Throughout the 1950s and '60s in country New Zealand, I and girls of my era knitted and stitched our way towards the arrival of "Mr Right" and the life of domesticity which society dictated would be our eventual lot.

A world away, in London and even in Auckland, a revolution was talking place. The pill brought not just sexual freedom but the work and educational opportunities that came with the ability to postpone pregnancy. Changing values meant many young women's lives held greater promise than those of their mothers.

But in the small towns and countryside, still adjusting to the end of post-war shortages, where dependence on incomes from small farms meant money was tight, there was still an inevitability about pregnancy and marriage -often in that order. Creating a comfortable home, often from very little, was women's work.

At 16, when I left home for university, it was with a sense of relief and liberation that I broke open my "bottom drawer" and began using all those carefully embroidered tray cloths and doilies, the crochet-edged tea towels and cross stitched aprons.

Today, having escaped what Rosemary McLeod calls the "cottage idyll" which was the sustaining fantasy for so many young women, I still have some of those carefully worked textiles. I marvel at the tiny stitches, the crochet made with the finest hook and wonder at the patience of the young woman who made them-a stranger who once was me.

So I came to McLeod's book with a sense of nostalgic familiarity. In my childhood home too, and those of virtually everyone I knew, were so many of the items which are the stuff of her collection-oven cloths made from sacking and edged with recycled dress fabric, patchwork aprons, dolls made from clothes pegs, embroidered table cloths kept starched and ready for "best", woollen tea cosies for a time when tea meant black leaves, stewed 'til bitter.

We took them for granted. But now, stimulated and challenged by McLeod's analysis of these home textiles-of the reasons for their creation, of what they reveal about their times and the women who made them-I see them in a new light.

Rosemary McLeod is a respected New Zealand journalist and nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist. She lives in Wellington, but grew up in the 1950s in a country town in the south of the North Island, the only child of a mother who wanted nothing more than to be a farmer's wife, but who found herself a divorcee at a time when marriage failure was a social stigma. Money was tight and there was no welfare for single mothers.

She did, however, have a talent for needlework, expressing her belief in her self worth through the textile objects she created-"the one area of her life where she met with nothing but success and pleasure," McLeod says.

McLeod has many items made by her mother and other women in her family. But over decades of fossicking in junk shops and thrift shops she has accumulated a vast and remarkable collection of New Zealand domestic textiles spanning more than a century. Her focus has not been the refined needlework created by women of wealth and leisure, but humbler objects which illuminate the lives of the ordinary women who made them. She likens building this collection to the archaeology she longed to study as a child and to the detective work at times required by journalism.

"The themes I've seen emerging in the objects I've discovered have been a way of understanding the past through physical evidence, just as digging up a shard of pottery in the Middle East might be," she writes.

Thrift to Fantasy is a superbly produced book, with dozens of large, colourful illustrations on high quality paper, mostly of textiles but some snapshots from McLeod's family album and some from craft and women's magazines of the day which she quotes liberally throughout. But this is no victory of style over substance-the text is a fascinating snapshot of three decades of New Zealand history, an innovative and illuminating way of interpreting events of the times and the role and expectations of the women who lived through them.

This handwork and the images it records are a record of ordinary women's lives and values. They did not set out to make history themselves, but their handwork did, McLeod writes.

"It seems to me that in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, the last great period of domestic handcrafts and making do, women in New Zealand were asking two questions as they stitched: Who are we? And where are we?"

The book is divided into six parts, not according to years or types of textiles but by what they symbolised. Thus, 'Safe Behind the Picket Fence' deconstructs the "cottage idyll", looking at the myth of domestic bliss for which women prepared, but also at the solace, self-esteem and peer recognition they drew from their textile work in lives which were often little more than relentless drudgery.

'Taming the World' looks at images of Maori, of which there were few in Pakeha home textiles, and of New Zealand itself, isolated, parochial, relentlessly monocultural, a place where many people still called England "home". The images they stitched, of bluebirds and cottage gardens and ladies in crinoline gowns bore little resemblance to the reality outside their kitchen windows.

