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 Māori 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.

Standing in the sunshine is an illustrated social history of New Zealand women since they won the vote in 1893. New Zealand had the distinction of being the first country in the world where women's struggle for the vote resulted in success. This book explores all aspects of women's lives from 1893 to 1993, turning up new and unexpected moments in New Zealand women's history.

"Reveals ... the exquisite work and extraordinary skill of a group of New Zealand artists, most of them women, working in a wide variety of art and craft forms ... This flowering of local talent ... originated in the British Arts and Crafts movement and is associated with the growth of art education in this country: its quiet but dedicated character also suggests much about the situation of women in the years before and after 1900"--Jacket.