Universal suffrage has never existed in Canada. Even today certain categories of citizens, ranging from the senior electoral officers to the mentally disabled, may not vote. In the nineteenth century, the poor and the propertyless were regularly denied the franchise in municipal, provincial, and federal elections. Both sexes fell into these under-privileged classes, but women were denied the vote in the first instance by the fact of their sex. Although there are scattered examples of females voting early in the previous century, the federal franchise was not won for all Canadian women until 1918. Enfranchisement at the provincial level was not complete until 1940 when Quebec, the last holdout, gave in.
Discrimination was rooted in the legal fiction that the interests of females were represented by male relatives. Opponents of women suffrage like humorist, Stephen Leacock, writer Goldwin Smith and politician Henri Bourassa, also argued that political activity by women would brutalize mothers, worsen marital relations, and produce neglected homes. Finally, through its perversion of family life and encouragement of general immorality, it was believed that the suffrage movement would destroy the state itself. According to this catastrophic view, woman's supposed inability to bear arms in defence of her country was further justification for legal inequality. Such anti-feminists, or "ants" as they were commonly called, insisted that woman's influence would be most beneficial and effective when exercised in personal and non-public ways. Female beauty, spirituality, and gentleness were to be preserved in the home in order to counteract the powerful male drives of aggression, selfishness, and materialism. These drives dominated the non-domestic world, providing it with both its power and its corruption. Female intrusion into the male arena would entail the inevitable loss of womanly virtues.
For all such dire forecasts, women in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Canada slowly came to regard the vote as a surer means of achieving individual and collective goals. Nor was this conversion limited to women. A combination of the unjust treatment of women and the revelation of more general social problems convinced the humanitarian and egalitarian of both sexes of the need for direct input by women into politics.
The Class Nature of the Movement
Wherever they lived across the Dominion the great majority of the suffragists, male and female, were middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Their devotion to the enfranchisement of women was dictated as much by their class and ethnic interests as by their progressive instincts. According to many of the outstanding suffragists, enfranchised womanhood would stabilize and purify a new urban-industrial world in which social revolution was only too real a possibility. At the same time, the vote would guarantee middle-class women a fuller share in the benefits of their society. Most feminists believed, as fervently as any successful businessman, that the power of Canada's largely British middle class was fully explicable and defensible in terms of its great thrift, energy and intelligence. Conferring of the franchise would acknowledge women's equal share in these virtues as well as in their rewards. Naturally enough, the class bias inherent in such views was hardly attractive to the working-class, who toiled long days in the Dominion's factories or endured a cramped existence in the nation's ethnic ghettos. No talk of shared "sisterhood" could ever bridge this chasm of conflicting interests.
Although the suffrage movement was largely restricted to those well above the poverty line, it at no time could count on the active support of the majority of middle-class women. Isolated in city homes or rural farmhouses, women were often too ill-informed, indifferent, or frightened to join. A willingness to campaign openly for political rights constituted an intimidating decision in a conservative community, where deviation or radicalism, however muted, often brought social ostracism.
Despite such handicaps, a number of factors operated in favour of the suffrage cause. Rapid population growth, especially in the years immediately preceding the First World War, offered new occasions for sociability and co-operation. Large centres such as Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver had long been the strongholds of women's organizations, but now they became the focus of ambitious national associations. The consolidation of agricultural settlement, particularly in the West, also enabled rural women to come together to discuss common problems and raise consciousness. New self-confidence and new social insights often accompanied the enlarged scale of women's joint efforts.
At the same time, improvement in domestic technology and a rising standard of living freed many middle-class women from the most onerous burdens of housework and parenthood. English Canada's declining birthrate from about 1870 onward provided a welcome release from the dangers and drudgery of constant childbearing. At a time when it was rigidly held that a woman's domestic duties were her first and overriding responsibility, a certain level of wealth and leisure was essential for participation in activities outside the home.
Background to Female Activism
New educational opportunities had sharpened the social awareness of small privileged groups of women. By the middle of the nineteenth century public high schools were opening their doors to girls. Private institutions, like Halifax Ladies' College, Loretto Academy, and Wesleyan Female College, also helped educate the daughters of the well-to-do. In the 1870s the Ladies' Educational Associations at the Universities of Toronto and McGill, and a similar group at Queen's, arranged non-credit courses for women seeking both personal improvement and social understanding. These voluntary initiatives prepared conservative universities for co-education. In 1875 Canada's first female university graduate appeared at Sackville's Mount Allison, and the next few decades marked the long deferred acceptance of co-education. By World War One the majority of the nation's post-secondary institutions offered female students some instruction, although usually with little enthusiasm and unequal facilities.
