Celebrating 100 Years of Women Standing for Parliament 1919 - 2019

It’s my privilege to address you this morning to commemorate and to celebrate 100 years since women became eligible by law to stand for Parliament in New Zealand.

It was part of a long and challenging movement for women’s equality spanning centuries, and we are still not done.

Taking a seat in parliament was a vital part in equality, because this place is the heart of law-making. When women are 51% of the population it was inevitable that we should take our place here and continue our ambitions for fair representation.

I would like to do three things today.

• To pay tribute to the women candidates and representatives that played such a key role in our progress.
• To highlight the progress that gets made when women MPs work together 
• To celebrate our current women Members. 

When women are now serving in Parliament in such significant numbers, it’s difficult to imagine the time when the concept was totally alien and vehemently opposed.

While it all seems a bit quaint and silly looking back at some of the reasons given why women should not become MPs, in the minds of many New Zealanders at the time – both male and female, the reasons were very real.

Allowing women the vote in 1893 was one thing, but allowing them to stand for Parliament was quite another. For many, the very idea of women sitting in Parliament was quite another.

The reasons were as numerous as they were pathetic. They said:

• Our place was in the home.
• Allowing women to play a more active role in politics would create “domestic misery”
• The very fabric of society would disintegrate
• Voting, let alone being an MP, was not feminine
• Some thought female beauty would distract male MPs in the Chamber.

Whether Mr Wi Pere MP was joking or serious I do not know, but he suggested during one debate that one way to avoid such distraction was to allow only “plain women” to enter the House. How an appropriate level of “plainness” was to be determined was never explained.

•  Finally, we would be insulted at the polls and, being the weaker sex, would collapse.

The list was longer than that (an near identical to arguments against women having the vote - anti-suffrage cartoon above) , but I am sure you can see the pattern.

We all know that New Zealand has been an inspiration to the world on women’s issues, but it was still extremely slow progress between 1893 and Women’s Parliamentary Rights Act in 1919.

There had been many attempts, but it wasn’t until after the end of the first world war that the cause was invigorated. 

26 years after winning the vote, women became be eligible to stand for Parliament.

It took another 14 years before Elizabeth McCombs was elected to the seat of Lyttleton in 1933. Elizabeth was no political newcomer. She had already campaigned hard in two elections before that, but she stood in her husband’s seat after his death and finally won through a by-election.

Like many firsts for women in our history, serendipity played a part, but we don’t doubt for one second hers was an Everest-level epic climb.

In the 14 years between 1919 and 1933 many courageous women stood for Parliament, but I’d like to highlight 4 of them today. I am sure you will agree that their courage and hard work laid the path that we walk on today.

In 1919, when the act became law, there were just 7 weeks before the general election.

A group of women thought “we’ve got the right, it is imperative that we field some candidates”. 

Three courageous women put their names forward in the 1919 election.

• Rosetta Baume in Parnell
• Aileen Cooke in Thames
• Ellen Melville in Grey Lynn 

 They were impressive leaders and women ahead of their time/

 Rosetta was a University graduate and one of the first high school teachers in the United States before she settled in New Zealand. Simply and succinctly she said she “Felt it necessary to take the lead”.

Meetings where she spoke were reported as being relatively polite and well-received, but I am sure there were challenges. She was concerned about the cost of living for women and spoke about endowments for mothers why it was so vital that 50% of the population had fair representation.

Ellen Melville, on the other hand, definitely had a rough time on the hustings.

One of the meet-the-candidates meetings is recorded in the Evening Post in 1919 under the “Pandemonium At Meeting”. Ellen was shouted down by both women and men, and at times could not complete her speeches.

 “The uproar was led by a woman with a shrill voice”, the newspaper reported.

But Ellen persevered. She believed that politics should be a partnership between men and women, and she fought for women to have full participation in life. It’s a mark of her courage and dedication that, having failed in 1919, she kept standing. In 1925 she was the ONLY woman to stand for parliament in New Zealand. Now take one moment to imagine what that was like, being the only woman to stand in our whole country.

 Aileen Cooke must have been a strong woman of character. She was a former head of the Shearers Union. She was a former head of the Shearers Union, and the first woman to do so. She was a former nurse and domestic servant. She did not mince her words. Her goal was to see better lives for working class women, so she talked about issues like pay equity, fair divorce laws and property rights.

Not related to standing for Parliament but equally fascinating, there is a story about how Aileen campaigned to stop New Zealand shearers going over to Australia to as non-unionised workers. Free passage was offered to 150 Kiwi shearers to head for Sydney. Aileen got on the ship with them in Lyttleton as a union rep. One report notes, "she harangued the men to such an effect that, by the union's account, 75 left the ship at Wellington and only 33 of the remaining went shearing after landing in Sydney". She must have been a compelling debater! 

The fourth woman I would like to celebrate today is Rehutai Maihi, the first Maori woman to stand for Parliament. She stood in the seat of Northern Maori in 1935. Rehutai was a journalist, a newspaper editor and of Ngapuhi descent.

