Women Mean Business

Colonial businesswomen in New Zealand

By: Catherine Bishop

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Paperback | 30 September 2019

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400 Pages

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24.0 x 17.0 x 3.3

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From Kaitaia in Northland to Oban on Stewart Island, New Zealands 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 spouses 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 Australasias 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.

Industry Reviews

"...the extraordinary scope of the author's empirical research and her confident historical vision in assessing its significance combine to make this an important, illuminating, and highly readable book." -- Economic History Review reviews Minding her own business: colonial businesswomen in Sydney by Catherine Bishop (17 April 2018)

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