Ruth Spencer on New Zealand, the working man's paradise

Maids pausing on the stairs at the London hotel where they work in 1892. Most likely their pay was docked. Photo / Getty Images

It's a fun fantasy question — were you born in the wrong era? If you could travel back to any period in time, would it be Regency England or, perhaps, Belle Epoque Paris? For women who've really thought about this, the answer is no, thank you. Take your time machine and put it where the sun doesn't shine, possibly the Ice Age. I'm not going to live anywhere without Panadol and tampons, even if the dresses are really pretty.

For some reason we all imagine ourselves in the aristocracy of the past. Our past lives are always Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette; no one sees themselves as the reincarnation of Abigail the under-housemaid, knuckles raw from carbolic soap, waking before dawn to boil other people's bath water and scrub the chamber pots. Most of us would have been Abigail though, just as most of us don't currently have time to lie around on our asps. We don't have time to get our hair cut, let alone get our heads cut off.

Marie Antoinette sits for a portrait in her bedroom at Versailles 1777, as painted by Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty (1710-81). Photo / Getty Images

In New Zealand, populated supposedly by good keen men, my lineage began with a good Keane woman: Ellen Keane, arriving from Ireland on the Opawa in 1880 to be a domestic servant. In those days that meant a 16-hour day, six and a half days a week, more than 100 hours of hard physical work each and every week until you found someone to marry or your arms dropped off, whichever came first. Not many managed to marry after their arms dropped off, because who would make the scones?

But along came labour laws to help! Sort of. In 1896 it was decided by law that domestic servants could swap a year's worth of afternoons off for a fortnight's holiday. That's a tough choice. The fortnight halves your time off for the year. But if you wanted to visit family, or you worked in the country and wanted to go to, you know, a shop, you might have to take your fortnight and work 16 hours every other day of the year. It gets worse — if you chose the afternoons off, the hours were from 3pm to 9.30pm, to make sure you'd done the lunch dishes and set up a nice cold supper before you left. Men in 1896 liked making laws but drew the line at making a sandwich.

Luckily, for my existence, Ellen got married fairly quickly, although she thus did herself out of 52 legally enshrined half-days off. Someone at the bill reading did propose extending the legal holidays to domestic housewives, bless him, but the suggestion was met with great hilarity and defeated 10-33.

One of our current statutory holidays is Labour Day. This is to make up for the time mothers lose going through labour, which is generally rough and deserving of a day in lieu. Just kidding, it's when we celebrate Samuel Parnell and his insistence that the working day be limited to eight hours. New Zealand was afterwards heralded as a "working man's paradise". It was not, however, a working woman's paradise. In 1906 domestic servants — and domestic service was the single largest form of employment for women until the 1930s — campaigned for a 68-hour work week. And they got it. Just kidding, they didn't get it. The movement failed, probably because the interested parties were too tired and busy to keep arguing. Laws are ephemeral but chamberpots are eternal.

This discrepancy between what we celebrate and the reality for women parallels some of our other so-called social triumphs. New Zealand was first in the world to give women the vote in 1893, but women weren't eligible to be elected to the House of Representatives until 1919, and no woman was actually elected until 1933. Attempts to civilise men's drinking habits banned women from working in bars from 1910 to 1961. Barmaids were seen as manipulative seducers of young men and somehow, at the same time, innocent children to be led astray. In 1916 women were legally banned from going to pubs entirely. Women, being human people in need of a wine, found different ways around this as the years went by, but the laws didn't change until 1961 when any woman could once again serve behind a bar, and 1976 — the year I was born — when women could boldly go into a public bar without being in direct breach of the law. For the sake of my foremothers, I have since entered many pubs and shall continue to do so as a matter of principle. It's a stand I'm willing to take for the good of all.

So if I'm looking for an era of the past to live in, it's none of them. It's not even now, really. There's still a pay gap of around 9 per cent. There's still victim-blaming and gendered insults against powerful women. Women still do twice as much unpaid work than men; in fact, the popular agony column Dear Prudence recently announced it would no longer accept letters about how to fix the division of labour in the home, because there was no roster, no negotiation, no strike action that had ever worked. Prudence washed her hands of it - and probably also the chamberpots, because no one else was going to do them. Until we can sort all this out there won't ever be a Belle Epoque for women, no matter how pretty the dresses.