Public virtue, private ambition—Women owners of private hospitals in early twentieth‐century New Zealand

Abstract New Zealand's early‐twentieth‐century health service was a two‐tier system of state hospitals supported by an expanding network of over 300 private hospitals, almost exclusively owned by nurses and midwives. This article will show that this environment was created by a legislative framework introduced between 1901 and 1906, requiring nurses, midwives, and their private hospitals to be registered, licensed, and monitored. Stringent regulation could have stifled the industry. Instead, it provided fertile ground on which many women flourished as enterprising businesswomen who made significant contributions to their communities, breaking with traditional notions of nurses solely as carers and handmaidens to doctors.