[3] Pryor was of Ngāi Tahu descent and became New Zealand's first Māori Papal Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1996.
[5][6] Through her maternal grandmother's mother Mary Joss, she was a great-great-granddaughter of William and Sarah Cameron, daughter of John Howell and his first wife Kohikohi, a young Kāti Māmoe princess of Raratoka Island.
[9] Although Mrs Pryor began her political career as a conservative New Zealand Labour Party supporter, due to the anti-abortion views of the late Prime Minister Norman Kirk in the early seventies, she resigned when his successor, Bill Rowling, stated that he would hold a referendum on the abortion issue if Labour won the 1978 New Zealand General Election, which it did not.
She subsequently joined the New Zealand National Party instead, and lost nomination for its Kapiti electorate to Roger Sowry in 1987, who later served as a Cabinet Minister under the administrations of Jim Bolger and Jenny Shipley in the nineties.
She was made a Papal Dame of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1996,[8] and helped to establish an administrative pastoral office for Cardinal Thomas Stafford Williams in Wellington, at the same time that she continued her anti-abortion activities.