The desire for equal opportunity, which was so basic to the demand for political rights, was strengthened when professional schools began to graduate women in the 1880s. Kingston's and Toronto's Medical Colleges for women were founded in 1883, quickly producing such prominent feminists as Doctors Helen MacMurchy and Elizabeth Smith Shortt. In 1893 the first woman graduated from a Canadian dental school, the Ontario College of Dental Surgeons. In the 1890s Ontario admitted women as barristers and solicitors. Barriers erected by male monopolists in education and employment began to yield to insistent female applicants in every province, although in the Maritimes and Quebec the process was particularly slow.
Entry into traditionally masculine jobs, however, was unusual. For the most part, newly educated women crowded into separate professions, often newly created, where pay and prestige were minimal. Teaching was one profession that welcomed ambitious, often needy, female applicants. Less expensive than their male rivals, women soon formed the majority of elementary school teachers. Nursing, inspired by the "Nightingale revolution" in Great Britain, overcame its reputation for low morality and lower efficiency. Beginning in the 1880s hospitals, hopeful of acquiring both cheap and dedicated workers, set up training schools which welcomed middle-class recruits. By the next decade home economics was emerging as a field specifically tailored to the prevailing understanding of the womanly traits of purity, altruism, motherliness, and orderliness. In the new century, social work and library science would join the pioneers as occupations for respectable females.
By 1914 Canadians found themselves, almost inadvertently, with a substantial reservoir of educated and professional women. Female immigrants, especially those from Great Britain and the United States, also included college and training school graduates. Neither their education nor their employment brought women equality with men. Native or foreign born, women countered wide-spread discrimination in education and employment. Almost without exception they received one-half to two-thirds of a male salary for comparable skill and effort. The group consciousness and anger so important to the women's movement was fostered by common exploitation.
Of course not all women, not even all middle-class women, entered the paid labour force at the level of the university or professional school graduate. From at least the 1890s, a variety of secretarial schools coached eager girls for positions in business and finance, preparing the way for the growth of female employment ghettos in the white collar work force. Female "scribblers", like novelist Madge Macbeth, also flocked to newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. Their own actual or potential participation was not, however, the only change in the paid labour force to interest the middle-class suffragist. A sense of noblesse oblige or social responsibility inspired some of the more well to do women to offer emotional sympathy and concrete aid to their sisters among the working poor. As the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital dramatically revealed in 1889, many women desperately needed assistance in their struggle for the barest economic survival. Abysmal conditions in cotton factories or sweated trades seemed proof positive that male legislators and voters were not sufficiently sensitive to female suffering. Middle-class activists believed that the vote would enable them to rectify the worst conditions facing labouring women and children.
Indeed, urban-industrial growth produced many of the challenges which drove observant women to seek the franchise. Unrest and destitution had existed from the founding of North American cities, yet the scale of these conditions had increased dramatically by the opening of the twentieth century. Despite its benefits for the Gross National Product, the factory system regularly over-worked women, provoked class conflict, and undermined public health. The foreign-born, often exploited as cheap labour and criticized as a danger to morality, also worried those citizens who anxiously examined the state of the nation. In particular, the arrival of large numbers of Eastern Europeans after 1900, touched off Canadianization campaigns in which "respectable" women joined. Nor did women fail to note that immorality, poverty, and labour troubles were often associated with alcohol consumption. Problem drinkers were attacked as a special threat to the Dominion's home life and thus most directly to its women and children. The entrenched power of the distillers and brewers, like the stubborn resistance of many immigrants to assimilate, was seen by many female prohibitionists as justifying political action on their part. Indeed, alcohol abuse was a highly visible social problem. Unfortunately, many feminists failed to inquire whether alcoholism was a cause or a symptom of social distress.
By the late nineteenth century more and more citizens of both sexes were turning to cooperative remedies as one hope for salvation from the perils of urban-industrial progress. Male associations, like the Young Men's Christian Association and the Dominion Alliance for the Suppression of Traffic in Liquor, provided powerful models for the nation's reform-minded women. Voluntary organizations, including one or both sexes, constituted the backbone of the reform or "progressive" movement of pre-World War One Canada. As one contingent in this largely middle-class crusade, feminists shared other reformers' enthusiastic optimism. They too believed that the world, or at least their own community, could be transformed for the better in their own time.
