Tooth and Veil:
The Life and Times of the New Zealand Dental Nurse, Massey
University Press
, published by
Massey University Press.
The award was announced at
the Labour History Project AGM on Tuesday 20
July.
Named for the late historian Herbert Roth, the
award is presented annually to the work published in the
previous calendar year that best depicts the history of work
and resistance in New Zealand.
The award was judged
this year by Cybèle Locke, Claire-Louise McCurdy, Grace
Millar, and Ross Webb
‘On 29 March 1974, nurses from
all over the country marched on parliament and won a
substantial pay increase. This protest is at the centre of
Once a rarity in what was previously a traditionally male-dominated profession, there are now many female Funeral Directors, Arrangers and Crematorium Managers helping families to say farewell to their loved ones that have died. In pre-Victorian times, before funeral directing became a profession, the practical tasks required when someone in a community died were divided amongst the male and female members of the family or village. The caring job of ‘laying out’ the dead would be allocated to a local woman or women, who may well have also acted as a midwife. The men would be responsible for physical tasks such as digging the grave, making a coffin, transporting the deceased and - if the family did not have enough men to fulfil the task - providing additional men to carry the coffin.