Janet McCallum
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
McCallum, Janet (1947 - ) is an author who has published accounts of New Zealand women in parliament, in wartime and in the wilderness, environments with rather more in common than one might hope or expect.
Born in India to British parents, McCallum was raised and educated in New Zealand, spending a year in Paris as a student of French and travelling extensively in South East Asia. She holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Victoria University in French and Russian.
Her first book, Women in the House (1993) presents, for the first time in one volume, the lives of the 36 women Members of Parliament who served in the first 100 years after New Zealand Women won the vote. The road for women in Parliament has not been an easy one. As Oliver Reddell writes in the Christchurch Press: 'Perhaps not even local sports clubs... have seen the same consistent sexism which men MPs have dealt out to their woman counterparts.'
In The Evening Post, Karen Brown writes of Women in the House: 'Its strength lies in the humour, honesty, intimacy and insight it offers.'
This landmark book was preceded by contributions to Herstory Diary (1984), Women in Wartime (1986), Wilderness Women (1989), The Book of New Zealand Women (1991), and a dozen articles in various volumes of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.
In 1992 McCallum was awarded the National Library Fellowship to research early New Zealand Women Journalists.
Women and their Words was published by Fraser Books in 2009. Clarke Isaacs reviewed the book for the Otago Daily Times, writing 'Janet McCallum, in Women and Their Words, has delved deeply to deliver up the experiences of a great many would-be women journalists in New Zealand from the 1860s till the late 1940s. Too often their talents were under-rated and their recompense for long hours, even more so than the men, poor. But most beavered away determinedly. Gradually their abilities came to be appreciated... '.
Known best for her writing and research on New Zealand women, McCallum is equally proud of her work on Maori language, including a study comparing the English speech of young Maori with that of young pakeha. In Search of a Dialect: An explanatory study of the informal speech of some Maori and Pakeha children (1975) was followed by a booklet entitled He Pioke no Rangaunu - Exercises and Games for Practice in Maori (1975).
