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Australian women in politics

In 1902 Australia's new Commonwealth Parliament paved the way for a new form of democracy by granting women the vote and the right to be elected on a national basis.

This was a significant victory for Australia's suffragette movement. It succeeded despite strong opposition to the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902, which enshrined these new women's rights in law.

Leading the world in rights and yet, the longest lag time for election

While New Zealand had granted women the right to vote in 1893, Commonwealth women's suffrage reflected the rights of women to seek election in South Australia and to vote in Western Australia, rights granted between 1895 and 1899. However, Indigenous women were not granted suffrage until 1962.

A leading suffragette, Edith Cowan, was the first woman to be elected to an Australian parliament when she won a seat in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in 1921.

The victory was indeed groundbreaking, but the next hurdle proved even more difficult. It took nearly 41 years for a woman to enter federal parliament. Ironically, this 'time lag' was the longest of any Western country.

The first nominations

In 1903, for the first time in the British Empire, Australian women were candidates for election to a national parliament. In all, four women were nominated - three for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives.

Vida Goldstein - an electoral pioneer

Vida Goldstein ran for the Senate on three occasions - in 1903, 1910 and 1917. She was also a House of Representatives candidate in 1913 and 1914. However, she was never successful in her bids for election.

Apart from 'breaking the ice' by running as a candidate, she was also a vocal campaigner for issues such as equal pay for equal work, the recognition of a basic wage, the abolition of child labour and equal property rights for spouses.

A true activist, Goldstein saw her nominations for parliament as an opportunity to express her views to a wider audience:

I accepted nomination because I saw what a splendid educational value the campaign would have. I knew I would attract much larger audiences as a candidate than if I were advertised to give a lecture on women's part in the federal elections, or some such subject.

The power of the women's vote - Western Australia

Between 1910 and 1920 the power of the women's vote began to have an increasingly noticeable effect on the law and on society. Divorce laws were made more equitable, King Edward Memorial Hospital was established as a women's hospital, women justices were appointed to the Children's Court, and barmaids and female musicians were granted equal pay with men.

Edith Cowan, 1921-1925 and May Holman, 1925 - 1939

Edith Cowan - a pioneer for women's and children's rights at the turn of the century - became the first woman to enter any Australian parliament when she was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in 1921.

Edith Cowan was a suffragette and social activist. Despite demeaning stereotyping, Edith Cowan was a forceful parliamentarian. She introduced and saw enacted the Women's Legal Status Act, which enabled women to practice law. This was a major milestone in the achievement of women's rights. The Edith Cowan University in Perth was named after her.

The next woman elected in Western Australia was May Holman (1893 - 1939), first elected in 1925 and the first female Labour parliamentarian in the world.  May had grown up with a mother who was active in Labor women's organisations and a father who was a Labor member of the Legislative Assembly in 1901-21 and 1923-25. From 1918 she assisted her father at the Timber Workers' Union, spending nine months in the Victorian Arbitration Court. After his death in 1925, May was briefly acting secretary of the union and won pre-selection for his blue-ribbon seat of Forrest, a predominantly timber electorate. The Timber Industries Regulation Act, 1926, was largely her work.

Holman was to occupy the seat of Forrest for the next fourteen years, at a time when Western Australia was at the forefront of the Australian women's movement. At her instigation, in 1938, a royal commission to inquire into sanitation, slum clearance and health and housing regulations in Perth was set up.

Florence Cardell-Oliver, 1936 - 1956

Florence Cardell-Oliver (1876-1965), president of the Western Australian Nationalist Women's Movement, won the State seat of Subiaco in 1936, which she was to hold for 20 years. Cardell-Oliver was especially concerned about the health of children from low income families.  Cardell-Oliver was the first woman in Australia to attain full cabinet rank when she became Minister for Health in October 1949. Her efforts created the school milk scheme, which ensured that generations of children received a daily quota of free milk.

'woman's skirts rustle on the sacred benches', 1925 - New South Wales

Millicent Preston-Stanley (NSW, 1925) was elected to the NSW Legislative Assembly as a Nationalist Party candidate for the Eastern Suburbs electorate. Preston-Stanley was a realist with regard to the immediate impact she would have:

I'm not fool enough to suppose my going into the House is going to make any sweeping alteration. The heavens won't fall because a woman's skirts rustle on the sacred benches, so long the sacrosanct seats of the lords of creation. (E. F. Smith, Millicent Preston-Stanley: A Feminist in Politics, BA (Hons) Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1977)

Since Preston-Stanley, over eighty women have been elected to Parliament, with nearly forty of them doing so now. Overall, more than 700 women have stood for Parliament in NSW.

