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Women Mean Business:
Colonial businesswomen in New Zealand
'the best kind of history - the kind that tells us history is not what we thought it was'
review, North & South magazine 2019
2021: WMB shortlisted for NZ Historical Association's biennial W.H. Oliver Prize for Best Book in NZ History
2020: WMB longlisted for non fiction award in Ockham NZ Book Awards
2019: WMB shortlisted for Heritage NZ Book Award
This history populates nineteenth-century New Zealand with entrepreneurial women.
From Kaitaia in Northland to Oban on Stewart Island, New Zealand’s nineteenth-century towns were full of entrepreneurial women. Contrary to what we might expect, colonial women were not only wives and mothers or domestic servants. A surprising number ran their own businesses, supporting themselves and their families, sometimes in productive partnership with husbands, but in other cases compensating for a spouse’s incompetence, intemperance, absence – or all three.
The pages of this book overflow with the stories of hard-working milliners and dressmakers, teachers, boarding-house keepers and laundresses, colourful publicans, brothelkeepers and travelling performers, along with the odd taxidermist, bootmaker and butcher – and Australasia’s first woman chemist.
Then, as now, there was no ‘typical’ businesswoman. They were middle and working class; young and old; Māori and Pākehā; single, married, widowed and sometimes bigamists. Their businesses could be wild successes or dismal failures, lasting just a few months or a lifetime.
In this fascinating and entertaining book, award-winning historian Dr Catherine Bishop showcases many of the individual businesswomen whose efforts, collectively, contributed so much to the making of urban life in New Zealand.
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Otago University Press
published October 2019
Price: 45 NZD