Books 11 March -April 2024 from the History group
Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman
METAPHYSICAL ANIMALS How four women brought philosophy back to life Vintage 2023 ISBN 978 1 529 11218 4
Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgeley, Iris Murdoch.
A portrayal of how four woman undergraduates at Oxford during WWII shared ideas (as well as shoes, sofa and lovers) and went on to develop a radically different way of thinking about freedom, reality and human goodness. It is a story of intellectual courage.
Redmer Yska
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe – Station to Station
Otago University Press ISBN 2023 978 1 99 004853 1
‘A host of biographers and scholars have fixed Mansfield’s place in and impact on the English-speaking literary world, her fellowship with the Bloomsbury ring, her distinctive contribution to literary modernism. Too little, however, has been written about her European wellheads, the places across the continent where she lived, was inspired, searched for – and recorded – lost time. Nor have we learned much about her startling celebrity in interwar France, her iron grip on its subconscious. This book addresses these silences.’
Yska Foreword Page 8
Myke Cole THE BRONZE LIE SHATTERING THE MYTH OF SPARTAN WARRIOR SUPREMACY Osprey Great Britain 2021
464 pages ISBN: 978 1 4728 4375 3
The title states the works purpose. Sparta-worship is alive and well today – “Laconophilia marched on throughout western arts and letters, and always on the same theme – worshipping at the altar of the Spartan’s legendary self-denial, restraint and devotion to duty.” P. 415. Cole exposes the myth as a lie.
From Margaret Stuart
BREAD AND ROSES : Sonja Davies Her Story (unicornbooks.co.nz)
Honest, revealing and down to earth. Yes, she famously sat on the railway lines at Tui, near Nelson to protest the government decision to not complete the West Coast to Nelson rail link. But of more interest are her struggles to reconcile home, family and her passionate interests and giftings, which so often leave busy women working themselves to the bone to keep all their juggling balls in the air. Yet, this amazingly determined woman, often at her own cost(on the smell of an oily rag), travels most of New Zealand & the world to change the lives and awareness of women as to how they can be involved in politics, trade unions, pay parity, employment options in male strong-holds, raise child-care standards and serve in local government and community endeavours. All her work is accompanied by realisation of her mistakes, a sage analysis of what can & can’t work in New Zealand and plan Bs to attempt different solutions. This is also a current history of New Zealand – we are seeing now the fruit of some of her work and yet there are still huge battles to be won esp. in people’s mind-sets from our British heritage and traditional male roles. But all this is moving along at a fast pace as we survive her 3 marriages, heart-break over the first, the death of her marine husband on active service, her third happy marriage to Charlie Davies, all against the back-drop of her prolonged struggle with tuberculosis threatening her life. We somehow emerge through the realities of nursing training in the early 1950s in Wellington, much of which was still reality for the students of the early 1970s. We also survive with her through the tragedy of the death of her son and Charlie. This book was published in 1984 & Sonja herself died in 2005, but her battles and victories live on. A MUST read for all NZ women, everyone involved in peace-movements and politics and all those seeking equality across gender and cultural barriers.
The Book of New Zealand Women / Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa (bwb.co.nz)
The Book of New Zealand Women: Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa. Edited by Charlotte Macdonald, Merinieri Penfold and Bridget Williams. Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 1991. 772pp. NZ price: $45.00. OVER 130 YEARS ago. the English novelist George Eliot wrote that ‘The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history”; now the authors of this recent publication have 226 REVIEWS turned this statement on its head.1 In The Book of New Zealand Women, Charlotte Macdonald. Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams have compiled the accounts of more than 300 women who have lived in New Zealand. These range from Palliser Bay Woman of c. 1200 AD, to journalist Helen Paske, who died in I989^ s the editors state, the aim of this collective project was not to catalogue New Zealands s ‘famous women’, but rather to emphasize with a broad sweep ‘the variety of courses that women’s lives have taken’ (p. viii). The inclusion of women of note along with those hitherto unknown in the public sense, challenges the criteria which have previously determined one’s entry into an historical text. In setting this alternative agenda. The Book of New Zealand Women is indeed at the forefront of research in New Zealand women’s history. The Book of New Zealand Women takes as its starting point the female social pattern that has been provided by recent publications in New Zealand women’s history. It then goes a step further to move from the general to the specific; from the public to the private worlds of women and their experiences in New Zealand. This approach allows for the complexity of women’s lives to be shown, and suggests that an analysis in terms of the simple life/work distinction does not accommodate the many roles that women have been, and still are, expected to assume. This montage of life stories, presented as a series of biographical portraits, is created as a means of compiling an ‘alternative history’. The Book of New Zealand Women may be read as a col lection of fascinating true stories, but it is as a reference work that it will be particularly valuable to historians. At the end of the book, subjects are listed alphabetically, then indexed according to their field of activity, allowing the reader to cross-reference between essays. There is also an index of contributing authors. The detailed indexing is testimony to the quality of research upon which this book is based, but it could be improved with the addition of a list of essays in chronological order. For a reference work the text is generously illustrated, yet without the distraction of obtrusive footnotes. Variety is also extended to the range of source materials. The sources include published and unpublished material and are drawn from archival collections as well as informal personal records, both written and oral. A list of sources is provided after each essay to facilitate further research. Where the evidence is scarce, or where women left no records of their own, the authors have drawn upon other sources; medical records have been consulted for Annemarie Anon, police records for Opium Mag (Margaret Williams), and the Sweating Commission of 1890 for a portrait of Miss Y and Miss Z. Although shorter entries have been allocated to those women whose lives have previously been studied, it is surprising just how few these are. It is refreshing to see longer entries on women who have been previously unknown to most outside their immediate circle; women such as Alice Stott, Maro Hoterene, Unui Doo and Jessie Buckland. For practical reasons, not every woman with a claim to have her story told could be included in The Book of New Zealand Women, as its editors admit, but those that are provide a comprehensive insight into women’s worlds in our past. In addition to the wealth of detail that will inspire future researchers of women’s history, its enduring contribution to the direction of feminist scholarship in New Zealand is in providing an alternative definition of fame and notoriety. GISELLE BYRNES University of Auckland
1 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), bk.vi, ch.3.
Te Puea by Michael King
Te Puea Herangi, whom Professor John Pocock identified as ‘possibly the most influential woman in our political history’, wanted an honest biography of her turbulent life. ‘I want the truth told and nothing but the truth,’ she told a Pakeha journalist. Michael King has written such a book. He did so with the full support of Te Puea’s tribe, Tainui, and of her surviving family and protégés. When this book first appeared in 1977 it was hailed as the best book written by or about a New Zealander. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature said it was so far an advance on anything published previously that it was without precedent. It remains so.
376 pages, Kindle Edition
Maureen Bobbett recommends
Michael Livingstone Never Greater Slaughter- Prunanburbh
The battle, fought in CE 937, was won by King Alfred’s grandson King Athelstan with other “Kings” against an allied force. It was the first battle where the English kingdoms united against a common foe, and the site has only been found on the Wirral near Liverpool. Historians rate it as least as important as Hastings as it defined a nation for the first time ever. BUT somehow it is isn’t well known and the probable site has only recently been dug. Michael Livingstone is a really clear writer and although there is a forward by Richard Cornwall, Livingstone really does cover what used to be the Dark Ages with scholarship, clarity and humour.
Barbara Rosenberg’s recommendation
Elizabeth Wayland Barber Women’s Work: the First 20,000 years
Pb. W. W. Norton Ltd. 1995
American academic specialising in prehistoric textiles. Because the food and clothing women provided was perishable, their contribution to the economy in prehistoric and ancient times has been overlooked.