First and foremost we celebrate the Matriarchs of our families. And all the women of yesterday who have lived and loved through some pretty hard times.
Through wars and depression, through poverty, through the deaths of their husbands and children, through illnesses. For NZ women many of our great great grandmothers arrived to find nothing to live in but tin sheds or sod huts.
They battled on through the worst of circumstances to give us the gift of life that we hold today.
Please feel free to list the women you'd like to honor......
Mary Ashwell, 1840-1875.
ReplyDeleteSarah Fredericks, 1869-1946.
Mary Elizabeth Fredericks, 1843-1903.
Margaret McLeod, 1838-1916.
Meria Fisher, 1875-1928.
Frances Fisher, 1905-1988. Born in a mining town, she survived the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918 but lost her father. Ten years later, she lost her mother and became the guardian of her remaining siblings. She and her family had to live in a tent for a number of years during the depression and she lost her 13yr old son to a drunk driver. She and her husband still managed to give their kids a decent education and they were always properly dressed.
Zoe Wills, 1903-1958.
Christina McLeod, 1865-1961.
Enea 'Ann' Needham. 1922-1998. Divorced her wife beating husband in the 1950's and survived by working as a live-in housekeeper on farms.
Geraldine Thacker, 1887-1944. Married to a man that left her destitute, she kept her children in care by teaching the piano. She loved Poppies and iceskating.
Alice Rose Schoch, b1863. Was the secretary to the Womens Social & Political League (Political arm of the Suffragettes). She steered her family through wrack and ruin when a change in government cancelled her husbands contracts, the subsequent death of her husband and the loss of her son in WW1. she and her family used to put on plays & performances for the inmates at a local asylum.
Brenda Minnell, 1947-2001. A beautiful soul who as a survivor of cancer, nursed countless others through their final hours - at all hours of the night and day, before she was taken from us in a car crash.