Restoring our faith in the past BY LLOYD GORMAN
THE 2021 MARCH STATE ELECTION PRODUCED AN UNPRECEDENTED – EVEN HISTORIC – RESULT FOR THE LABOR GOVERNMENT OF MARK McGOWAN GOVERNMENT. NO WA PREMIER BEFORE HIM HAD BEEN HANDED SO MUCH CONTROL OVER BOTH HOUSES OF STATE PARLIAMENT. But an important political anniversary for Western Australia and the suffragette cause went largely unnoticed, overshadowed by election fever. The eve of the March 13 poll quietly marked the 100th election anniversary of Edith Cowan to the state parliament, the first female MP in Australia and only the second in the British Empire, if you take an Irish technicality into account. The first woman ever elected to the Westminister parliament in London happened just three years earlier. Anglo-Irish woman Constance Markievicz won the Dublin seat of St. Patrick’s (one of four seats for the capital as a UK parliamentary division) in 1918. Markievicz, who took part in the 1916 Rising and stood as a Sinn Fein candidate, romped it in. But instead of taking her place in London (she was in prison at the time of her election), she took part in the revolutionary establishment of an Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann. Cowan’s election came close to never happening. 24 | THE IRISH SCENE
Top: Monument man Frank Smith. Photo: courtesy of POST Newspapers and photographer Paul McGovern. Above: The Edith Cowan memorial clock located at the entrance to
Kings Park.
Not long before the 1921 ballot, then attorney general Thomas Draper from the Nationalist Party changed the law to allow women to stand for parliament. This came 22 years after Australian women had won the right to be able to vote in elections. Cowan, then 59, ran against Draper for the seat of West Perth and just won by a razor thin margin of 46 votes. She lost her seat in the 1924 election but in
