In 1849 Edward Gibbon Wakefield declared that a ‘Colony that is not attractive to women, is an unattractive colony’. His emphasis on female immigration to New Zealand arose from his belief that women, particularly in their roles of wives and mothers, were central to building the ‘morals and manners’ of the nation and to promoting principles of ‘industry, steadiness and thrift’. Historian Erik Olssen argues that Wakefield's insistence on ‘the importance of women's moral authority to the transportation of civilization’ became a ‘recurring theme throughout the nineteenth century’. In her influential analysis of ‘The Colonial Helpmeet’, Raewyn Dalziel explores this idea more fully, claiming that a widespread acceptance of women as the moral centre of society ‘led to an intense emphasis in nineteenth-century New Zealand on women's role within the home and family’. Dalziel also argues that ‘the early success of New Zealand women in gaining political rights’ emerged from this emphasis on women as ‘homemakers and guardians of moral health and welfare’.

Wakefield was not the only immigrant to advocate the virtues of the moral, domestic woman. Dunedin poet and politician Thomas Bracken described women as ‘the light of the home and the genius of the fireside’, while for Auckland teacher Frances Shayle-George women provided ‘good order, peace and refinement in man's sole remaining paradise – his own Home’.