Book Talk - Women Mean Business with Catherine Bishop

Book Talk - Women mean business: Colonial businesswomen in New Zealand by Catherine Bishop.

Discover colonial New Zealand’s businesswomen from tour guides to taxidermists in Taupō and beyond.

Join us for this free event and go in the draw to win a free copy of the book. Books will be available to purchase on the night thanks to Paper Plus.

The popular idea that, ‘traditionally’, a woman’s place was ‘in the home’ has coloured our understanding so completely that the ‘businesswoman’ is often considered to be a late twentieth-century phenomenon. General New Zealand histories, even very recently, have been known to omit businesswomen, and often women generally, from any consideration in the context of the nineteenth-century economy.

Women Mean Business turns the spotlight on New Zealand’s nineteenth-century urban businesswomen to reveal that they were more numerous than usually imagined and were engaged in an extraordinary variety of enterprises.

The author of this fascinating and entertaining book, award-winning historian Dr Catherine Bishop, is conducting a comprehensive nationwide tour throughout New Zealand, visiting Taupō on Thursday November 14.

Dr Catherine Bishop grew up in Whanganui. She completed her first degree at Victoria University in Wellington, before working as a maths teacher, bookseller and mother in the UK and Australia. She finished her Ph.D at the Australian National University in 2012 and now lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney.

Her first book, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial businesswomen in Sydney, won the prestigious Ashurst Business Literature Prize in 2016. She currently holds a research fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council at Macquarie University, where she is writing a history of women in business in twentieth-century Australia. The research for Women Mean Business was assisted by a New Zealand History Trust Award.