Joyce Steele

Joyce Steele (29 May 1909 – 24 September 1991) was an Australian politician and one of the first two women elected to the Parliament of South Australia, the other being Jessie Cooper. Steele was elected to the House of Assembly and Cooper was elected to the Legislative Council at the 1959 election. Ironically, South Australia was the last state to elect a female representative – at the 1896 election, South Australian women became the first in Australia, and some of the first in the world, to be given the right to vote and stand for election to Parliament.

Prior to her election, Joyce Steele was a homemaker, an ABC broadcaster and active in community organisations, including the Queen Adelaide Club (the women's equivalent of the exclusive Adelaide Club). She was pre-selected for the Liberal and Country League's (LCL) safest metropolitan seat, Burnside, in 1959 and was comfortably elected. She was not a feminist, and was affiliated with the conservative wing of the LCL.

Molly Byrne was Labor's first female elected to the Parliament of South Australia at the 1965 election, and the third ahead of Steele and Cooper.

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