WOMEN COUNCILLORS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24085, 2 October 1941, Page 8

WOMEN COUNCILLORS

The Government, by deciding to make women eligible for appointment to the Legislative Council, carries one stage further the curiously delayed process of giving them full Parliamentary rights. Having pioneered in the cause of woman's suffrage by granting the vote in 1893, New Zealand did nothing more for over 25 years. It was not until 1919 that the right to sit in the House of Representatives was conferred. Meantime there had been prompter action elsewhere. Finland gave the right to sit in Parliament, simultaneously with the power to vote, in 1906. When in Great Britain the long controversy over votes for women ended with the signing of the enabling Act in February, 1918, it was followed only 10 months later by a further measure making them eligible for the House of Commons. In New Zealand the possibility of such a step was recognised some years before any move lo take it was made. The Legislative Council Act, passed in 1911 —and still in the Statute Book, though never brought into force —provided for an elective council. It included a clause which said : "When and so soon as women are eligible for election as members of the House they shall be also eligible for nomination and election as members of the Council." Five years later the doors of the House of Representatives were unbarred, but the reluctance of successive Governments to make the Council elective caused it to remain a close preserve for men. That exclusiveness is now to be swept away. It is a logical development of other advances toward full political equality between the sexes. It may also be another indication that there is to be an election this year.