Women mean business : colonial businesswomen in New Zealand /
"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 t...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Dunedin, New Zealand :
Otago University Press, Te Whare Tā o Te Wānanga o Ōtākou,
2019.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "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"--www.otago.ac.nz. |
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| Physical Description: | 404 pages : illustrations (some colour) ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |
| ISBN: | 9781988531762 1988531764 |