Enid Muriel Lyons

Australian politician

• Born: July 9, 1897
• Birthplace: Duck River, Tasmania, Australia
• Died: September 2, 1981
• Place of death: Ulverstone, Tasmania, Australia

Lyons became the first woman to sit in the Australian House of Representatives (1943-1951) and the first woman to become a federal cabinet minister (1949-1951).

Early Life

Enid Muriel Lyons was born in Duck River (now Smithton), northern Tasmania. Her mother, née Eliza Taggett, was born in South Australia of Cornish parents; her father, William Charles Burnell, born in Devonshire, England, and an assisted immigrant, worked his way up from sawyer to mill manager. When Enid was seven, the family moved to Cooee and lived in a house with a general store attached, a means of supplementing their income. She had two sisters, Nellie and Annie, and a younger brother, Bertram. The three girls attended school at Burnie. At age fourteen, Enid followed Nellie to the Teachers’ Training College in the capital, Hobart.

Teaching, however, was not to be Enid’s vocation. On a visit to the state parliament with her mother and Nellie, she charmed one of the Labor members, Joseph Aloysius Lyons, and soon a correspondence began between the two that continued throughout his lifetime. By the time she was seventeen, he was treasurer and minister for education, as well as being her fiancé. Apart from age (her father wanted her to wait until she was twenty), the most serious obstacle to marriage was religion. Enid was reared in the Methodist tradition: She taught Sunday school, sang in the church choir, and played the organ. When Joseph, thirty-five and a Roman Catholic, explained that non-Catholic ceremonies were not recognized by his church, she and her mother accepted an invitation to spend a month at the presbytery in Stanley while studying the tenets of his faith. During this time, Enid was received into the Church. On April 28, 1915, the couple exchanged vows before Father T. J. O’Donnell at St. Brigid’s, Wynyard.

A few years later, the Lyonses built a house on a nine-acre plot about a mile and a half outside Devonport. Without sewerage, town water, electricity, or telephone in the early years, “Home Hill” provided a refuge from the many pressures of public life. In April, 1916, Joseph’s party went out of government. When, under Lyons’s leadership, Labor again lost the election in 1919, the family moved to Hobart so that Joseph could study law and improve the family’s precarious finances. Soon after he became premier of Tasmania in October, 1923, however, the family again took up residence at Home Hill.

Life’s Work

As her husband advanced in his political career, so did Lyons advance in her political awareness. At his wish she often accompanied him on election tours, her training in elocution proving an advantage when she appeared on the platform as one of the (rare) women speakers. She was a delegate at the momentous Tasmanian conference of the Labor Party in 1921 at which the federal socialization objective never rescinded was approved. Both she and her mother, an independent woman with a love of politics, were candidates, albeit unsuccessful, in the 1923 elections, following the passing of a bill (1921) entitling women to sit in the state parliament.

At the request of the federal leader, James H. Scullin, Joseph stood for election and in October, 1929, carried the seat of Wilmot in national elections that Labor won handsomely. Gradually, however, Joseph became increasingly unhappy with his government’s fiscal policies; he resigned from the cabinet on January 29, 1931, and then on March 13 joined the opposition in a vote of no confidence in the prime minister. A new party, the United Australia Party, accepted Lyons as leader. In the campaign that followed, his wife was, she later wrote, “one of the team.” “Let every Australian feel for Australia,” she would urge, “what every Englishman feels for England, and every Scot for Scotland; what every Irishman feels for Ireland.”

Lyons was now widely acknowledged to be her husband’s closest confidante and adviser. “They are not two people,” wrote Louise Mack in the Australian Christian World, “They are one.” After Joseph became prime minister on January 6, 1932, his first act was to write, “Whatever honours or distinctions come are ours not mine.”

When Lyons arrived at the prime minister’s lodge in Canberra she was thirty-five, a rather plump matron who wore little makeup and dressed to suit her husband’s conservative tastes. The difference in their ages was thus less apparent: She fitted easily into the mother role assigned by most politicians to women. Privately, she was torn between the needs of her husband and those of their ten children. Four accompanied her to Canberra, six were in boarding school, and their twelfth (one died of pneumonia at age ten months) and last child was born in October of the following year. During these years, as in earlier ones when he was studying law in Hobart, Joseph helped with the care of their children, allowing her to retreat to Home Hill from time to time.

The highlights of his prime ministership for her were their two visits to London in 1935 for the Royal Jubilee and in 1937 (the year she became Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire) for the coronation of King George VI and the two days she and her husband spent at the White House as guests of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. On April 7, 1939, however, their wonderful partnership ended. At age fifty-nine, Joseph Lyons was dead.

