Enid Lyons
Dame Enid Muriel Lyons was an Australian politician. She was notable as being the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives and to serve in the federal cabinet. Prior to her own political career, she was best known as the wife of Joseph Lyons, Prime Minister of Australia from 1932 to 1939, who served previously as Premier of Tasmania from 1923 to 1928.
Lyons was born in Smithton, Tasmania. She grew up in various small towns in northern Tasmania, and trained as a schoolteacher. At the age of 17, she married politician Joseph Lyons, who was almost 18 years her senior. They would have twelve children together, all but one of whom lived to adulthood. As her husband's career progressed, Lyons began assisting him in campaigning and developed a reputation as a talented public speaker. In 1925, she became one of the first two women to stand for the Labor Party at a Tasmanian state election. She followed her husband into the new United Australia Party following the Labor split of 1931.
After her husband became prime minister in 1932, Lyons began living at The Lodge in Canberra. She was one of the best-known prime minister's wives, writing newspaper articles, making radio broadcasts, and giving open-air speeches. Her husband's sudden death in office in 1939 came as a great shock, and she withdrew from public life for a time. At the 1943 federal election, Lyons successfully stood for the UAP in the Division of Darwin. She and Senator Dorothy Tangney became the first two women elected to federal parliament. Lyons joined the new Liberal Party in 1945, and served as Vice-President of the Executive Council in the Menzies Government from 1949 to 1951 – the first woman in cabinet. She retired from parliament after three terms, but remained involved in public life as a board member of the Australian Broadcasting Commission and as a social commentator.
Early life
Birth and family background
Lyons was born on 8 July 1897 at Leesville, a small sawmilling settlement outside Smithton, Tasmania. Her birth was registered just over one month later. She was the second of four children born to Eliza and William Burnell. Her father, a sawyer and talented musician, was born in Devon, England, and grew up in Cardiff, Wales, before immigrating to Australia at the age of 17. Her mother was born in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, to an English immigrant father who had drawn by the Victorian gold rush. Her forebears in England had been middle-class, but the family fell into relative poverty in Australia. Lyons' parents first met at Angellala on Queensland's western railway line, where her widowed maternal grandmother Louisa Taggett had won a catering contract. They married in Brisbane in 1888 and initially settled in Burringbar, New South Wales, where their first child was born. They moved to northern Tasmania in 1894 to be closer to William's parents, who farmed in Somerset.Lyons' biographer Anne Henderson has speculated that William Burnell may not have been her biological father, and that she may instead have been fathered by Aloysius Joyce Jr., the son of a prominent local businessman. However, she also notes that "nothing did in rearing her would suggest she was not his own". According to an account from the Joyce family, William confronted Aloysius Joyce Sr. and the two were overheard arguing, with Joyce eventually accepting Enid as a blood relation and agreeing to provide financial support to the Burnells if William raised her as his own daughter. Henderson suggests this as an explanation as to how the family were later able to secure a loan to buy property with limited income and no collateral.
