The long road from a house to the House
Parliament’s no longer a boys’ club, but there’s still have work to do to make New Zealand a better place for women and children, writes Barbara Brookes on Suffrage Day.
American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton once famously said, ‘‘The best protection any woman can have is courage.’’ And no, she wasn’t talking about contraception: she was talking about political rights where, for most of the 19th century, women were seen to be under the protection of men, whether it was their husbands, fathers or brothers.
Shut out from voting, women were in the position of being governed without their consent. According to another American suffragist, Susan B. Anthony, ‘‘No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.’’
It took courage for 24,000 New Zealand women to put their signatures to the 1893 Suffrage Petition in the face of those who believed that enfranchising women would lead to their ‘‘unsexing’'.
Feminine charm, it seemed, depended on staying out of the hurly burly of politics. According to one member of the House of Representatives, only a masculine type, a ‘‘tall thin woman, with a long nose, very compressed lips and somewhat flat in the chest’’, would seek to enter Parliament.
The granting of the vote in 1893, surprisingly to some, did not lead to women donning top hats and abandoning their families. It was another 26 years, however, before the men in Parliament could accept that women might join their ranks, and even then it was only the House of Representatives that admitted women and not the appointed upper house, the Legislative Council.
The latter saw fit to agree to admit women in 1941 but the first two women members were only appointed in 1946, four years before the council was abolished.
It is unsurprising that the first women to run for Parliament in 1919 had already had the courage to put themselves forward for local bodies: Rosetta Baume served on the Auckland Education Board and Ellen Melville was an experienced member of the Auckland City Council.
When they failed to be elected, the NZ Freelance carried a cartoon of the two women standing forlornly outside a house named ‘‘Woman’s Kingdom’’, with Mrs Baume saying to Miss Melville: ‘‘After all, dear, there’s no place like home for a woman. We can always get elected to this house without opposition.’’
The courageous Melville stood for Parliament seven times without success. She stood at the time the political parties were strengthening and they were very much men’s clubs.
Kate Sheppard lived to see the first woman elected to Parliament when Elizabeth McCombs won the Lyttelton seat in 1933. As a consequence of her election, the ‘‘No Women Permitted’’ sign over Bellamy’s dining room in Parliament was removed, the wording of the swearing-in was altered, and ‘‘members’’ rather than ‘‘gentlemen’’ now participated in the House.
Mabel Howard, who served in Parliament for 26 years and became the first woman in Cabinet, complained publicly, and to little avail, about parliamentary rules which disadvantaged women. She finally gained access to the use of a bathroom by threatening to climb out one window and into the bathroom via another in order to avoid the ‘‘Gentlemen’’ sign on the door.
The boys’ club atmosphere in Parliament continued into the 1980s when the numbers of women doubled from four in 1978 to eight in 1981. A senior government MP’s response to Mary Batchelor’s 1980 question about the lack of representation of women at intergovernmental negotiations was to ask her who she slept with.
In 1984 Annette King found Parliament ‘‘incredibly sexist’’. And the numbers of women continued to rise at a snail’s pace until the advent of MMP in 1996 to hover around one-third in the 2000s.
Julia Gillard, formerly prime minister of Australia, laid bare the assumptions about women’s place she had encountered in Parliament. She famously rebuked Tony Abbott for lecturing her on misogyny in a speech that went viral and has been creatively set to music. There is no male (and hopefully no New Zealand) equivalent to the ‘‘Ditch the Witch’’ campaign against her.
There are now 41 women in the New Zealand Parliament or about one-third of the 121 members. It takes courage to put oneself forward into the cut and thrust of politics. We no longer need courage to vote, it is an easy thing to do, so easy, in fact, we have to fight apathy.
The women who signed the Suffrage Petition believed that their votes could help make New Zealand a better place for women and children.
Let’s be courageous and enter the debates about how to respond to the issues facing us today both in and outside the country. It takes courage to stand up and call attention to the issues important to you, whether they be child poverty and abuse, inequality, and climate change. If we don’t do so, our aspirations for a better world may well be trumped.
❚ Barbara Brookes is Professor of History at the University of Otago. She wrote the forward to The Women’s Suffrage Petition 1893, one of three books produced to support He Tohu, the new permanent exhibition of New Zealand’s constitutional documents at the National Library in Wellington. The 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition is one of the documents on display.