Toy kitchen utensils

This collection of toy kitchen utensils includes a metal kettle, a metal colander, a metal frypan, one metal spoon, two metal knives, a metal tea strainer, a plastic fork, two plastic spoons, and two plastic knives. The toys were gifted to Jan Haxton as a child growing up in Palmerston North in the 1950s.

The toys materialise a form of play modelled on domestic duties and women’s work in the home, which was common for young girls in the first half of the twentieth century. As historian Gary Cross notes, toys had an important role to play in ‘teaching children to look forward to their eventual roles as men and women.’ The ‘road to the future,’ shaped by play, was sharply divided between the sexes, and girls' toys trained them ‘to become "modern" housewives and nurturing mothers, to cultivate personal relationships with friends, and to be charming and attractive to adults.’ (Cross 1997, 50-51) Toys like kitchen utensils and cleaning tools represent the gendering of domestic work and point to some of the mechanisms by which young people were introduced to those social expectations.