Broadcasting the Women Citizen: Dame Enid Lyons' Macquarie Network Talks

Abstract

Dame Enid Lyons was a prolific broadcaster in the 1930s and 1940s. Perceived by many as the ideal Australian woman, she was the wife of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, and later the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first woman in federal Cabinet. In December 1939, eight months after the death of her husband, Lyons began a series of weekly broadcasts on Sunday evenings on the Macquarie Network. Her archives contain the scripts of these talks and many letters from devoted listeners. These broadcasts, and the audience response to them, demonstrate the importance of radio to Lyons’ public life and her role as a major figure on the medium. More broadly, they provide a key example of how radio provided a new public space in which women could speak about a range of issues and claim a voice as citizens in mid-twentieth century Australia. Radio represented an intersection of public and private spheres, and this gave women a space to articulate and perform oppositional forms of citizenship. Broadcasting challenged the gendered hierarchy of the public sphere, and as such women’s radio speech needs to be taken seriously as a crucial part of Australian women’s history.