My Hand Will Write what My Heart Dictates


Book Description

The women of this book are mainly Pakeha. They are domestic servants, governors' wives and farmers, married, single, widowed or deserted. They write about love, friendship, children, destitution, illness and grief. Maori women write about land, loss and love, about families and domestic events - in both Maori and English.




Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange


Book Description

Presents fresh insights into the relationships between missions and indigenous peoples, and the outcomes of mission activities in the processes of imperial conquest and colonisation. This book focuses on missions across the British Empire (including India, Africa, Asia, the Pacific), within transnational and comparative perspectives.




He Reo Wahine


Book Description

During the nineteenth century, Maori women produced letters and memoirs, wrote off to newspapers and commissioners, appeared before commissions of enquiry, gave evidence in court cases, and went to the Native Land Court to assert their rights. He Reo Wahine is a bold new introduction to the experience of Maori women in colonial New Zealand through Maori women's own words – the speeches and evidence, letters and testimonies that they left in the archive. Drawing from over 500 texts in both English and te reo Maori written by Maori women themselves, or expressing their words in the first person, He Reo Wahine explores the range and diversity of Maori women's concerns and interests, the many ways in which they engaged with colonial institutions, as well as their understanding and use of the law, legal documents, and the court system. The book both collects those sources – providing readers with substantial excerpts from letters, petitions, submissions and other documents – and interprets them. Eight chapters group texts across key themes: land sales, war, land confiscation and compensation, politics, petitions, legal encounters, religion and other private matters. Beside a large scholarship on New Zealand women's history, the historical literature on Maori women is remarkably thin. This book changes that by utilising the colonial archives to explore the feelings, thoughts and experiences of Maori women – and their relationships to the wider world.




Tom's Letters


Book Description

The correspondence of Thomas King, from his arrival in New Plymouth in 1841, following his progress in business, politics and his family life. It allows us to see the pleasures and pressures of colonial life, and gives an insight into Victorian marriage.




Imperial White


Book Description

Radhika Mohanram shows not just how British imperial culture shaped the colonies, but how the imperial rule of colonies shifted—and gave new meanings to—what it meant to be British. Imperial White looks at literary, social, and cultural texts on the racialization of the British body and investigates British whiteness in the colonies to address such questions as: How was the whiteness in Britishness constructed by the presence of Empire? How was whiteness incorporated into the idea of masculinity? Does heterosexuality have a color? And does domestic race differ from colonial race? In addition to these inquiries on the issues of race, class, and sexuality, Mohanram effectively applies the methods of whiteness studies to British imperial material culture to critically racialize the relationship between the metropole and the peripheral colonies. Considering whether whiteness, like theory, can travel, Mohanram also provides a new perspective on white diaspora, a phenomenon of the nineteenth century that has been largely absent in diaspora studies, ultimately rereading—and rethinking—British imperial whiteness. Radhika Mohanram teaches postcolonial cultural studies in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of Black Body: Women, Colonialism, Space (Minnesota, 1999) and edits the journal Social Semiotics.




Unpacking the Kists


Book Description

Historians have suggested that Scottish influences are more pervasive in New Zealand than in any other country outside Scotland, yet curiously New Zealand's Scots migrants have previously attracted only limited attention. A thorough and interdisciplinary work, Unpacking the Kists is the first in-depth study of New Zealand's Scots migrants and their impact on an evolving settler society. The authors establish the dimensions of Scottish migration to New Zealand, the principal source areas, the migrants' demographic characteristics, and where they settled in the new land. Drawing from extended case-studies, they examine how migrants adapted to their new environment and the extent of longevity in diverse areas including the economy, religion, politics, education, and folkways. They also look at the private worlds of family, neighbourhood, community, customs of everyday life and leisure pursuits, and expressions of both high and low forms of transplanted culture. Adding to international scholarship on migrations and cultural adaptations, Unpacking the Kists demonstrates the historic contributions Scots made to New Zealand culture by retaining their ethnic connections and at the same time interacting with other ethnic groups.




Women Writing Home, 1700-1920 Vol 5


Book Description

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.




A History of New Zealand Women


Book 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 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.




Parrot Pie for Breakfast


Book Description

Catching a parrot and building the hearth to bake it was all in a day's work for the woman pioneer. This riveting anthology tells the story of over 100 such women who settled everywhere from Africa and India to North America and Canada in the age of Empire, from the early 17th to the early 20th centuries.




Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia


Book Description

In gold-rush Australia, social identity was in flux: gold promised access to fashionable new clothes, a grand home, and the goods to furnish it, but could not buy gentility. Needlework and Women's Identity in Colonial Australia explores how the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters who migrated to the newly formed colony of Victoria used their needle skills as a powerful claim to social standing. Focusing on one of women's most common daily tasks, the book examines how needlework's practice and products were vital in the contest for social position in the turmoil of the first two decades of the Victorian rush from 1851. Placing women firmly at the center of colonial history, it explores how the needle became a tool for stitching together identity. From decorative needlework to household making and mending, women's sewing was a vehicle for establishing, asserting, and maintaining social status. Interdisciplinary in scope, Needlework and Women's Identity in Colonial Australia draws on material culture, written primary sources, and pictorial evidence, to create a rich portrait of the objects and manners that defined genteel goldfields living. Giving voice to women's experiences and positioning them as key players in the fabric of gold-rush society, this volume offers a fresh critical perspective on gender and textile history.