One newspaper reports that after she had delivered a great speech, a local chief complimented her on her performance, but said his only regret was that she was a “mere woman”.

 In her reply Rehutai responded, “Who made the Treaty of Waitangi possible?

A woman, Queen Victoria" and she quoted her ancestral creed, “a woman and land: for these two things a man will die”. After that no one was game to return to the topic of gender. 

None of these women were successful in the polls, but like a lot of things in life that’s not the point. The fact that they took such public roles as candidates and participated at all given the context of the time is a triumph worthy of great recognition and thanks from us all.

They stood for Parliament knowing that they would not win, but they knew it was so important for women to be seen to use and claim the new right to stand for election.

Despite such a lot of work and effort by these women and others, progress remained slow in New Zealand.

A piece in the Auckland Star by Mrs M.B. Soljak in 1931 picked up and discussed a remark made by "a distinguished woman lecturer from overseas" , that for a country that had led the world with votes for women, it was dragging its heels with getting women into parliament.

She wondered whether it was because of unreasonable expectations.

"The perfect woman candidate, she said "seems to be a rara avis (rare bird).

She may actually be superior in many ways to her male opponent and yet fail to win votes, not because of her sex, but because of her trivial faults are magnified by the fierce light that beats about those who are different and to whom the public are unaccustomed”

 “A woman candidate is expected to be something composed of the qualities of an archangel and an encyclopaedia”.

I must say I worry that sometimes still, in this modern age, this kind of expectation is still there for many women candidates and politicians.  

In the 1930s, reported comments made to candidates included the likes of “I don’t approve of ladies in Parliament. That’s a gentlemen’s place”.

Or “Some people said she was a jolly good sort, but they did not want women in Parliament because of petticoats and all that sort of thing”. 

Unfortunately, I recall hearing similar comments (minus the petticoats) when I stood for Parliament in Dunedin in 1999.

Of course, standing for parliament today is not the novelty it once was, but now as an observer from outside, I can still see comments about women MPs that make me wonder what century we are in.

• Comments about balancing motherhood and work.
• Motherhood being treated as a weakness not a power
• “Trial by wardrobe comments” about lipstick, hair, dress colours - whether it be Judith Collins came dressed for the big day", Paula Bennett being "dressed in a floaty cobalt dress and a string of hot-pink beads..." or possibly the worst headline ever, "Jacinda Ardern wore two pairs of Spanx.."
• Words like shrill, shrieky, hormonal, perky and feisty - these are words designed to diminish or dilute power.
• Question to candidates about their other roles as wives and mothers, questions seldom asked of male candidates.
• Women MPs and Ministers being allocated certain sorts of portfolios - "she will give X portfolio a softer face".
• Women participating in a caucus but not in the inner sanctum or "kitchen cabinet" of party decision-making.

Out of the 150 women elected in 100 years, half were elected in the last twenty years. There is momentum but unconscious bias remains. There is a lot of progress to be made.

However, women are not a homogeneous group. There will, of course, be different views and robust debates.

What I would say is looking back at the 100 years of women MPs in our parliament, we have achieved so much when working together wherever possible.

Interestingly many behind the scenes cross-party cooperation by women MPs never makes history. It seems conflict makes history more than collaboration.

During my time I can recall working with Green MPs, Labour, New Zealand and Act women MPs on issues like laws relating to the assaults on children, prostitution reform, civil unions, divorce and property laws, contraception, Plunket funding, childcare, breastfeeding support and others. We worked across the Parliament to support law which would establish and extend mother and baby units in prisons.

I know there will be examples from other eras and today.

As a final note I would like to thank today’s women MPs.

I am no Jane Campion but I have made this little slideshow. I can see the irony but I made it while watching season 3 of the Handmaid’s Tale (which I thoroughly recommend to those who haven't seen it). 

As I sat on my couch googling all the women MPs, it was wonderful to learn about the women members I didn’t know so well. Every single elected woman has brought talent, attitude and hard work to this parliament.

I was sad that some do not have an appropriate record of their service and stories on the internet. In some cases, not even a photo. Rona Stevenson, for example, served Taupo for 9 years and there wasn't one photo online anywhere. Thank you for the Parliamentary Library for helping me find the final extra pictures. Let's make sure we celebrate our pre-internet MPs by recording their stories properly.

To return to the suggestion that only plain women should be allowed into the Chamber there’s nothing “plain” about any of your lives or aspirations for our country.

You’re a bunch of talented, terrific people and I hope you are being a “distraction” in the chamber through the energy of your advocacy and debate.

 Thank you for your service and work on behalf of New Zealand.

 To quote Elizabeth McCombs’, the first Woman MP, 

 You are free and strong. Go forward and lead on. 

In this speech I have used images from Te Ara, National Library, Digital NZ and other sources. Thanks to them and others.