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- A
WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE:
- Women
pioneers in Australian
parliament
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- In
1895 South Australian women, the first in
Australia and some of the first in the world,
were given the right to vote and stood for
election to Parliament. The following year, the
first women in Australia voted at the South
Australian elections.
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- Australian
women first voted in a federal election on 16
December 1903 (although Aboriginal women were
not entitled to vote until 1967). Vida
Goldstein, Mary Ann Moore-Bentley, Nellie Martel
and Selina Anderson also stood for election, the
first women in Australia and the British Empire
to stand for a national parliament. However,
they were unsuccessful and Australia was to wait
another 40 years before a woman entered federal
parliament.
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- In
1921, Edith Cowan became the first woman to
enter any Australian parliament when she won the
seat of West Perth. As the legal bar for women
to enter state government was removed, the first
female members gradually emerged throughout
Australia; Millicent Stanley (NSW: 1925); Irene
Longman (Queensland: 1929); Lady Millicent
Peacock (Victoria: 1933); Margaret Edgeworth
McIntyre (Tasmania: 1948). Ironically South
Australia - the first state to allow women the
right to vote and stand for election did not
have a female representative until 1959 when
Jessie Cooper and Joyce Steele were elected to
both Upper and Lower Houses.
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- August
1943 witnessed for the first time a woman in
each house of Australia's federal parliament
when Dorothy Tangney became Senator for WA and
Enid Lyons, the first female federal cabinet
minister, was elected to the House of
Representatives.
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- However
between 1943 and the 1960s very few women
entered federal government. By the 1972 election
there were only two women in parliament, both
Senators. A bleak decade, it was also a time of
significant change with women's issues being
placed on the public agenda for the first time
as demonstrated by the formation of the Women's
Electoral Lobby; the appointment of an adviser
to the Prime Minister on women's issues (later
developing into the Office of the Status of
Women); the beginnings of sex discrimination
legislation; and the foundation of the National
Women's Advisory Council. This prepared the way
for the 1980s and 1990s, which was to see a
marked increase in women in federal
parliament.
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- Some
first women in State
Parliament...
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 - Courtesy
Battye Library, 1364P
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- EDITH
D COWAN (1861-1932)
- The
first woman member of any Australian parliament,
she was elected to the Western Australian
Legislative Assembly in 1921.
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 - John
Oxley Library neg no
63182
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- IRENE
LONGMAN (1877-1964)
- Representing
Bulimba from 1929-1932, she was the first woman
member of the Queensland Assembly, nearly 15
years after Queensland women were first granted
the right to stand for parliament in
1915.
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 - Courtesy
Battye Library, 9396B
(866P)
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- (ANNIE)
FLORENCE CARDELL-OLIVER
(1876-1965)
- First
elected to the WA Lower House in 1936; she
became the first woman in Australia to obtain
full cabinet rank when made Minister for Health
Supply & Shipping in 1949.
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 - Courtesy
of Hon Joan Kirner
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- JOAN
KIRNER (b1938)
- The
first woman to head the Victorian government, she was elected
Premier in 1990.
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 - Courtesy
of Mr Geoffrey Cooper
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- JESSIE
COOPER (1914-1993)
- Elected
to South Australia's Legislative Council in
1959, she was the first female member of the SA
parliament beating Joyce Steele, who had been
elected to the House of Assembly the same day,
by only an hour.
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 - By
permission of the National Library of
Australia
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- ROSEMARY
FOLLETT (b1948)
- The
first woman to head a government as the ACT's first female Chief
Minister, she as also the first woman to attend a Premiers' Conference
in 1989.
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 - By
permission of the National Library of
Australia
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- CARMEN
LAWRENCE (b1948)
- Elected
Premier of Western Australia in 1990, she was the first woman
to head a state government.
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 - By
permission of the National Library of
Australia
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- VIDA
GOLDSTEIN (1869-1949)
- The
first Victorian female candidate for the Senate
in Australia's 1903 first federal election, she
was one of the first four unsuccessful women
candidates that year but who came closest to
victory. Her journal, the Australian Women's
Sphere, first published in 1900, is believed
to have inspired the Pankhursts' British
suffrage papers.
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 - By
permission of the National Library of
Australia
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- ENID
LYONS (1897-1981)
- Elected
in August 1943, she was first woman member of
federal parliament's House of Representatives
and later the first woman to serve on a federal
cabinet when elected Vice-President of the
Executive Council in 1949.
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 - By
permission of the National Library of
Australia
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- DOROTHY
TANGNEY (1911-1985)
- The
first woman in the federal Senate when elected
in August 1943, she was Senator for WA for 25
years, the only female member of the ALP
throughout her term of office. She was also the
first woman to serve on any parliamentary
committee - the Senate Standing Committee on
Regulations and Ordinances.
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 - By
permission of the National Library of
Australia
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- JOAN
CHILD (b1921)
- The
first female ALP member in the House of Representatives when elected
in 1974, she later became the first female Speaker of either House
of the federal parliament when appointed to the House of Representatives
in 1986.
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 - Courtesy
of Rosemary Crowley
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- ROSEMARY
CROWLEY (b1938)
- The
first South Australian female member of the ALP in federal parliament,
she was appointed Senator for South Australia in 1983. She was
also the first SA woman to be elected to a federal ministry when
made Minister for Family Services and Minister assisting the Prime
Minister on the Status of Women in 1993.
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 - National
Library, Canberra
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- JANINE
HAINES (b1945)
- First
Australian Democrat Senator from 1977-1978, she
was later appointed leader of the Australian
Democrats in 1986, the first female leader of an
Australian parliamentary political
party.
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