Both sexes found an inspiration for social activism in their religious faith. In fact, the Protestant Churches offered many women their first opportunities for community reconstruction. Encouraged by ministers who were often active in reform endeavours, women founded homes for unwed mothers, campaigned for baby clinics, and inspected local factories. News of women engaged in similar work in the United States and Great Britain further legitimized philanthropic initiatives outside the home. The wide interests of non-Canadian activists such as Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, wife of the Governor-General who served between 1893 and 1898, and first president of the National Council of Women of Canada, awakened and reassured Canadian women. The world-wide debate on the merits of the feminist case was also instructive for Canadians like Toronto's Flora MacDonald Denison and Halifax's E.M. Murray. Although most women were critical of the militancy of the Pankhurst suffragettes in Great Britain and the radicalism of left wing feminists everywhere, tactics and analysis were regularly borrowed from abroad to deal with the Dominion's own entrenched sexism.
English Canada produced, both relatively and absolutely, a greater number of female activists than French Canada. A higher birth rate and a smaller middle class, combined with the antagonism of the Catholic Church, hindered the development of French-Canadian feminism. Nor did Francophones benefit to the same degree from advances in higher education. Neither Laval nor the University of Montreal graduated female students until the 1920s, and few professional schools welcomed women seeking careers. At the same time a powerful system of religious sisterhoods attracted many socially conscious women who otherwise might have found release for their energies, and commitment for their spirits, in the feminist movement. Contact with feminist agitation elsewhere was also less frequent, as were immigrants and lecturers expounding radical ideas. Language proved to be a further barrier. Unlike Anglophone women, who were powerfully influenced by the American and British woman's movements, their Francophone counterparts were unable to benefit from similar observations.
Women in nineteenth and early twentieth century Canada found many things to rouse them to awareness and anger. Yet if feminism was a collective response, it was also intensely personal and individual. Dr. Emily Stowe never forgave those who attempted to bar her sex from the nation's medical schools. Marie Gerin-Lajoie was bitterly critical of a legal system which treated women so unfairly. Women like Nellie McClung and Helen Gregory McGiIl were haunted by the tragedies which resulted from the double standard in sexual matters and the economic inferiority of women. In Halifax, Eliza Ritchie, with her Ph.D. from Cornell, was ever reminded of her sex's lack of welcome from the universities. Such individuals quickly became eager and self-sacrificing apostles of the feminist cause.
The Emergence of National Associations of Women
The wide range of motives behind female activism was as extensive as the variety of women's cooperative efforts in English Canada. Although women had joined together for a multitude of projects very soon after settlement, the first nation-wide bodies appeared in the 1870s. Religiously-affiliated groups like the missionary societies, the Dominion Order of King's Daughters, the Girls' Friendly Society, and the Young Women's Christian Association, had early appeal for uncertain or conservative female activists. Organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association attracted more confident or determined social critics. For many years the WCTU was the most controversial of women's joint endeavours. Modeled, like so much else in the Dominion, on American initiatives, it surfaced first in the hard-drinking port town of Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1874. By 1900 its membership numbered in the thousands. As the champion of alcohol's victims, the WCTU was dedicated to the enactment of prohibition. Its demands for governments to finance hospitals, improve schools, and reform prisons, were part of an integrated plan for social uplift. The poor reception of its first ladylike pleas drove members to espouse woman suffrage as the sole means of re-educating insensitive and corrupt governments. From the 1890s on, the WCTU was the Dominion's most outspoken and most pervasive champion of political equality.
Canada's first club founded for the express purpose of winning suffrage appeared in 1876 as the innocuously titled Toronto Women's Literary Club, founded by Dr. Emily Stowe. Not until 1885 was it confident enough to carry its true colours as the Toronto Women's Suffrage Association, the predecessor to the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association (DWEA). Early agitation was not limited to Central Canada. West Coast women were also laying their first suffrage plans at about the same time. Anxious to reassure the conservative, these early suffragists argued that enfranchisement would protect women and not desex them. Once women voted the home and its feminine virtues, so threatened by urban-industrial change, would at last be secure. The promise, repeated by almost every feminist in Canada as elsewhere, that women voters would improve the entire community, was part and parcel of the widespread belief in masculine immorality and female purity. Until at least the turn of the century, Ontario's and British Columbia's women were Canadian feminism's foremost crusaders. Agitation elsewhere was slower to develop. With the formation in 1893 of the Dominion-wide federation of women's organizations, the cautious and respectable National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC), however, the movement for political rights received a fresh boost. The DWEA (later the Canadian Suffrage Association) won for its cause wider hearings and greater acceptance by its early affiliation with the Council. Despite the official neutrality of the national body on the controversial suffrage question, local councils of women in cities across the country conveyed suffrage information to women who previously had little or no contact with the campaign. At the same time, the failure of NCWC requests for reform - for example, raising the age of consent - made new numbers of women conscious of their powerlessness and sensitive to the potential benefits of the vote. The emergence of franchise societies, like the Manitoba Equal Franchise Association (1894), the St. John Enfranchisement Association (1894), the Political Equality League of Victoria (1910), and the Winnipeg Political Equality League (1912), reflected the emerging consensus that only female voters would guarantee social improvement. In 1910 the still conservative but powerful NCWC formally embraced a suffrage platform, thus signalling the widespread acceptance of female enfranchisement as a respectable and useful reform goal.
