Without prejudice

With International Women's Day upon us, it is timely to reflect on the Liberal principles that guided Robert Menzies' fervent commitment to equality of opportunity and the advancement of women in any field of endeavour. By David Furse-Roberts.

In cultural perceptions of Australia in the 1950s, Menzies has loomed large as the champion of the male breadwinner/female homemaker nuclear family. As such, he is frequently regarded as a cultural relic who inhabited a pre-feminist world of male privilege and domination. Yet the evidence suggests Menzies’ entertained a keen interest in the advancement of women both inside and outside the Liberal Party. The founder of the Liberal Party was committed to empowering women within the institutional structure of his new party while also envisioning a post-war society where women would be emboldened to realise their full potential in any field of endeavour. The attitude of Menzies towards women entered the public record in the early 1940s and was informed by both his political philosophy of liberalism and his personal experiences of the Second World War.

Even before his first elevation to the prime ministership in 1939, Menzies had collaborated with like-minded women from the Victorian-based Australian Women’s National League (AWNL), a liberal conservative group formed in 1903. Like Menzies himself, the anti-socialist AWNL was heavily influenced by the philosophy of English liberalism, with its belief in private enterprise and the independence of the individual, together with the tradition of Nonconformist Protestantism (particularly Methodism) which stressed the values of community service and domestic propriety. Whilst the AWNL had opposed women’s suffrage in its early years, its leaders including Elizabeth Couchman were committed to recruiting more women into anti-Labor politics in the 1930s and 40s. Indeed Couchman herself became a close personal friend of Menzies and helped bring the AWNL into the fold of the Liberal Party in 1944, a development Menzies wholeheartedly welcomed. With the input of Couchman and the AWNL, the new Liberal Party made an unprecedented pitch to female voters with women addressed directly in advertising and in speeches. As Fitzherbert noted, the Party’s campaign advertising and policy promotion materials were gender inclusive.

With the Liberal Party appealing to female voters, its founder and leader made no bones about his guiding belief in the inherent equality of men and women. In the tradition of the English liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill, Menzies argued that there were no rational grounds for believing that women should be denied the same opportunities as men in society simply because of their sex. If men and women were equally endowed with various intellectual and athletic faculties, then there was no reason why women should be inhibited from exercising these to any lesser extent than men. Like Mill in The Subjugation of Women (1869), Menzies regarded existing impediments to women’s participation in education, the professions and public life as a compromise to the liberal principle of individual freedom. It was only by giving women a free reign to cultivate their individual talents and realise their potential that societies such as Australia could enjoy greater freedom and social progress. 

Critical to the formation of Menzies’ own views on women was his experience of witnessing women serve at the coalface of the war effort in Australia and Britain. In the early 1940s, Menzies deeply admired the proficiency, stamina and resourcefulness of women who served as truck and ambulance drivers, land army corps, fire-fighters and factory workers. To him, this was vindication of his Mill-inspired liberal philosophy that women were eminently capable of exercising their skills and abilities when given the opportunity to do so. In a prescient observation of future trends, Menzies described ‘this great movement of women into the defence of the realm’ as a ‘formidable breaking down of old barriers and old ideas’. He welcomed this as a progressive step which would see Australia benefit from the full contribution of its female citizens.

During and after the War, Menzies and his Party sought to lead by example in their resolve to encourage more women to seek political office. To be sure, progress towards increasing the participation of women was slow but there were some noteworthy breakthroughs. In the 1943 Federal election, the UAP’s Dame Enid Lyons became the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives. After the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944, Dame Annabelle Rankin of Queensland entered the Senate in 1947. In 1949, she was joined in the Senate by Ivy Wedgwood of Victoria and Agnes Robertson of Western Australia. Under Menzies, Dame Enid Lyons became the first woman to be a member of Federal Cabinet, serving as Vice-President of the Executive Council in 1949. In 1951, Senator Rankin became the first woman to be party whip in the Federal Parliament and in 1955, Nancy Butterfield of South Australia added to the number of female Senators. With the entry of more women into parliament, the Menzies government enacted some policies that were targeted at women. These included the extension of child endowment to first-born children and the introduction of free milk for school children in 1950. In 1962, the Women’s Bureau was created in the Department of Labour and National Service to investigate policy in relation to women in the paid workforce.

While Menzies actively encouraged the participation of women in politics as both party members and MPs, he proved to be a traditionalist with respect to the role of women within the domestic sphere. His government’s system of tax deductions introduced in the early 1950s tended to favour families with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home mother. When it came to changing the requirement that women retire from the public service on marriage, Menzies refused to remove the ‘marriage bar’ despite the urging by some of his female parliamentary colleagues to do so. Notwithstanding his conservative views on the role of women in the family, his attitudes towards the role of women in society were fairly progressive. In the 1950s, he declared that he had ‘no inhibitions about women in careers’, deeming ‘competence’ to be the sole criterion for determining a woman’s success in her field of choice. In the realm of public life and international affairs, Menzies held that women had an equal stake to men and that the division between public and private life was non gender-specific. Although some modern feminists may regard Menzies’ views on the role of women as somewhat contradictory, he saw his own views as eminently complimentary, appreciating a healthy society to be reliant upon both the stability of family life and the personal freedom of women to contribute to professional and public life. In short, Menzies was committed to a feminism that was liberating and empowering but not socially disruptive.

Selected Menzies quotes on his attitudes towards women:

“Of course women are at least the equals of men. Of course there is no reason why a qualified woman should not sit in parliament or on the bench or in professorial chair, or preach from the pulpit, or, if you like, command an army in the field. No educated man today denies a place or career to a woman just because she is a woman”

Robert Menzies, Women for Canberra, 29 January 1943

“For myself, I decline to vote for any woman just because she is a woman … I am not half so interested in the sex or social position or world wealth of my representatives and rulers as I am in the quality of their minds, the soundness of their characters, the humanity of their experiences, the sanity of their policy, and the strength of their wills”

Robert Menzies, Women for Canberra, 29 January 1943

“We should shake our minds clear of whatever prejudice may linger in them and honestly and sincerely acknowledge that there is just as much room in all our public bodies for public-spirited and intelligent women as there is for public-spirited and intelligent men”

Robert Menzies, Women for Canberra, 29 January 1943

 “Tonight I speak to the women of Australia with profound respect and gratitude. They have established an unanswerable claim to economic, legal, industrial, and political equality. I hope that the time will speedily come when we can say truthfully that there is no sex discrimination in public or private office, in political or industrial opportunity. We are all, men and women, citizens with a common interest and a common task”

Robert Menzies, Election Speech, 20 August 1946

David Furse-Roberts is the editor of Menzies in his own words: A collection of quotes. You can purchase the book here