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Enid Lyons

Enid Muriel Lyons (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.

Lyons was born Enid Burrell in Devonport, Tasmania, and became a school teacher. She met and married Joseph Lyons, then a young Labor politician, in 1914, when she was 17. They had eleven children. 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, and Enid, by now bearing the title Dame Enid Lyons, 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 was elected as a Labor Senator from Western Australia.) As a conservative Catholic from Australia's most provincial state, Lyons was no feminist, and her speeches in Parliament were generally espoused traditional views on the family and other social issues.

In 1949 the Liberals came to power under Menzies's leadership. Despite their frosty personal relations, 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 Lyons published two volumes of memoirs, which embarrassed the Liberal Party by reviving her allegations that Menzies had been disloyal to Joseph Lyons in 1939.

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)
Last updated: 08-04-2005 20:05:29
Last updated: 10-29-2005 02:13:46