Breaking through the barriers – Elizabeth McCombs, New Zealand’s First Female MP

By Liz Grant

In 1933, Elizabeth McCombs won the seat of Lyttelton, becoming the first woman in New Zealand to be elected a Member of Parliament. It was a convincing win, with a majority of 2,669 votes over the two men who had been her rivals, breaking through the glass ceiling!

This was a by-election brought about by the death in August 1933 of her husband, James McCombs, the Labour MP for Lyttelton. Elizabeth had stood unsuccessfully in other Christchurch seats in the Elections of 1928 and 1931. This time, locally her candidacy was well supported although some on the Labour Party executive were not convinced she was the right candidate, largely because of the general prejudice against women standing for Parliament.

However, Harry Holland, the leader of the Labour Party, was a strong supporter and Elizabeth was introduced as the candidate at the Excelsior Hall in Lyttelton on 21 August. She formally opened her campaign at the Oddfellows Hall in Ōhinehou Lyttelton on the evening of 25 August and went on to that resounding victory. On the evening of her success a crowd of around 2,000 gathered, in dreadful weather, below the balcony of Warner’s Hotel in Cathedral Square to hear her speak.

Aotearoa New Zealand proudly claims to be the first country in the world to grant women the right to vote (1893), but the right of women to stand for Parliament did not come with the right to vote. It took another 26 years and the passing of the Women’s Parliamentary Rights Act 1919 before they could put themselves forward as candidates. It was 14 years after that legislation that Elizabeth McCombs took her seat in the House. There was still resistance to the very idea:

“And all this cock-a-doodling by masculine women and feminine men is because of the very regrettable but absolutely unimportant fact that a woman has been sent to Parliament from Lyttelton.… I do hope it will be remembered in New Zealand history as an occasion on which an electorate in a burst of sentimentalism or a fit of absent-mindedness forgot itself and sent a woman to Parliament … Mrs McCombs is the first woman in Parliament. I hope she will have the distinction of being the last and only one”.

‘Lord of Creation’, letter to the editor, Christchurch Press, 13 October 1933

Elizabeth McCombs was no stranger to the House of Representatives and would have taken little notice of those opinions. Her husband had been an MP for nine years and Elizabeth had spent a lot of time in Parliament’s public gallery. She knew how Parliament worked and was in no way intimidated by it. She was also familiar with the machinations of party politics. As author Jenny Coleman writes in her fascinating book From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The Path to Parliament for New Zealand Women: “She was interested in what she referred to as ‘the machinery of Government’ but even more interested in what she wanted Parliament to do”. Women and girls, workers and the unemployed, were her key focus.

Social activism was not new territory. Elizabeth Reid Henderson was the eighth of nine children. Like her three older sisters (all of whom had signed the Suffrage Petition – Elizabeth was too young to have done so) she was involved with the socialist Progressive Liberal Association. One of the Association’s goals was to increase the political rights of women. It was through the Association that Elizabeth met James McCombs, a committed socialist. They married in 1903. Elizabeth was also a prominent figure in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Council of Women.

James had become an MP in 1913, having stood for the Social Democratic Party. In 1916, he was elected the first president of the second New Zealand Labour Party, and Elizabeth was elected onto the Party executive. In 1921, she was the second woman to be elected to the Christchurch City Council. It was thanks to her efforts that a creche and women’s restroom was built in Cathedral Square. She became chairwoman of the Council Electricity Committee and was on the Hospital and Tramway boards. In 1926 she was one of the first women in New Zealand to be made a Justice of the Peace. It was a strong track record that underpinned her parliamentary success.

When she was elected to Parliament, Labour was in opposition and there was limited opportunity for Elizabeth to push through the causes to which she was dedicated, but she worked extremely hard in the House and in her electorate. Increasingly, this took a toll on her health, which had never been robust because of asthma, and only two years after she had taken her seat she died in hospital in Wellington on 7 June 1935, aged just 61. She had earned a great deal of respect during her short time in Parliament and flags were flown at half-mast across the country. Later in Christchurch, once again in dreadful weather, thousands of people lined the route for the funeral procession to Waimairi Cemetery.

Michael Joseph Savage, then leader of the Labour Party eulogised: “Her passing has created a gap in the ranks of the Labour Party that will be hard to fill.

She was not only the first woman to occupy a seat in the Parliament of New Zealand, but also, by her outstanding ability, both in the House and out, she made a very effective reply to those who maintained that women are not the equals of men either in local or national government.”

After her death, Elizabeth and James’s son, Terrance McCombs, won the Lyttelton seat, which he was to hold for the next 16 years.

Elizabeth McCombs’s portrait is on the wall in the Women’s Suffrage Room in the New Zealand Parliament. She and her husband are commemorated by the McCombs Memorial Garden in Woolston Park.