed that their labor, not military service, was essential to protect their home, by which they first-and-foremost meant New Zealand. They held the demand they serve in uniform, prompted in significant part by earlier concepts of settler masculinity, was a danger to the health of their society. Ultimately, then, married men, along with the well-known actions of pacifists and internationalist labour radicals who stood against the war, were the foremost agents in unsettling settler masculinity during this profoundly influential moment in the development of white settler societies.