Childhood
In 1901, Lyons and her family moved to Stowport, Tasmania, a rural locality south of Burnie. She began her education at a one-room public school, at a distance of from her home. Her mother supplemented the family's income by mending and laundering clothes and delivering meals to itinerant workers, taking a particular interest in well-educated visitors and those from overseas. She intended that her daughters would enter the teaching profession, which at the time provided the only opportunity for girls to gain a state-funded secondary education. In 1904, the family moved to a property at Cooee, on the coast to Burnie's west. They operated a small general store from their residence, with her mother serving as the local postmistress, and later added a dancehall which was rented out for community events. Lyons and her siblings attended school in Burnie.Marriage
Eliza Burnell introduced her 15-year-old daughter to Joseph Lyons, a rising Tasmanian Labor politician. On 28 April 1915, the two married at Wynyard, Tasmania; she was 17 and Lyons was 35. Enid had been brought up a Methodist but became, at Lyons' request, a Roman Catholic. They would have twelve children, one of whom died in infancy.State politics
Lyons' husband, an MP since 1909, was elected state leader of the ALP in the aftermath of the 1916 party split over conscription. She was an active member of the ALP in her own right, appearing as a women's branch delegate at the 1918 state conference where she successfully amended one motion and co-sponsored a motion for compulsory military training with Edmund Dwyer-Gray. Her position as wife of the opposition leader gave her greater public prominence and beginning at the 1922 state election she began making appearances on his behalf. In October 1923, Lyons' husband was unexpected appointed premier of Tasmania following the collapse of the incumbent Nationalist government. She was expected to undertake various social engagements on his behalf, although she had to meet her own expenses and usually had to rely on public transport.In 1924, Lyons gave birth to her seventh child, the first born to an incumbent Tasmanian premier. The family experienced a number of difficulties over the following two years. She was bedridden with mumps for two months in mid-1925, shortly after which her infant son died of meningitis. A few months later she miscarried and was forced to carry the dead foetus for three months; the curettage procedure resulted in toxemia. In July 1926, her husband was severely injured in a car accident that caused the death of his colleague Michael O'Keefe, remaining in hospital for nine weeks.
1925 candidacy
In 1925, Lyons and her mother became the first women to stand as ALP candidates in Tasmania. The 1925 state election was only the second since Tasmanian women received the right to stand for state parliament in 1921. Lyons stood in the Hobart-based seat of Denison, where it was hoped she would draw votes away from female voters supporting independent candidate Edith Waterworth, while her mother stood in the seat of Darwin which included her home town of Burnie.Lyons, aged 27, emerged as a "natural local candidate", making frequent public speeches both in support of her own candidacy and supporting her husband as he toured other electorates. She opened her campaign at the Hobart Town Hall, standing on a platform that included increased government funding of education and health, clearance of Hobart's slums, and government control of milk distribution and the saw-milling industry. She appealed primarily to female voters and frequently used domestic metaphors in her speeches, while also attacking the Nationalist opposition for financial mismanagement. The ALP ultimately won its first majority government in Tasmania, with Lyons finishing around 60 votes short of election in Denison.
Federal politics
In 1931 Joseph Lyons left the Labor Party and joined the United Australia Party, becoming prime minister at the subsequent election. Enid Lyons was made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in the Coronation Honours of 1937. Joseph Lyons died in April 1939, aged 59, the first Australian prime minister to die in office, and Dame Enid returned to Tasmania. She bitterly resented Joseph Lyons' successor as leader of the UAP, Robert Menzies, who had, she believed, betrayed her husband by resigning from the cabinet shortly before Joseph's death.Widowhood
Lyons suffered from "nervous exhaustion" in the period immediately after her husband's death. She fainted or collapsed on a number of occasions and spent several weeks in hospital, initially at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, and later at Mercy Hospital for Women, Melbourne. She had some requests to stand for his seat at the resulting by-election, including from Jessie Street, but declined. Outside of the family home, Lyons was left only £344 from her husband's estate. In the absence of any parliamentary pension, the government under caretaker prime minister Earle Page immediately drafted legislation to provide annuities for her and the couple's seven dependent children. There was some opposition from Joseph's political opponents who regarded the amount as excessive, and she was eventually awarded an annual grant of £500 with another £500 for the children's education through to the age of 16. Lyons received thousands of letters of condolence, which she answered with the help of family and her husband's former staff, but also received hate mail over the annuities issue – "filthy epithets, threats, dead rats, things even more revolting" – leading her to stop opening her own mail.In December 1939, Lyons began a series of weekly Sunday evening broadcasts for 7LA Launceston, which were syndicated on the Macquarie Broadcasting Network. She turned down other offers, including from the ABC and from Keith Murdoch's 3DB. The Macquarie broadcasts came to an end in June 1940, partially due to a lack of sponsorship. In the same year she had moved to Melbourne to be closer to her children's schools, leasing a house in Malvern East. Her mother died in January 1941, a few months after Lyons had become a grandmother for the first time at the age of 43. She had left Melbourne after only a brief period and returned to Devonport, staying out of public life for a few years.