Shirley Smith: An Examined Life by Sarah Gaitanos (review)

New Zealand has a strong tradition of female political leadership. Kate Shepphard, Mabel Howard, Whina Cooper, Elsie Locke and Helen Clark come readily to mind. It is easy to be proud, perhaps relieved, when making comparisons between current Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, and her male counterparts, Donald Trump, Boris Johnston and Australia's own Scott Morrison. Several generations of women helped pave the way for the current situation in New Zealand, but sadly many of these lives have yet to be fully recorded. It is in this context that Shirley Smith: An Examined Life is especially welcome.

Shirley Smith's life says much about the dynamic political landscape of the twentieth century and how women pushed through gender barriers to full participation. In profession and politics Shirley Smith was a pioneer and a radical boundary pusher. A graduate of the University of Oxford in the "Red" 1930s she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and later the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ). She was a pioneer female lecturer in Classics at Auckland University in the early 1940s and later an early staffer of the newly established Vocational Guidance Service. In the 1950s, in the context of the National Party's attempt to enshrine in statute the draconian regulations introduced during 1951 waterfront lockout, Shirley Smith was a principal founder of the Human Rights Association and the influential New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties. She was the first woman employed to teach in a faculty of law at a New Zealand university and, in her own practice, championed those socially marginalised by mainstream New Zealand. She was a tireless peace activist and was for a time the national secretary of New Zealand's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. This is the tip of the iceberg, but gives a clear sense of the scale and breadth of her paid and unpaid work, her commitment and irrepressible energy. Shirley Smith, although diminutive in stature, was a personification of overachievement–not for her own selfish gain, but rather for the greater good. Her life is certainly worth a full biographical treatment.

Gaitanos gives a good outline of Smith's life. She has trawled through a very considerable body of primary material including interviews and correspondence with family, colleagues and comrades and institutional records of various branches of the state, including security intelligence material. There is no shortage of material available to examine this life. Yet I was left with a sense of an opportunity missed. Readers interested in the labour history/popular politics elements of Shirley Smith's life will be teased but unsatisfied.

Good biography sheds light not just on the life under study but also the movements the subject participated in and the times in which they lived. In this respect I found this book deeply disappointing. For someone whose life was closely linked to the communist movement for about 20 years, one finds very little new light on what it was to be a woman in this male-dominated realm, or what it was like to be an intellectual in a proletarian party. Nor do we learn a great deal about the social and comradely lives of party members. Gaitanos provides little more than a cardboard cut-out of the party: "She would have to learn to follow the Party line as dictated by Moscow." I had hoped to find some nuance, finesse and even insight into a bright and complex woman, but the author seems little interested in exploring Smith's communism. Sadly, the same can be said about most of Smith's other political and personal preoccupations. We learn precious little about the New Zealand Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) or the Council for Civil Liberties, of which Smith was a key early player.

Some may suggest this expectation is unfair and that the author was seeking to explore the private life and friend networks as a greater priority. Perhaps, but even here I was very disappointed. We are told that Shirley...