1/31/2024 0 Comments Shadow of a Doubt (1943) cover![]() ![]() These biographies tell us important stories about the past that prompt good questions about the present: in particular, they stand as an implicit challenge to the present-day Liberal Party which, by its own admission, struggles to find and promote female members of parliament.Īnnabelle Rankin came from a prosperous middle-class family in Queensland’s coastal Wide Bay region. But both operated within heavy constraints imposed on them by the masculine character of their chosen career. Her life is told by the prolific Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute.įor both, the path to power, and the exercise of it required innovation, political smarts and sheer tireless persistence. Three months after Rankin left the Senate, in 1971, Margaret Guilfoyle, a Victorian, entered she served until 1987, becoming a senior and powerful cabinet minister. Rankin, a Queenslander who became the first Liberal woman in the Senate, served from 1946 and eventually became Australia’s first female minister her biography is written by long-time Canberra journalist and lobbyist Peter Sekuless. Who were these pioneering women? And how did they get there? Recent biographies of two of them, Dame Annabelle Rankin and Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, describe two very different women who took strikingly different paths to power and who, against the odds and in different eras, became ministers. ![]() But that first wave of elected Liberal women - six senators, along with Enid Lyons elected to the House in 1943 - were real pioneers, prising open the men’s world of parliament. And while Tangney spent her entire career on the backbench, two of those six Liberals managed to become ministers. Instead, she watched as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh women were elected to the Senate - all of them Liberals. But though she sat in that chamber for twenty-five years, no Labor woman ever joined her. Labor’s Dorothy Tangney made history in 1943 when she became the first woman elected to the Australian Senate. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |