New Zealand Working Women's Council, Auckland Branch records.

The New Zealand Working Women’s Council was founded by Sonja Davies in 1976. It proposed to combine women in paid employment and those working in the home, with the aim of promoting greater understanding of the trade union movement and the problems facing all women, inside and outside the home. The Auckland Branch of the Council had its inaugural meeting in 1977.

The Working Women’s Charter was first discussed by the New Zealand Working Women’s Council in October 1976, when it was decided to introduce it at the Working Women’s Convention in 1977. The New Zealand charter was based on an Australian model, but a clause (Clause 15) was added to include a provision for safe abortion. In 1980 an Otago Working Women’s Council meeting was taken over by an anti-abortion group that, having discovered that the New Zealand Working Women’s Council was not an incorporated society, founded a rival body called the New Zealand Working Women’s Council Incorporated. The matter was reviewed by the Registrar of Incorporated Societies and ‘the incorporated society was ordered to take its name off the books’.

The Auckland Branch appears to have wound down its activities by the end of November 1982 and ceased to function by the mid 1980s.