I could hardly call my little book ‘First New Zealand Women’ – and then I woke up at 2am
one night with a phrase that singer Dinah Lee had said when I had interviewed her years
previously: ‘But I changed all that....’
Dinah was the first New Zealand woman to have a number one hit overseas – in Australia, in
1964. She said the men in the band she toured with told her ‘not to get a big head. They kept
me right down because to them the girl singer was just a fill-in. But I changed all that. All of
a sudden, I was going on my own tours.’
The women in But I Changed All That all heard that little crack in the glass ceiling. The book
is a pick and mix of some of the women who were a ‘first’ in some way. Each page has a
picture, 300 words and a pull-out quote.
Some were the first New Zealander to achieve in an area. Women have been ahead of the
men in some spheres. For example, literature. Two New Zealand women have won the
Booker Prize: Keri Hulme and Eleanor Catton. No male writer is as well known in the
international arena as Katherine Mansfield or Janet Frame are.
Elizabeth Yates was the first mayor in the British Empire in 1893. Elizabeth McCombs was
the first woman elected to the New Zealand Parliament, in 1933; Mabel Howard the first
Cabinet minister, in 1947; Iriaka Rātana, the first Maori woman MP, in 1949; and Whetu
Tirikātene-Sullivan, the first Māori woman Cabinet minister, in 1972. The first woman prime
minister was Jenny Shipley, in 1997, but Helen Clark became the first elected one two years
later.
The historiography of women in New Zealand writing strikes a difficult balance – or does not
do so. Some books and websites make sweeping statements about how 19 th century women
were forced to remain in the domestic sphere and were unable to achieve their ambitions. But
too much emphasis on such arguments means that achievements are overlooked.
New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow women to vote in national elections,
in 1893. Sixteen years earlier, the Education Act had not only sent all girls to school between
the ages of seven and 13, but the pupil-teacher system meant that intelligent girls could stay
on and earn as they trained – in their own locality. By 1900, women made up 50 per cent of
university students, though that proportion fell until the 1970s.
Dr Agnes Bennett, of Wellington, features in the book as she was the first woman to work in
a British military medical unit and Enid Bell, from the same city, as the first officer in the
Women’s Royal Naval Service. Hundreds of other women paid their own way to play a role
in the war effort overseas, including Ettie Rout, who was responsible for New Zealand
becoming the first country to give its soldier compulsory safe sex kits; they had to take one if
they went on leave.
But I Changed All That is available at Booklovers B&B at the wholesale price of $10.
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