Connie Purdue

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Connie Purdue (née Soljak) (1912-2000) was a New Zealand trade unionist, former communist and Labour Party activist, who then became a conservative Catholic anti-feminist and Pro-life activist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Anti-Abortion activism 3 Legacy 4 Bibliography

[edit] Early life

Connie Soljak was the daughter of Miriam Soljak nee Cummings, a New Zealand-born feminist, communist and unemployed rights activist mother of Irish descent, and Peter Soljak, a Croatian gumdigger father, and eventually settled in Auckland's Northcote. During the thirties, she was a member of the Young Communists League, sold their newspapers and even distributed material about sex education, before moderating her views on social democracy and industrial relations, and joining the New Zealand Labour Party and the Auckland Clerical Workers Union.

Despite later referring to herself as a conservative Catholic, Purdue had a string of unhappy marriages, each ended by divorce, as she acknowledges herself in her biographical reference for Robyn Rowland's collection of self-descriptions from feminists and anti-feminists in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. In her later years, Purdue became celibate, although she cherished her beloved grandchildren.

[edit] Anti-Abortion activism

While she founded the New Zealand National Organisation for Women, Purdue fell out with the rest of New Zealand feminism when she espoused active anti-abortion views and joined SPUC (the Society for Protection of the Unborn Child). With liberal Catholic novelist Daphne de Jong, Purdue established "Feminists for Life" in New Zealand. De Jong and liberal Catholic anti-abortionists dropped out early on, and Purdue became increasingly social conservative from the seventies onward. In 1983, "Feminists For Life" abandoned its position as a feminist organisation, and became Women for Life. In hardline opposition to contraceptive access, Purdue ironically betrayed the principles of reproductive freedom that her mother, Miriam Soljak, had fought for as one of the founder members of the New Zealand Family Planning Association in 1940.

As she aged, she suffered from restricted mobility, abandoned the Labour Party after it embraced pluralism and social liberalism, and joined the New Zealand National Party.

During the 1970s and '80s, she campaigned against incorporation of feminist objectives within the trade union movement in the Working Women's Charter in the early eighties, attacked Māori moves toward reclamation of their land, language and culture, opposed homosexual law reform, and became involved in a futile campaign to prevent New Zealand ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

[edit] Legacy

During the 1990s, Purdue's increasing infirmity and frailty meant that she was largely restricted to calls to Radio Pacific, an Auckland-based talkback radio station, as her erstwhile anti-abortion colleagues also suffered from increased age, related illness and mortality. In the late nineties, oral historian Lesley Hall interviewed her for a subsequent article on oral history and perceptions of family relationships within the Communist Party of New Zealand.

In 2000, Purdue died. She was mourned by her anti-abortion comrades, but as tragic figure, who abandoned the centre-left for the Christian Right.

As New Zealand still has liberal standards of abortion access and comprehensive lesbian and gay rights legislation, Purdue's later years appear to have been spent for naught. As for Women for Life, it later became the Family Education Network and survived its elder founders death, until it abandoned operations in 2004, when its glossy magazine, "Off the Fence," ceased publication.

[edit] Bibliography

• "Connie Purdue" in Robyn Rowland (ed) Women Who Do and Women Who Don't Join the Women's Movement: London: Routledge Kegan Paul: 1984: ISBN 0-7102-0296-2

• Lesley Hall: "The Personal is Also Political: The Relationship Between Political Activism and Family Life Among Members of the Communist Party of New Zealand": Oral History in New Zealand: 17: 1-11.