Abstract:
In Leisure and Pleasure: Reshaping and Revealing the New Zealand Body 1900-1960 (2003), Caroline Daley acknowledges the rise of the body beautiful in New Zealand culture and argues that “as muscles and strength were to men, so, increasingly was beauty of face and form to women” (85). Recent years have witnessed the examination of the New Zealand body within the context of physical health and sport in a number of critical studies including Charlotte Macdonald’s Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935-1960 (2011). Such histories of twentieth-century New Zealand demonstrate the potential for making use of nineteenth-century beauty culture as an equally significant site for investigation. This paper will consider New Zealand women’s visibility within the nexus of changing standards for female beauty over the second half of the 19th century, focusing in particular on the tension between the pervasive influence of British and American beauty products and the emergent national identity of the healthy, robust and naturally beautiful New Zealand woman who began to inhabit the pages of local newspapers. “Nature has not made all women beautiful, but if it has endowed her with good taste and habits of cleanliness the chances are she will be a greater success in social and domestic circles than if she depended upon mere physical beauty alone” observed Louisa Alice Baker in the Ladies Pages of the Otago Witness in 1889. Baker’s weekly column was dedicated to topics of the day such as personal beautification and home decoration and contributed to public debates as to what constituted female beauty in the colony.