Some of them were 'first in their field'. Helen Sham-Ho, (MLC 1988-2003) was the first Chinese-born parliamentarian in Australia. Janice Crosio, who served on the executive of all three levels of government, was the first woman New South Wales Government Cabinet Member. In 2003, Linda Burney became the first Aboriginal person elected to the NSW Parliament when she won the seat of Canterbury. (Putting Skirts on the Sacred Benches)

Irene Longman, 1929, Queensland and the long dry until 1966

Queensland did not enfranchise women until 1905. However, it was the second State to allow the right for women to sit in parliament, in 1915. Irene Longman was the first to stand as a candidate, endorsed by the Country-National Party and the Queensland Women's Electoral League. Longman was responsible for women being admitted to the Queensland police force, something originally proposed by the suffragists in the nineteenth century.

It was not until 1966 that a second woman, Vi Jordan, entered parliament - and she managed to get a women's toilet in the House. Annabelle Rankin was Queensland's first female Federal Member when elected to the Senate in 1947, and the first Queensland woman in the House of Representatives was Elaine Darling in 1980. When Kathy Martin (Sullivan) was elected to the Senate in 1974 she was the only Queensland woman in Federal parliament. Flo Bjelke-Petersen and Margaret Reynolds were both elected to the Senate in the 1980s.

Lady Millicent Peacock, 1933, and Doris Blackburn, 1946 - Victoria

Women in Victoria had to wait until 1908 before they were granted suffrage in Victorian state elections and until 1923 before they were eligible to stand for the Victorian Parliament. Lady Millicent Peacock (1870 - 1948) became the first female Member of the Parliament of Victoria at a by-election for the Legislative Assembly seat of Allandale, caused by the death of the sitting member, her husband.

It was not until 1946 that Victorian women entered federal parliament. Doris Blackburn (1889 - 1970) was elected as the independent member for Bourke, her late husband's seat, although she had been campaign secretary for Vida Goldstein in the 1913 federal election. Blackburn was involved in the Free Kindergarten movement and campaigns for better education, playgrounds and crèches. In 1957, with Doug Nicholls, she was a co-founder of the Aboriginal Advancement League and the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement.

Margaret McIntyre, 1948, Tasmania

Margaret Edgeworth McIntyre (1886 - 1948) was a member of the National Council of Women of Tasmania, a commissioner (1940-48) of the Girl Guides' Association and established the G. V. Brooks Community School in 1948 before being appointed O.B.E. that year. In the same year, she stood as an Independent to win the division of Cornwall in the Tasmanian Legislative Council: she was the first woman to be elected to the parliament. 'Less than four months after her parliamentary career began, she was killed when the Australian National Airways Dakota in which she was travelling crashed into a mountain near Quirindi, New South Wales.' (Australian Dictionary of Biograpy)

Jessie Cooper and Joyce Steele, 1959, South Australia

Although it was the first state to allow women the right to vote and stand for election, South Australia was last to have a female representative. South Australia's first female elected parliamentarians were Jessie Cooper and Joyce Steele - elected to both the Upper and Lower Houses in 1959.

Breaking into federal parliament - Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons, 1943

In August 1943, after a 41-year wait, Australia finally elected women to Australia's federal parliament when Dorothy Tangney became Senator for Western Australia, and Enid Lyons, was elected to the House of Representatives.

Tangney, a 31-year-old school teacher, went on to become a veteran of the parliament, representing Western Australia for 25 years until 1968. Senator Dorothy Tangney was WA's representative at the 1958 National Conference on Equal Pay in Sydney. The decade closed with the establishment of the Combined Equal Pay Committee of Western Australia

Lyons was also a teacher and the widow of former Prime Minister Joseph Lyons. Joseph Lyons was Australia's tenth Prime Minister, and served between 1932-1939. Lyons was the first woman elected to the Lower House, and the first woman in Federal Cabinet.

Lyons worked hard in Parliament for women and children. She believed that men and women should be completely equal. In those days women often stayed at home. If they did go out to work, they earned less. Lyons brought in welfare payments for mothers and equal training allowances for women and men.
She was made Dame Enid by the King in 1943 and Dame Enid of Australia in 1980.

Post World War II - first women political leaders, Ministers and Premiers

Over the past 30 years women have increased their representation in Australia's parliaments. While there has been a great deal of rhetoric from our political parties about the pre-selection of women candidates and issues such as 'quotas', their representation in both federal and state politics is still disproportionately low.

