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Truby King and the Plunket Society: an analysis of a prescriptive ideology.

G E N E R A L histories of New Zealand almost completely ignore Dr Frederick Truby King and the Society for Promoting the Health of Women and Children, better known as the Plunket Society. King's concern with the health of infants, motherhood, and child-rearing did not fit easily into the political narratives which most historians, here as elsewhere, considered central in explaining the history of nations. Fashions change. Over the last fifteen years historians have become much more concerned with the history of societies, the lives and experiences of ordinary people, and value systems. Not that political history has been or ought to be ignored. The objects of the so-called 'new' social history require no justification, but as we learn more about the history of society so too we understand more fully the more elusive and symbolic character of politics. Although it is not possible to speak with confidence about the past of New Zealand society it is clear by now that urbanization and industrialization proceeded to transform an informal network of relatively autonomous and small communities into one social system. Bureaucracy and organization supplanted face-to-face and spontaneous decision-making; the occupational structure changed, the number of unskilled shrinking as 'white collar' groups expanded; colony-wide organizations emerged; state bureaucracy expanded; women began entering the work force in unprecedented numbers, demanded and won greater legal equality, and successfully limited their own fertility. Such sudden and traumatic changes posed new problems and generated new anxieties. Social order itself appeared, to some at least, in jeopardy. In the midst of this bewildering chaos Truby King offered his own diagnosis and prescription.