Women Mean Business

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