Behind every man … the unheralded female origins of Australasian department stores

Across New Zealand and Australia department stores have become household names. While women dominate customer numbers, and feature on the shop floor, management and ownership have, until recently, been almost entirely male. Before the mergers and acquisitions, before the creation of company boards, however, the founders of many of those stores were women. This article introduces several early female entrepreneurs and considers both their sidelining in the businesses they created and their erasure from the history of many department stores.