Nevertheless, there have been some notable figures in the state and federal arenas.

Susan Ryan, 1984, Minister for Education

Susan Ryan (1942- )was appointed the first Labor Senator for the Australian Capital Territory, 1975. In the Federal Parliament she was the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister Bob Hawke on the Status of Women 1983-88 and the Minister for Education, 1984-87. She presided over the passage of the federal government's Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and the Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunities in Employment) Act 1986.

Janine Haines, 1986, South Australia, Leader of the Australian Democrats

In 1986, Janine Haines became the first woman to lead an Australian political party when she was elected leader of the Australian Democrats. Under her leadership the Democrats held the balance of power in the Senate. She significantly increased Democrat support, with the Senate vote rising to 12.6 per cent in 1990.

Since Haines, the Democrats have had other female parliamentary leaders - Janet Powell, Cheryl Kernot, Meg Lees, Natasha Stott Despoja and Lyn Allison.

Joan Kirner, 1990, Deputy Premier of Victoria

Joan Kirner served as Deputy Premier of Victoria for a year in 1989 before serving as Premier for two years to 1992. Following the Labor Party's defeat in 1992 she became Leader of the Opposition. She resigned from parliament in 1994. She said of her time in the 'top job':

My being premier, whatever people thought of my government, showed that a woman, a feminist, can be premier and win the respect of business, unions and the community.

Carmen Lawrence, 1990, Premier of Western Australia

In a leadership change on 12 February 1990, Dr Carmen Lawrence made history by becoming Premier of Western Australia and Australia's first woman Premier.

Following Labor's narrow defeat at the 1993 State election, Dr Lawrence also became Western Australia's first woman Opposition Leader and held the positions of Shadow Treasurer and Shadow Minister for Employment and Federal Affairs.

Dr Lawrence entered federal politics by winning the federal seat of Fremantle in a by-election on 12 March 1994. She was appointed Minister for Human Services and Health, and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women in March 1994.

Amanda Vanstone, 1996, Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs...

Senator Amanda Vanstone has had a diverse range of portfolios. After the national 1996 election, Senator Vanstone served as the Federal Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, and in October 1997 became the Minister for Justice. Following the 1998 election she was sworn in as the Minister for Justice and Customs. From January 2001 until October 2003 she served as Minister for Family and Community Services, and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Status of Women.

Anna Bligh, 2007, Premier of Queensland

Anna Bligh (1960 - ) was elected to parliament in 1995 with a Bachelor of Arts and in 1998 became the Minister for Families, Youth and Community Care and Disability Services. She was promoted to deputy premier in 2005 and then in 2007, with Peter Beattie's retirement, Anna became the first female Premier of Queensland. A local newspaper has also managed to trace Anna's family back to Captain Bligh.

Marion Scrymgour, Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory

Marion Scrymgour is the first female Aboriginal minister in any government in the history of Australia. Marion was born in Darwin in 1960 and raised on the Tiwi Islands. Marion has been the Member for Arafura since 2001 and a Minister since 2002. She is currently Deputy Chief Minister, Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Minister for Family and Community Services, Minister for Child Protection, Minister for Indigenous Policy, Minister for Arts and Museums and Minister for Women's Policy.

Related Culture and Recreation Portal Stories

• Federation
• Governors-General
• Royal visits to Australia
• Suffragettes

Early suffragettes and politicians

• Goldstein, Vida
• The Suffragette: Vida Goldstein (1869 - 1946)
• Tangney, Dorothy Margaret
• Senator Dorothy Tangney 24 September 1943
• Dame Enid Lyons
• Dr Carmen Lawrence - Member for Fremantle 1994-2007
• Forging The Nation - Vida Goldstein

Online collections of women in politics

• A Vote of Her Own - Centenary of Women's Suffrage 1999 (Western Australia).
• Representative Women: Victorian Women Parliamentarians Since 1923
• Putting Skirts on the Sacred Benches - NSW
• State Library of South Australia - Women and Politics in South Australia
• Queensland, Women in Parliament
• Parliament of Australia - Women in the Senate
• AEC: Women in the Political Arena

Look, listen and play

• Discovering Democracy Units
• Edith Cowan - ABC TV, Australians

Search over 4,000 Australian websites for information about:

• Vida Goldstein
• Edith Cowan

Or enter your own search:

Last updated: 3rd October 2007

The Portal welcomes contributions and feedback from readers about Australian Stories. To provide feedback on this article, please email the Stories Editor, StoriesEditor at culture dot gov dot au.

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