'Wishing and Hoping' has just two chapters: the self-explanatory 'One day my prince will come, I hope' and 'My secret life', in which McLeod contrasts the romantic and glamorous vision of life conjured by romantic fiction and depicted in some women's embroidery with the grim statistics of the day, extracted from the Official New Zealand Year Book . They describe a world in which women had limited career options, were not expected to deprive a man of a job, were poorly paid if they did work, and were expected to marry for life.

McLeod sees domestic textiles-craft objects traditionally undervalued, even by their makers, because they were women's work-as telling the story of the preoccupations of their makers as clearly as contemporary literature, film or fashion photography did for women of higher education and social status. They recorded values, beliefs and images, defining a time when "making do" was seen as a virtue.

For many their crafts were an attempt to make a little England in a new and often harsh country. Their making offered a little quiet, private time when domestic duties were all-consuming-even doing the washing without a machine would take a day. Women depicted themselves as solitary figures, never with men or children-family life may have been their fate, but they saw themselves as individuals, McLeod says.

Lives were disrupted by war and then Depression and divisive industrial disputes, but women were expected "to carry on serenely making domestic life their priority". In the new young Queen, a wife and mother, who toured New Zealand in 1954, they had a role model.

McLeod derides the conventional view of domestic crafts, especially since the 1970s, that they were a sign of submission to male expectations, She sees them as "a positive and strong assertion of self", with the creation of special pieces a way of elevating skills usually devoted to the mundane.

Sewing was a necessity but accessories such as needle cases and pin cushions were personalised; The workbags which accompanied women everywhere were themselves often small works of art, appliquéd, felted, embroidered, even if the basic material was sacking; even the humble apron could be elevated to a frivolous, impractical froth of nylon-a statement that although its maker and wearer was a housewife she was not without style, nor means to express her personality.

Through their handcrafts many of the women of these three decades created "an ideal world of perfect happiness" a far cry from their reality. McLeod analyses the ambiguous symbolism of their embroideries. Post-war social disruption, child mortality, death from abortion and disease such as polio, minimal pensions for war widows or the wives of amputees were the reality of life. Yet as McLeod points out: "there is no such thing as depressing subject matter in textile handwork in wartime New Zealand, any more than there was during the Depression."

Thrift to Fantasy is a very personal book, not only because it is based on McLeod's textile collection and family anecdotes, but in its first-hand, non-academic interpretation of history. McLeod's analysis is very much her own, drawn from her historical research and personal knowledge.

At times this analysis is undermined by being highly speculative and lacking in rigorous research. Workbags "must have been popular"; embroidery transfers "were probably reprinted and possibly designed both here and in Australia"; "it could be that this lack of Maori imagery suggests..." In part, this is because McLeod is in uncharted waters and posing questions to which there are no known answers. She says herself, there have been few books to guide her as she collected, and when curating an exhibition of her collection in Hutt City three years ago was surprised to find New Zealand museums had not considered such domestic textiles worthy of collecting.

It is pity that McLeod has addressed herself so firmly to a New Zealand audience, with her regular references to "here". She devalues her own efforts if she assumes that Thrift to Fantasy will interest only locals. It has much to offer a wider audience, both as an enjoyable and entertaining pictorial reference and a window on a country whose history and textiles gain little international attention.

McLeod's collection shows an eye for quirky textiles: the doll tea cosies, topsy-turvy dolls with a head at either end, elephant pincushion, novelty teapot handle insulators, miniature felt gloves to cover the ends of knitting needles. She clearly enjoys objects made by women with a sense of fun, who, even with limited resources and materials, were unafraid to let loose their creativity.

Although the story behind many of those textiles is not a happy one -the women who made them led lives of poverty and drudgery, without educational or employment opportunities -the care and delight they took in their handwork and McLeod's own appreciation of and joy in them shines through.

"To me these objects radiate an attitude to the world that is uplifting and positive," she writes.

"Their makers didn't give up, even if the world gave up on them; they may not have been sophisticated, but they were infinitely resourceful and creative, and they had a sense of fun. These objects call into question the very idea that real creativity is elitist and that it has to take itself seriously to be serious."