A History Of New Zealand Women

Author: Barbara Brookes

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $70.00 NZD
  • : 9780908321452
  • : Bridget Williams Books
  • : Bridget Williams Books
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  • : February 2016
  • : New Zealand
  • : 69.99
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Barbara Brookes
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  • : Hardback
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  • : English
  • : 305.40993
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  • : 554
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Barcode 9780908321452
9780908321452

Description

What would a history of New Zealand look like that rejected Thomas Carlyle's definition of history as 'the biography of great men', and focused instead on the experiences of women? One that shifted the angle of vision and examined the stages of this country's development from the points of view of wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts? That considered their lives as distinct from (though often unwillingly influenced by) those of history's 'great men'? In her ground-breaking History of New Zealand Women, Barbara Brookes provides just such a history. This is more than an account of women in New Zealand, from those who arrived on the first waka to the Grammy and Man Booker Prize-winning young women of the current decade. It is a comprehensive history of New Zealand seen through a female lens. Brookes argues that while European men erected the political scaffolding to create a small nation, women created the infrastructure necessary for colonial society to succeed. Concepts of home, marriage and family brought by settler women, and integral to the developing state, transformed the lives of Maori women. The small scale of New Zealand society facilitated rapid change so that, by the twenty-first century, women are no longer defined by family contexts. In her long-awaited book, Barbara Brookes traces the factors that drove that change. Her lively narrative draws on a wide variety of sources to map the importance in women's lives not just of legal and economic changes, but of smaller joys, such as the arrival of a piano from England, or the freedom of riding a bicycle.

Awards

Winner - Illustrated Non-Fiction - Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2017.

Author description

Barbara Brookes is Professor of History at the University of Otago. Her research interests include gender relations in New Zealand, and the history of health and disease in New Zealand and Britain. She has written a book on abortion in twentieth century England, and co-edited several collections of essays on New Zealand history.

Table of contents

Introduction Chapter 1 Origins, Traditions and 'Civilisation' Before 1814 Chapter 2 A Civilising Mission 1814-1856 Chapter 3 Settling Pakeha Families, Unsettling Whanau 1850s-1860s Chapter 4 War, Gold and Dispossession 1860s-1880s Chapter 5 The Quest for Citizenship 1885-1890s Chapter 6 New Expectations for a New Century 1900-1919 Chapter 7 Motherhood, Morality and a Voice for Women in the Interwar Years 1919-1940 Chapter 8 The 'Modern Woman' of the Interwar Years 1919-1940 Chapter 9 On the Home Front: From Dependence to Independence 1939-1951 Chapter 10 Suburbia: Expansiveness and Confinement 1950s-1960s Chapter 11 Decade of Discovery 1967-1977 Chapter 12 Into the Corridors of Power 1977-1986 Chapter 13 Reckoning with Women 1984-1990s Chapter 14 Shaping the New Millennium 2000-2015 Acknowledgements 484 Editorial Note 485 Endnotes 486 Index 544