It's been a long, hard road for Australian women

CANBERRA - It has been a long road to the top for Australia's women.

The election of Julia Gillard as Prime Minister yesterday comes 50 years after Sirimavo Bandaranaike became Sri Lanka's and the world's first female leader, and three decades after Margaret Thatcher won power in the United Kingdom.

It is also 13 years since Jenny Shipley became New Zealand's first female Prime Minister.

Gillard, a Welsh-born former lawyer, follows more than 40 other women in countries as diverse as India, Dominica, Malta, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Germany, France and Haiti.

Within Australia, Gillard was the first woman to be elected to one of Labor's safe Victorian seats, Australia's first Deputy Prime Minister and, briefly, its first part-time Prime Minister when Rudd took Christmas holidays.

Winning power has always been hard for Australian women.

South Australia - then a separate colony - followed New Zealand by two years in giving women the vote, followed by the newly federated Australia in 1901, with all states separately falling into line by 1908.

But it was not until 1921 that Edith Cowan, a vigorous women's rights campaigner, became the first female to be elected to an Australian parliament when she won a state seat in Western Australia.

In 1943 two women moved to Canberra.

Dame Enid Lyons, wife of former Tasmanian Premier and Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, became the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives and, later, the first to be appointed to the federal Cabinet.

The same year Dorothy Tagney was elected to the Senate.

Winning real power took longer.

The nation's first two women state Premiers were not elected until 1990 - Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia, and Joan Kirner in Victoria.

There have only been two others since: Anna Bligh in Queensland and Kristina Keneally in New South Wales, both still in office.

The only major party to put females into its top job was the now-defunct Democrats, which chose women as six of its 11 leaders.

The present Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, is Australia's first female Governor-General.

In the states, the first woman governor was South Australian Dame Roma Mitchell, appointed in 1991.

Since then there have been five others in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland, but none in Tasmania, Victoria, or Western Australia.