Colonial Businesswomen In the Hutt and Beyond

Next door to the Hutt City Library once lived Elizabeth Cowles, businesswoman, property owner and prohibitionist. Over in Tory Street was the Petone Steam Laundry (now Alsco), run by the entrepreneurial but unscrupulous Eliza Couchman. Neither women are much remembered today but, like many other women of business, would have been well-known to their fellow residents at the end of the nineteenth century.

In this talk Catherine Bishop, author of Women Mean Business (Otago University Press), explores the stories of some of New Zealand’s colonial entrepreneurs – the successful and the outright failures, the heart-warming and the tragic, the everyday and the scandalous.