Several colourful characters from the University of Otago's past staged a dramatic comeback to the campus this week during a historical re-enactment to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.
Nearly 114 years after graduating at Otago and becoming New Zealand's first female law graduate, Ethel Benjamin popped in to explain what life was like for a female in the university's first 50 years.
About 100 university staff and other well-wishers took the chance to catch up with Miss Benjamin, whose role was played by fourth-year university theatre studies student Kiri Beeching.
Staff also met incarnations of other notable women students from the university's early days and their sometimes unsupportive male contemporaries during a re-enactment tour, which included some lively "classes" at the historic Quad 4 lecture theatre in the geology building.
The tour was led by university international relations co-ordinator Sandy McAndrew, who took up a suggestion by the Staff Women's Caucus to mark the international anniversary, and added the dramatic elements, including the use of actors.
As the audience was led to various locations around the university's old buildings, women and quite a few male characters from the past "came alive" and spoke about their early experiences.
Other characters included the university's first woman graduate, Caroline Freeman; its first woman law graduate, Emily Siedeberg; and Seacliff Lunatic Asylum medical superintendent and part-time mental diseases lecturer Dr Truby King.
Otago's early female university students and professors clearly overcame some daunting obstacles on their way to academic success.
Caroline Freeman, the university's first female graduate, had to walk seven miles (11km) to the university and back to her home at Green Island each day and initially also faced the "unwelcoming attitude" of the all-male staff and 111 male students, before gaining her BA in 1885.
Prof Winifred Lilly Boys-Smith, the first female university professor in New Zealand, also overcame the Otago Home Science School's limited initial housing in an old School of Mines building known as "the Tin Shed".
And the school flourished, with its initial five students growing to 71 within 10 years of its founding in 1911.
