My granny was 20 on VE day, still a few years before the first female Māori MP entered Aotearoa's parliament. Photo / Ilona Hanne
Opinion:
Last month featured a couple of political firsts in Taranaki.
Min Mckay became Stratford's first female deputy mayor and Charlotte Littlewood become Taranaki Regional Council's first female chairperson.
You would think my feminist soul would be delighted, wouldn't you?
Excuse me, however, if I don't indulge in a glass of celebratory champagne to toast the success of these two unquestionably deserving and intelligent women.
Because while I do congratulate them, I can't help but wish we weren't still talking about firsts when it comes to equality. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, it's actually a bit bloody late. Scratch that, it's not a bit late, it's well overdue.
When it comes to Herstory, rather than History, things don't exactly move quickly.
Let's go back five generations in my own family. Back to my great-grandmother's year of birth in 1890. She was born at a time before women had the right to vote, let alone be a deputy mayor.
Great-granny Florence was 3 by the time women in New Zealand were finally given the right to vote.
An exciting time to be a young girl? Before she was even school age, not only had women in New Zealand achieved the right to vote but Elizabeth Yates had become the very first female mayor across all of the British Empire when she was elected mayor of the borough of Onehunga in 1893.
I wonder if news of these achievements reached great-granny Florence's ears, or even her home. She lived in England, where women were still some 35 years away from getting the right to vote.
By the time women in England were finally able to vote, my amazing granny Eunice had been born. In fact, she was 5 when women in England achieved the same right to vote as their sisters in New Zealand.
Now 99, Eunice, or granny-in-Africa as she is known in our family, was born in 1923. That's four years after the Women's Parliamentary Rights Act gave women the right to stand for Parliament in Aotearoa New Zealand. While three women did contest seats in the 1919 NZ election, none was successful, however.
In fact, granny-in-Africa would be celebrating her 10th birthday by the time the Labour Party's Elizabeth McCombs became the first female Member of Parliament in New Zealand.
Granny-in-Africa had also served in World War II AND was mother to a toddler by 1949, the year Labour's Iriaka Ratana became the first female Māori MP.
That toddler was my mother, and she herself reached adulthood at a time of great change across the world - the 1960s. An exciting time to be a young woman? As the swinging 60s began, women across the world welcomed the news that Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) had become the first woman to be democratically elected prime minister of a country.
Progress is slow it seems, however, and my mother had become a mother twice over by the time England joined what was a very tiny list of countries with a female leader.
Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister in 1979 when I was a toddler, but I was well and truly out of the toddler years by the time New Zealand caught up. In fact, I had finished my university studies and my postgraduate degree by the time Jenny Shipley became Aotearoa's first female prime minister, in 1997.
Over in local Government, things were a bit more positive. By the time Jenny Shipley had replaced Jim Bolger as leader of the National Party, Mary Bourke had been South Taranaki's mayor for five years - a role she held for 15 years in total. Georgina Beyer had been mayor of Carterton for two years by then as well, and her election in 1995 made the history books across the globe, as she was the world's first openly transgender mayor. She continued making history politically and went on to claim the title of the world's first openly transgender Member of Parliament in 2005, three years before my daughter was born.
My daughter is now 14 and it's been 132 years since my great-granny Florence was born. A lot has been achieved in that time - women have got the vote not just in Aotearoa and Britain, but they now have the right to vote in every country and territory in the world (except for Vatican City, in which only Catholic Church cardinals, who must be male, vote to elect the pope).
Last month, with the swearing in of Labour MP Soraya Peke-Mason, New Zealand reached a majority female parliament for the first time in its history, becoming one of just a handful of nations to achieve that gender equality milestone.
It's an exciting time to be a 14-year-old young woman then perhaps; after all, we have a female prime minister, the third female prime minister to lead Aotearoa New Zealand in history. Only, fun fact. When I was 14, back in England, I too spent my teenage years with a female prime minister at the helm of my country. A country that today has also had only three female prime ministers in its history. (Presuming we are counting Liz Truss' blink-and-you'll-miss-it time in the role).
So while we may have come a long way since great-granny Florence was born, we haven't exactly progressed in leaps and bounds when it comes to equality in government.
A hundred and 32 years down the track, we shouldn't still be celebrating firsts. Min and Charlotte's appointments shouldn't have been newsworthy because of their gender, but because of their talent, dedication and respective skill sets.
I hope that by the time my daughter is a mother, let alone a grandmother or great-grandmother, her descendants aren't still marking firsts when it comes to women's achievements in politics and governance. In fact, I hope her descendants find nothing remarkable or newsworthy in political candidates' gender, race, religion, sexuality or anything else other than their politics and suitability for the role. It would truly be an exciting time to be alive then.