Women meeting

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 137.

New Zealand was, and is, full of committees, boards, working groups and the like to organise, manage, advise and lobby. Here [O.018089, C.003206] is a diverse selection. The job of the all-male members of the Taranaki Harbour Board in their board room, overseen by a portrait of the long-dead Queen Victoria, is fairly clear. But that of the group of women identified as suffragists by a former owner of the postcard is less so, as women had gained the vote in New Zealand about fifteen years earlier. Perhaps they were anti-alcohol campaigners, for suffrage and temperance causes were closely connected. But their similar age and dress suggests that perhaps they were university students or school teachers having a meeting of some sort. The group of mostly Māori men could be a committee of the Whanganui City Council, or of some other organising group in the town. Newspaper references to Māori committees at the time include one involved with the Whanganui Agricultural Show, another with a patriotic carnival to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and one other, also photographed by Partington, that was assisting with the ‘More men’ campaign of 1900 to send troops to South Africa.