The past is a place and we can go there
From 1940s Marines and women in New Zealand, to the 2024 situation in America
A few weeks ago, a Scottish woman requested help on a Facebook group for people interested in Wellington history. She was trying to get hold of documents at the National Library in Wellington about two people in her family, and the librarians told her there would be a charge to scan the thousands of pages of material she was interested in looking at. I decided to help her. I didn’t realise at the time I would spend several lunchbreaks and Saturday mornings scanning 28 boxes of documents and becoming steadily embroiled in her family history. With each box, we were uncovering clues about family secrets scattered all through these documents, photos and newspaper clippings. Along with details specific to a woman named Ada and her family, the documents provide context for how life for women has, and hasn’t, changed from the 1940s to 2024: especially in the context of a recent election in America.
A New Zealand woman is engaged to an American Marine
Reading an 80-year-old yellowed newspaper, the Evening Post from 1943, the language caught my eye. In the ‘social cocktails’ section, there is a photo of a 23-year-old woman, our main research subject:
“Also wearing a new ring on the third finger, left hand, is blonde Ada Menzies, whose photograph appears on this page today. When glimpsed among dancers at the cabaret recently accompanied by her fiancé, First-Lieutenant Hugh Leidel, she was wearing a lovely frock of violet velvet…”
Hugh, an American Marine who was stationed in Wellington and who became Ada’s fiancé, sent her letters from the front in the Pacific where he was eventually killed just a month after their engagement. There are newspaper articles and magazine obituaries about his heroic actions at the Battle of Tarawa, and the leadership of his men. He’s a good leader. A seemingly good person (and always helpful, good-looking).
At the same time, he pens such missives as:
“I am missing New Zealand. I noticed several times that you took remarks about NZ seriously when it was only in the spirit of teasing. Your country really has everything – on a small scale, of course, but as you say there is nothing anywhere else that you can’t find in New Zealand. Your people treated the Marines royally while we were there, and if there were those who were really and truly hostile among us, that is because there are always a few in any group who wouldn’t be happy anywhere or satisfied with anything.”
It’s 1942. The world has a long way to go in terms of gender equality. But I am steadily and increasingly getting uneasy about the misogyny displayed in the letters that Ada receives – not just from Hugh, but from other suitors too.
When Ada is in hospital for seemingly weeks on end (we don’t know what caused this), one writes to her:
“I suppose the nurses are giving you a good time, especially as you like people to make a fuss of you… if you don’t write by tomorrow, then write to me later in the week and make it a good one.”
I can imagine this 23-year-old vivacious blonde girl going to dances, drinking and frolicking around with American soldiers and New Zealand men. She is frivolous, foot-loose and fancy-free. And why not? But men write her letters in earnest to try and get her to write to them, pin her down, get her to go to the next dance: pages and pages of letters.
Initially, reading through Hugh’s obituary and the stirring accolades about how he was a brave soldier, I thought he was a good person. But reading his letters, he comes across as insecure and demanding, possibly abusive. He talks about getting angry at the dock when he left New Zealand:
“I’m sorry I got mad at the dock. I wanted to be with you so much, and when you said you had to leave soon, I lost control…”
Advice from men, and other gender norms
In the Evening Post, on a page back from Ada’s smiling photograph, there is a column called “Boy advises girl” where a man named George dispenses advice: “Hell on earth is the way you feel when you’re jilted,” he tells a young woman who has been abandoned by a boyfriend.
“Stop moping. See people. Do things… Above all have dates. There are other boys in your community…”
There’s a lot of men advising ‘girls’ throughout these documents.
Sometimes, I look on the past with rose-tinted glasses: I imagine what it would have been like to have been a girl at a dance, surrounded by these foreign and exotic Americans. To get dressed up – only in a dress, because that was all you could wear. To do your hair a certain way. To have such rigid norms painted for you, locking you in, making life deceptively simple.
But it wasn’t simple.
As I got further into these boxes and uncovered what Ada got up to in her later years, the biography of her life took a different turn. Hugh died in The Battle of Tarawa. We don’t know how bereft this made Ada, or if she was unsure about him anyway (judging by the many letters from other men and parties attended). She kept in touch with her fiance’s mother. A few years later at age 30, she had a child out of wedlock, and kept it a secret. She then lived with her parents, we presume, while they raised her son. Her child didn’t find out his sister was really his mother, until later in life.
As Ada got older, she took on many jobs – at hotels, theatres and banks, and as a cashier initially. She was an independent lady across the decades.
With the pages of her passports, we traced her travels to Japan and Hong Kong. Each passport photo showed her getting older, and I felt a sense of despair at the inevitably of aging (especially a woman aging, and all that entails) as I scanned through each passport. I edged towards the last one. She got this passport age 80. She’s wearing red lipstick and a crooked smile. This passport never received any stamps.
Letters towards the end of her life show her rent increasing and her financial situation worsening. She had to ask men for money, including her son. If she’d been married, she probably would’ve benefited from having a double income, or the social structures that privilege marriage. Instead she supported herself, retired at one point, then started working again, presumably because she needed the money. She died in the year 2000 in a rest-home, arguing about her power of attorney in her final months and enjoying a fluffy dressing gown that a friend sent her in the post.
1940s American Marines and an American President, born 1946
While I was scanning these papers, the election in America loomed in the background. We like to think we’ve come so far, but the past moves in loops into the present. America has a misogynistic President, his birthyear 1946 - whose childhood must’ve been influenced by the attitudes of the time and a post WWII world. This is a President who openly hates women, whose words impact the boys and men who hear him speak. Women will likely have less bodily autonomy under Trump and fewer may be able to have abortions. In the 1940s, women couldn’t have legal abortions and in 2024, they can’t either, in at least 13 American states (13 states enforce bans at all stages of pregnancy, another four ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy).
In 1943, men wrote passive-aggressive, and downright aggressive, letters to women and men gave cutesy advice for women in newspaper advice columns. In 2024, men take to social media and podcasts to mansplain and spew forth their hatred of women. Meanwhile, the military still plays a big role in American politics – as the Marines came to New Zealand’s defence in 1942, in 2024 the military may be used to keep migrants out of America (the irony being that this is illegal).
The past circles back around in an endless loop, even when people die with it. We must keep an eye on the past to learn from it.
RIP, Ada Menzies, it was an honour to get to know you (and thank you to my Scottish friend for enabling me to do this, and being happy for me to share this story).
ADDITIONAL SOURCES:
More about the American Marines in Kapiti and Wellington
The National Library’s collection on Ada Menzies.
I absolutely love this. Uve worded her life, her journey, her hardships perfectly. I've learned so much about Ada and her life in the last few months & it's ALL down to your help and hard work and not giving up. What an amazing human u are. ❤️