It's interesting to read in Joyce Crowley's memoirs that her mother was the first woman in New Zealand elected to a school committee.
But her mother was elected simply because a quorum was needed and they were one member short. "So onto that committee went mother!" Joyce writes in her memoirs A Woman Ahead of her Time.
Nothing in Joyce Crowley's life has ever been left much to chance. Once she knew what she wanted, Joyce went after it, gumboots and all. And it didn't seem to matter what she wore on her feet at the time - dress shoes or silk stockings!
A winding road from Wellington to Taranaki
Joyce Crowley is the very first to admit that she's had a successful and fascinating life that's taken her on a long and often bumpy ride from her birth place in Dunedin to Waitara via the relative backblocks of Kaponga, Tokaora, Hawera, Mangamingi and Bell Block
Today Joyce and husband Des live in a small house in Stafford Street, Waitara, behind a wide, colourful garden.
It's a curious detail that Stafford Street, Dunedin, was a street she knew well. It's where her grandparents lived, "In a wonderful old house that had intercoms in all the rooms," according to Joyce.
A Young girl in Dunedin
Joyce Young grew up on the Otago Peninsular, where her father David and his brother Joe owned a farm.
She's loved horses all her life, and being brought up in the company of men meant she was never uncomfortable around them. She often helped Uncle Joe take horses to the blacksmith.
"I remember sitting on an upturned bucket at the Smithy's and they were all men talking. I think I absorbed that. There were never any barriers between women and men to me."
In their world, and later in the political arena, Joyce Crowley, could always hold her own.
"At the County Council, I got on very well with a man who said, ‘You annoy me, Joyce! You think like a bloody man!’”
A good practical girl
As a girl, Joyce was a crack shot with a rifle and often went off by herself to shoot something for tea. Years later, during an 18-year stint on the Taranaki Hospital Board which began in 1968, the committee had planned a formal dinner. "I thought I'd cook a rabbit so I went out and shot one,' Joyce said.
Joyce, who is an excellent cook, said she usually made scones to take to Hospital Board meetings which horrified some of the members.
"Peter Allen, who was also on the board - he was a real chauvinist but not with me - said the first time, 'You can't make scones! You're on the committee!’
"I said, 'Peter, don't eat them.'" That kind of no nonsense thinking always saw her right.
A furry few years
As a 18 year old, Joyce left home, went to Wellington and found a job in the fur trade.
She had already completed an apprenticeship of three years as a fur finisher, before answering an advertisment for a fur finisher with Universal Furs.
From there, she joined the Siberian Fur Company, where she earned the dubious honour of making a floor mat from the first polar bear skin ever landed in the city.
With World War II came a personal commitment to join the war effort: she enlisted in the New Zealand Land Army.
With only 40 women enlisted at the time, she was accepted almost before she knocked on the door.
It was only later she discovered she'd been given her first position in Taranaki by mistake. Her name had been mixed up with that of another Miss Young.
In the Land Army
"In 1941, the Land Army was very new," Joyce says. "We even had to provide our own working gear. I well remember my mother's reaction when I wrote her my news.
"She replied I should have saved my money as there was 'no glamour in helping on a farm', adding that Olga, my younger sister, had gone to a North Otago farm and that she was the type farmers needed, not I."
There must be a moral in there somewhere, Joyce says. "Because she lasted three months and I lasted three years.
"She left because the work was too hard. I left only after being rushed to hospital with rheumatic fever because of the hard work, which I had enjoyed."
Life in Taranaki
After travelling to Hawera by train, Joyce found herself almost slave labour for a while.
Though she'd never shied from hard work, Joyce remembers her time at Meremere.
"I was placed on the farm where the farmer was milking 90 cows and his wife was about to give birth to their third child. I felt this was more like it. I'm needed here!
"Two weeks later, the woman went into the home to have her child. I sure was needed! Not only was I expected to milk, clean the shed, then tear home to the house to get breakfast and two kiddies off to school then do anything else that needed doing, all for the old rate of 35 shillings minus tax."
Joyce says she could write a whole book on her four months there. "The farmer would put the kitchen clock to 5.15am when in fact my watch told me it was 4.30am, then switch it back when I left the house.
"He must have thought me silly. Even the neighbours who could see the lights coming on wondered how long I would stick it out."
Her next position was better, at Tokaora, with the Toslands. "I was almost immediately accepted as a family member and later was married from that house."
Love in Taranaki
When rheumatic fever put an end to Joyce's Land Army days - and with no wish to return to Wellington - she accepted the proposition of a Hawera haberdashery owner to open up her own dressmaking salon.
In 1945, Joyce married Des Crowley, a farmer from Kaponga. "Des was on final leave for the second time when we married. Thereby began a very emotional time in my life as he was a Catholic and I a Presbyterian."
Though religious differences never worried the couple - they've been married 60 years and have always shared each others churches - it made life extremely difficult when others disapproved.
From Mangamingi to Bell Block
The couple moved onto a farm at Mangamingi after their daughter Pauline was born. Later, Jill became a welcome addition to their family.
From Mangamingi they moved to Bell Block, shareholding on Corbett Road. There Des ran the farm, while Joyce helped milk and then made wedding dresses in a back bedroom. "I did a wedding a week," she says.
