Patricia Bartlett

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Patricia Bartlett (March 17, 1928–November 8, 2000) was a New Zealand conservative Catholic pro-censorship activist of the 1970s and 1980s.

She was born in Napier to Bertrand and Ivy Bartlett (nee Boult). She attended Sacred Heart school in Napier and failed her University Entrance examination. In 1947, she became a primary school teacher. She entered a Sisters of Mercy (S.M.) convent at Hill Street in Wellington after her mother died in 1950. She left the cloister in 1969 to become increasingly involved in social conservative political activism. In 1970, she founded the Society for Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS), which survived her death, albeit in much reduced circumstances.

Bartlett was the secretary of that organisation for 25 years, during which time the SPCS campaigned against exposure of bared female breasts (1970) and won initial bipartisan support from elderly social conservative Members of Parliament and local government leaders in Wellington and Auckland. From its beginning, SPCS sought assistance from conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants alike, and SPCS membership would often come from kindred conservative Christian pressure groups, such as SPUC (the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child - now Voice for Life, New Zealand's largest anti-abortion group), and the later Christian Heritage Party (a Christian-based socially conservative political party outside parliament, which is now defunct).

Over the years, she campaigned for theatre censorship, as with the stage show Hair in Wellington, (1972) and prohibition of adolescent oriented sex education books like Down Under the Plum Trees (1972). SPCS tried to ban Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris (1972), which led to New Zealand Film Society activism against her attempts to stifle what they saw as freedom of artistic expression throughout the late 70s and early 80s.

SPCS rapidly established connections to kindred organisations and individuals overseas who favoured similar conservative Christian pro-censorship stances, which included Dr John H. Court and the Adelaide-based Festival of Light (Australia), Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers and Listeners Association (United Kingdom) and Dr Judith Reisman and the Institute of Media Education (United States).

In the mid-80s, Bartlett and SPCS fell afoul of social change, as the High Court issued its Howley v Lawrence Publishing decision in 1986, shortly after the Fourth New Zealand Labour Government (1984-1990) decriminalised homosexuality. Magazine presentations of gay men did not depict criminal acts per se, and over the course of the late 80s, conservative Christians found themselves hampered by evidence-based requirements for censorship policy proof. Social scientific data was produced by opponents of rigorous state censorship and moves toward central government regulatory rationalisation led to contraction of previously disparate film, video and publications censorship into one body, the Office of Film and Literature Classification, in 1993.

As time went on, Bartlett's elderly former patrons and pro-censorship activists died, and in 1995, Bartlett learned she had inherited her mother's cardiovascular problems. In 1996, she retired from the organisation, and lived quietly in Upper Hutt until her death in November 2000. She never married.

Bartlett's pro-censorship campaigns had contributed to a backlash against social conservatism in New Zealand during the 80s and 90s. However, after its founder's death, the Society for Promotion of Community Standards still exists as a pressure group that attempts to obstruct film festival schedules, opposed prostitution law reform and the ending of parental corporal punishment of children due to the passage of Sue Bradford's Child Discipline Bill to that effect on May 16, 2007.

[edit] Further reading

• http://www.spcs.org.nz Society for Promotion of Community Standards
• http://www.censorship.govt.nz Office of Film and Literature Classification (NZ)

[edit] Biography

• Carolyn Moynihan, A Stand For Decency: Patricia Bartlett and the Society for Promotion of Community Standards Upper Hutt: Society for Promotion of Community Standards: 1995: ISBN 0-473-03340-2