New Zealand has experienced sustained increases in women’s labour force participation since the post-war period. When observed across time, work patterns provide insights to the changing overall lifetime attachment of women to the labour market. Using data from the 1995 sample survey New Zealand Women: Family, Employment, Education, we present descriptive findings on the work patterns of women born between 1936 and 1965, and depict these patterns in terms of spells in and out of work. A cohort perspective is taken. We then proceed to summarise the details of these individual work histories using summary measures which can then be correlated with potential explanatory factors. The results show that by the age of 30, successive birth cohorts have experienced: (i) increasing complexities in their work and non-work trajectories; (ii) childbearing continues to depress women’s engagement in paid work across time; and (iii) the influence of educational attainment and ethnicity seems to be changing.