Outsider and a Woman at That!, An

Description

This book tells the story of the author’s marriage to a volatile Irishman – a highly respected civil engineer, of coming to live in provincial Hawke’s Bay, and of her intrepid travels alone across Communist Russia then on to Armagh, Northern Ireland at the height of ‘The Troubles’. It is also the story of a woman entering and succeeding in a man’s world at the beginning of the ‘Decade for Women’. Sheila Belshaw was, as one young woman put it, part of a bow-wave of women who broke the channels and made it easier for others to follow. Sheila provides an often humorous, behind-the-scenes account of a rapidly changing political environment for local government from the late 1980s, and tells of her part, as a councillor, in shaping policy and revitalising Napier, a city she came to love.