She estimates she made 100 wedding dresses, as well as bridesmaid's dresses, during five years working as an expert out-sewer and designer for Fitzroy Bridal Fashions.
The money was for the much needed down payment on the farm. After finally purchasing the land from its owner at an exorbitant price, Joyce's belief 'that it would all work out' proved correct.
Within a week, the land was bought by McKechnie Brothers for an extrusion factory.
When the peaty land proved unstable, McKechnie Brothers would later build on Paraite Road.
From a picnic to politics
Living in Bell Block initiated Joyce's first foray into local body politics. "We had been at Bell Block six months, when one lovely night we took the girls and our tea down to the beach. All around was evidence of the lack of toilet facilities."
Thoroughly appalled by what she'd found in the flax bushes and grass, Joyce immediately revived a flagging Residents' Association to take on the Taranaki County Council.
"I took these men down to the bottom of Wills Road and showed them the mess. They were horrified. I was so pushy that long-drop toilets were installed within ten days."
It was that kind of no nonsense attitude that saw Joyce Crowley battle for anything she felt deserving. And though she often suffered ill health that required many operations, she refused to dwell on any of it once she escaped through the hospital doors. She was always fit for battle.
When elected onto the Taranaki County Council in 1971, as the first woman county councillor in the country, she had plenty to say and most times got the job done without fuss.
Waving her sword for a good cause
"When they were doing the subdivisions in Bell Block, I said, 'You have to leave a gap next to that stream’. They told me I was ridiculous, but I knew most families only had one car.
"It was called Nappy Valley. I said, 'When dad takes the car, what will mum do with the kids?' They need a walkway'. I said, 'No way will I okay the subdivision unless there's a walkway between the main road and the sea'.
"They argued about it, but I got the engineer in behind me and stuck with it until it went through."
She also fought for the Parklands Shopping Centre to be built at Bell Block. "The counties threw the idea out, and I was annoyed, so I went to all the people around there, and I got everyone in Bell Block to put their names on a petition.'
That was the beginning of Joyce's days of leadership, and battling causes she felt worthy enough to win.
"I felt a responsibility when I discovered women followed me. The hospital board and country council were both big jobs. I had to turn off from one to do the other.
"I became chairman of the New Plymouth Management Committee and I enjoyed it. I wasn't frightened of what I had to say. I was so with the men that I never had to worry about what I said."
She was also part of the National Party executive committee. Joyce had become active in party politics during the 1960s, when there had been few opportunities for women in political affairs.
Yet as a member of the Stratford Electorate delegation, she had contributed loudly to policy discussion, particularly when it came to women's health matters and her personal efforts led to women having a greater involvement in national politics.
A change to the Rape Law
"Yes,” Joyce says proudly. "I got the New Zealand rape law changed."
Her campaign began when she was called for jury service in the mid 1970s and found herself the only woman among men. "I knew the chap was guilty, I knew it, but the woman wasn't a virgin and he got off."
Outside the courtroom, the man made a gesture of self-congratulation and said, "It's easy when you know how. You simply pick your victim." Eight months later he was back in court on the same charge, and once again was found not guilty.
"Anyway, I kept complaining to Des about it and he said, 'For goodness sake go down to Dunedin and see Tom Ross’. Tom was a judge down there and he and his wife were our friends. I took myself off to Dunedin."
Joyce explained to Judge Ross how she felt that if the past of the woman could be brought up for public scrutiny, so should that of the man.
Tom Ross said "Look Joyce, I don't think for a minute you can do anything about it, but if you can, the women of New Zealand will never know how much you've done for them."
But he told her one family a week came before him with a daughter who had been the victim of rape.
"He said, 'Come on' and we went down to the law courts and he got all the legal material I needed and that was the key."
A remit to the National Party
Joyce took her remit through the women's' section of the National Party and then through the Divisional section. It took a year before it went before a National Party conference.
"There was a hell of a crowd,' Joyce says. "And there was a little note passed that said someone was going to submit a remit, but it had been amended to say it would be heard in Chambers, not in open debate.
"I took the note to the chairman and he said, 'Don't you worry about that. I'm not going to accept it'. In those days, you presented a remit and it was debated and you had the right of reply.
"I had everything ready and there were men hopping up all over the place, opposing it."
A Medal for her trouble
The remit went through.
"Jim McClay came to me, took all my data and put the Rape Law change through as his Private Member's Bill. He got all the accolades, which worried me not at all.
"He did send me his Bill, with a blue ribbon around it. It was done and I slept soundly in bed, knowing I had done my little bit to help the lot of New Zealand. That was in 1976. Judge Ross was as thrilled as I was."
A personal code of conduct
Joyce Crowley is the first person to admit she has had a rewarding and interesting life. In 1977, she received the Queen's Service Order in recognition of her public works.
"I was like a dog with a bone in local body politics. I always thought if something didn't work, that I'd get it next time round. But I also know you can't win them all."
She has always found strength in a poem by Kipling long ago adopted as a personal motto:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them:
Hold on...
And adds her own: "I long ago made a conscious decision to always be well groomed and dressed, to know what I was about and to laugh at life."
First published 14 October 2005
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