Enid Lyons

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Dame Enid Muriel Lyons, AD, GBE (9 July 1897 - 2 September 1981), Australian politician, was the wife of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and the first woman to be elected to the Australian House of Representatives and appointed to federal cabinet.

Lyons was born Enid Muriel Burnell in Smithton, Tasmania, and educated at the Teacher's Training College,Hobart and later became a school teacher. She met and married Joseph Lyons, then a young Labor politician, in 1914, when she was 17. They had twelve children, one of whom died in infancy. In 1929 Joseph entered federal politics as member for the Division of Wilmot.

In 1931 he left the Labor Party and became leader of the United Australia Party and at the beginning of 1932 became Prime Minister. Enid and her children moved into The Lodge in Canberra, and she became an extremely popular political spouse.

Joseph Lyons died in 1939, aged 59, and Enid (who was created a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire in the Coronation Honours of 1936, returned to Tasmania. She bitterly resented Joseph Lyons's successor as leader of the UAP, Robert Menzies, whom she believed had betrayed her husband by resigning from the Cabinet shortly before Joseph Lyons's death.

At the 1943 election Lyons won the Division of Darwin in north-western Tasmania for the UAP, which in 1945 became the Liberal Party of Australia. She was the first woman in the House of Representatives. (At the same election Dorothy Tangney (later Dame Dorothy) was elected as a Labor Senator from Western Australia.)

As a conservative Roman Catholic from Australia's most provincial state, Enid Lyons was no progressive thinking feminist, and her speeches in Parliament generally espoused traditional views on the family and other social issues.

In 1949 the Liberals came to power under Menzies's leadership. Their frosty personal relations thawed very slightly when Menzies appointed Lyons Vice-President of the Executive Council, a largely honorary post which gave her a seat in Cabinet but no departmental duties. But her health, always delicate, declined under the strain of regular travel between Canberra and Tasmania, and she retired at the 1951 elections.

In retirement, Dame Enid's health recovered. She was a newspaper columnist (1951-1954), Commissioner of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation(1951-1962) and remained active in public life promoting family and women's issues. She published two volumes of memoirs, which embarrassed the Liberal Party by reviving her allegations that Menzies had been disloyal to Joseph Lyons in 1939.

She died in 1981 and was accorded a State Funeral in Devonport, before being buried next to her husband at the Mersey Vale Lawn Cemetery.

[edit] Further reading

• Dame Enid Lyons, So We Take Comfort (1965)
• Dame Enid Lyons, Among the Carrion Crows (1977)
• Kate White, Political Love Story: Joe and Enid Lyons (1987)