Elizabeth Reid McCombs: First Woman Member of the New Zealand Parliament

Abstract

To say that woman is complementary to man is merely to restate a time-worn truism, but time cannot affect its truth. A society composed entirely of men, or one composed entirely of women, is a manifestly ridiculous and impracticable idea. In the same way, a state which gives power exclusively to one sex is unbalanced politically, and, therefore, as the social attitude to women has altered and broadened, so each country in turn has opened its legislature to women. Before this step could be taken, women had to be given equal representation with men. Therefore, before we consider Elizabeth Reid McCombs as a woman member of the legislature, we must first make a short survey of the steps towards the emancipation or women in New Zealand that made her election possible. New Zealand is predominantly a socially progressive country in spite of much evidence to the contrary. Her pioneers, though clinging with peculiar tenacity to the concepts of the English political and social structure, found that, no matter how hard they tried, they could not reproduce the shackles of English tradition in their entirety. The new land demanded from them a spirit of adventure end progress that had been stifled for centuries in England itself.