Such was her standing in the political world that Lyons was offered the nomination of his vacant seat of Wilmot, which she refused. Instead, the electors of Darwin (now Braddon) sent her to Canberra in her own right several years later. This was the seat for which Joseph had once stood the only time he was unsuccessful and it encompassed the state seat her mother had contested. Urged on by her own daughter and namesake, and at age forty-six still young enough for a career of her own, Lyons set up campaign headquarters in Devonport. There were seven candidates, three from the United Australia Party, which balked at putting all of its efforts behind a woman. The year was 1943, Australia was at war, and John Curtin’s Labor government had introduced many austerity measures affecting the family. Nevertheless, it was the postal vote of the men on active service that put Lyons ahead by 816 votes they had decided, one reportedly said, to give women a go. For the first time since the inauguration of the Commonwealth in 1901, a woman won election to the House of Representatives. At the same time, another of the less populous states, West Australia, sent Dorothy Tangney, an unmarried Catholic schoolteacher, to Canberra as the first woman senator.

The House was crowded on the occasion of Enid Lyons’s maiden speech. Nelson T. Johnson, a career diplomat serving as United States Minister to Australia, that night (September 29, 1943) recorded in his private diary that it was “a very fine speech,” an opinion shared by all who heard it. During her first three years, she became knowledgeable about matters concerning her constituents: agriculture, potato marketing, mining, and (as Tasmania is an island state) shipping problems. She acted independently in the matter of a bill to set up an aluminum industry in her home state, ensuring the Tasmanian parliament a say in its disposition and risking her party’s displeasure by voting with the Labor government. On another occasion she gave the best speech of her parliamentary career when opposing a section of the Stevedoring Industry Bill that smacked of industrial conscription.

Lyons held her seat after the election of 1946 gave Curtin’s successor, J. B. Chifley, a resounding victory. Dressed in her usual simple black dress with white detachable collar, she continued to live up to her reputation as the champion of the family, both in Parliament and in the party room. The determination of the prime minister to pursue his party’s socialization objectives, especially the nationalization of banking, lost for him popular support, and in December, 1949, Robert Gordon Menzies formed a government coalition of the Liberal (in 1944 the successor to the United Australia Party) and Country parties. Lyons won in Darwin by more than four times her original majority. Offered a place in the cabinet, she believed as a public relations exercise, she served in the prestigious post of vice president of the Executive Council for fifteen months. During a bout of ill health (from which she suffered intermittently throughout her life), she reluctantly resigned. Parliament was dissolved shortly afterward and she decided to retire.

Highly regarded as a public speaker and broadcaster, in 1951 Lyons was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the national radio service inaugurated in 1932 by Joseph Lyons. During the next eleven years, the American Broadcasting Company’s historian (Professor Kenneth Stanley Inglis) says, successive chairmen valued her calm and knowledgeable contribution.

From the early 1920’s, when Woman’s Day published a series of her articles on life as a politician’s wife, Lyons wrote occasionally for the press. At the end of her parliamentary career, she produced a twice-weekly syndicated column and several books, the first, as Joseph had wished, an account of their marriage and another about her career in Parliament. On September 2, 1981, Lyons was reported to be seriously ill in a hospital at Ulverstone in northwestern Tasmania, having suffered a series of strokes. She died that day at the age of eighty-four. Her much-loved Home Hill has been preserved for the nation by the National Trust.

Significance

Women in the Australian colonies were among the first in the world to receive the vote. By 1884, those with property, only a small minority to be sure, could participate in municipal elections. In 1896, South Australian women got the right both to vote and to sit in Parliament; West Australian women won the franchise three years later. Under the Australian Constitution (1901), these women were automatically eligible to vote in national elections and to stand for Parliament. The Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1902 extended the same rights to women in all states of the Commonwealth.

The first woman elected to a state parliament was Edith Cowan, who became a member of the legislative assembly in Western Australia in 1921, the year after women became eligible to stand there. When Dame Enid Muriel Lyons entered the House of Representatives in 1943, no woman had yet sat in her state’s parliament. New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria had had women Parliamentarians. Seen in this context, Lyons’s achievement is all the greater, since she did not succeed her husband but contested and won a seat in her own right.

Lyons was not the first woman appointed to cabinet rank; that honor again goes to a member of the Western Australian parliament, Dame Florence Cardell-Oliver, in 1947. However, Lyons was the first woman minister in the national Parliament, thus distinguishing herself at that level.

Bibliography

Encel, Sol, Norman Mackenzie, and Margaret Tebbutt. Women and Society: An Australian Study. Melbourne: Cheshire, 1974. See part 5 on “Public Life,” especially chapter 15, for background to women in Parliament.

Hetherington, Mollie. “Dame Enid Lyons.” In Famous Australians. Rev. ed. Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1983. A collection of sixty biographies.

Lyons, Dame Enid. So We Take Comfort. London: Heinemann, 1965. Described by Lyons as “the story of our marriage,” this autobiographical account of her life ends with his death in 1939.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Among the Carrion Crows. Adelaide, S. Aust.: Rigby, 1972. Continues the story of her career begun in So We Take Comfort, covering her term in Parliament and as cabinet minister, as well as her life after politics.

Ward, Russel. A Nation for a Continent: The History of Australia, 1901-1975. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1977. A useful account of the whole period.

White, Kate. A Political Love Story: Joe and Enid Lyons. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1987. An interesting account for the general reader, concluding at the death of Joseph Lyons.