Sir Frederic Truby King, CMG

"So who was Truby King? He was a health reformer, most famous for founding the NZ Plunket Society. It was named for Lady Plunket, wife of the governor general in 1907. The society’s goal was to ‘Help the Mothers and Save the Babies’, and was aimed at improving hygiene, health, and child-rearing practices. Which sounds lovely. But… King was also a huge proponent of eugenics, had some terrible ideas about women’s ability to be both mothers and educated, and was a massive racist. And these ideas were heavily, heavily reflected in the early Plunket Society policies... Despite being friends with some of New Zealand’s early female doctors, King firmly believed that education was detrimental to women’s ability to be effective mothers." Source: The Spinoff (7 May 2017).

Sources

1. Brookes, Barbara 'King, Frederic Truby', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993, updated October, 2011. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2k8/king-frederic-truby (accessed 6 September 2022)
2. Wikipedia Contributors. Truby King.
3. Writes, Emily (2019, May 7). Plunket’s founder was an awful person obsessed with eugenics. The Spinoff.