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 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; Maori and Pakeha; single, married, widowed and sometimes bigamists. Their businesses could be wild successes or dismal failures, lasting just a few months or a lifetime.