The currency of femininity: Earning, spending and saving among office girls in post‐war New Zealand

This article examines how post‐war clerical work shaped young New Zealand women's financial and social modernity. It explores how earning a ‘wage of one's own’ enabled women to perform modern femininity while negotiating ideals of glamour, thrift, and respectability. Drawing on women's magazines, bank archives, and oral histories, it analyses the figure of the ‘glamorous business girl’, whose body functioned as both spectacle and currency within the office. Through dressmaking, saving, and travel, women channelled their wages into self‐fashioning and aspiration, revealing how economic practice, display, and mobility intertwined to redefine post‐war femininity and agency.