Wanted, a Beautiful Barmaid: Women Behind the Bar in New Zealand, 1830-1976

WANTED, A BEAUTIFUL BARMAID: WOMEN BEHIND THE BAR IN NEW ZEALAND, 1830-1976 Susan Upton Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2013; 239pp. ISBN 978 0 86473 894 3Given New Zealanders' proclivity towards drinking, this investigation into the history of women and liquor regulation is a pertinent read. Beginning in the 1830s, Wanted, a beautiful barmaid, traces antagonism towards women behind the bar which climaxes in the abolition of the fairer sex from the profession in 1910. Far from a one-sided affair, the book also highlights the affec- tion a drinking community could have for 'their' barmaid, as was the case with publican Re- becca Tabor, elected as vice-president of her patrons' rugby club in Masterton. It is somewhere between these legislative restrictions and overly enthusiastic patrons, where Upton's barmaids and female publicans negotiated spaces in which they could support themselves and their fami- lies. The book also traces the slippery legislative slope leading to women's full reinstatement behind the bar in 1976, demonstrating that 'progress' in this case, was largely the removal of legislative restrictions that had always run counter to the preferences of the drinking communi- ties themselves.In a sense this is a well overdue book. It was 1997 when Diane Kirkby uncovered the story of women's work in pubs in Australia in her Barmaids: A history of women 's work in pubs. But Upton's work is not simply a New Zealand partner to Kirkby's, as its focus is far less on the role of the barmaid and drinking culture in the development of a national identity, and more on the legislative bombardment which confronted women seeking to support themselves and their fam- ilies through participation in the liquor trade. Upton's book is also able to situate the experiences of New Zealand barmaids within the international historiography, grounding the research at key points in a wider frame of reference extending to Kirkby's Australia, and also Canada. Upton po- sitions her narrative against other tomes of New Zealand women's history as well, thus not only uncovering the historical relationship between women, alcohol, and legislation in this country, but also contributing to the development of our understanding of New Zealand's position in the world and also women's position within New Zealand. Chapters cover the unrestricted grog shops of the mid-1800s, the feisty barmaids of the gold rushes of the 1860s and 1870s, the per- ceived moral threat the profession posed to women on the frontier, anti-barmaid campaigns led by the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the growing popularity of prohibition and its ef- fects on women in the liquor trade, the introduction of surveillance via the barmaids register, the war and six o'clock closing, and attempts by legislators and union alike to control barmaids dur- ing the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. Where drinking culture is considered a traditionally man's world, Upton's work usefully demonstrates that liquor is a women's history too.While the research for this social history was wide-ranging, personal accounts are often missing. We gain a brief and all the more valuable and rare insight into the personal letters of Ellen Piezzi, working near Hokitika from 1878-1881, but much of the early narrative is pre- sented from the outside looking in. Parliamentarians discuss working hours and the appropriate gender of drink-pouring, while criminal reports identify the bolshy women who participated in male bastions of New Zealand culture despite legislative restriction. A pair of barmaids wrote to the newspapers in 1884 decrying the slander thrown against them, and in 1910 Anne Carr and a handful of others engaged in correspondence with the Secretary of Labour concerning registration as barmaids, but these are small feminine voices in a much larger masculine wil- derness. …

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