Notes

Contents: Origins, traditions and 'civilisation' : before 1814 -- A civilising mission : 1814-1856 -- Settling pakeha families, unsettling whanau : 1850s-1860s --War, gold and dispossession : 1860s-1880s -- The quest for citizenship : 1885-1890s -- New expectations for a new century : 1900-1919 -- Motherhood, morality and a voice for women in the interwar years : 1919-1940 -- The 'modern woman' of the interwar years : 1919-1940 -- On the home front : from dependence to independence : 1939-1951 -- Suburbia : expansiveness and confinement : 1950s-1960s -- Decade of discovery : 1967-1977 -- Into the corridors of power : 1977-1986 -- Reckoning with women : 1984-1990s -- Shaping the new millennium : 2000-2015 Summary: 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. Barbara Brookes traces the factors that drove that change. (Publisher)