1933: 'A red-letter day for women'

Jake Kenny Reporter from Community News

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“Although New Zealand is believed to have been the first country in the world to give women the right to sit in Parliament, it is one of the few which have consistently refused to elect a woman to its national assembly,” The Press wrote on September 14, 1933.

“Legislation permitting women to stand for Parliament was introduced in 1919 by the then Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. W. F. Massey, and subsequently passed.”

Lyttelton MP Elizabeth McCombs​ had just shattered that glass ceiling after a by-election, becoming New Zealand’s first woman MP.

She had previously run as the Labour candidate in Kaiapoi and Christchurch North and became the Lyttelton candidate in a by-election after the death of her husband, James, who had held the seat since 1913.

The Press noted that “Mrs McCombs’s majority is larger than any Mr McCombs secured during his whole 20 years in Parliament”.

The Press reported from a packed Returned Soldiers’ Association Hall in Lyttelton.

“‘This is the proudest moment of my life,’ said Mrs McCombs, ‘but yet one of the saddest. You all know that my husband wished more than anything else on earth that I should sit in Parliament, and we had both hoped we should sit there together. I cannot help feeling a tinge of bitterness that it was not to be.’

McCombs died before the 1935 election, and was succeeded by her son, Sir Terence McCombs, who held the Lyttelton seat until 1951.