By this date, the suffrage cause was finding its most sympathetic audiences in the West. In many parts of the prairies, pioneer and agricultural life, with its shared hardship for men and women, meant widespread masculine acceptance of women's right to full equality. The prairie provinces gave shelter to such out-spoken feminists as Violet McNaughton of the Saskatchewan Women Grain Growers, Frances Beynon of the Grain Growers' Guide and Nellie McClung of the Winnipeg and Edmonton Political Equality Leagues. These women, invigorated by a milieu in which reforms of all types found ready support, lent the suffrage cause new dynamism and resilience. Some of these reforms included the farmers' governments, nationalized utilities, mothers' pensions and factory legislation. In the more conservative and less turbulent Maritimes, reform-minded women like Anna Leonowens, author of The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1890), and member of the Halifax Local Council of Women, were more isolated. Quebec feminists, like Marie Gerin-Lajoie, founder of the Federation Nationale St. Jean Baptiste (the leading French Canadian woman's organization, established in 1907) found still less encouragement for political action. Not for such easterners the heady optimism of prairie suffragists.
The Developing Campaign
While the number of their supporters varied enormously, suffrage agitators employed similar methods across the nation. Petitions to city and town councils and provincial and federal parliaments were regular events. From the 1880s on, numerous unsuccessful franchise bills appeared in nearly every legislature. A few courageous parliamentarians like Alan Studholme, the Independent member from Hamilton East in the Ontario Legislature between 1906 and 1919, doggedly took up the feminist cause. Suffrage organizations also hosted public lectures at which such feminists as Susan B. Anthony of the United States, Emmeline Pankhurst of Great Britain, and Nellie McClung, presented eloquent arguments. Parades and letter-writing were other common methods of pressuring reluctant administrations. The withholding of taxes or attempting to cast ballots were common forms of individual protest. The 1914 Mock Parliament held in Winnipeg by that city's Political Equality League, was one of the most successful efforts to arouse public sympathy. Here suffragists ridiculed opponents by reversing the standard arguments. Men humbly petitioned an all-female assembly for the franchise while speakers like Nellie McClung and Lillian Beynon Thomas trumpeted an arrogant and comic refusal. The ensuing public sympathy prompted activists in Vancouver and elsewhere to employ similar methods. The reform and philanthropic efforts of women's clubs in general spotlighted female abilities and furthered the suffrage cause.
For all their sacrifices, Canadian suffragists won few victories before 1914. To be sure, there were optimistic moments. In some areas women gained the right to vote in school or municipal elections and to run as candidates in the same forums. For a time in the early 1880s Prime Minister John A. Macdonald seemed ready to enfranchise widows and unmarried women as one part of a bill to establish a uniform Dominion franchise. The dominant pattern, however, as with the withdrawal of Macdonald's initiatives, was one of rejection. Premiers like Conservatives Sir James Whitney of Ontario and Sir Rodmond Roblin of Manitoba, were typical of the legislators who repeatedly mocked or denounced suffrage petitions and bills. Sir Wilfrid Laurier's 1898 return to the provinces of the authority to determine voting rights also handicapped efforts. Instead of being able to concentrate on a single central government, the suffrage movement had to fight separate provincial battles. Not until 1917 would Ottawa reverse itself by enfranchising certain women federally, regardless of their provincial status.
Nor were suffragists always successful in their efforts to arouse other women. Prince Edward Island, for instance, never produced a formal suffrage society. Each year brought further disappointments; apathy and discouragement remained problems everywhere, even for the most confident. It was hardly surprising, especially in a highly migratory population, that the existence of suffrage organizations was uncertain. Levels of activity depended very much on the continuing presence of highly committed individuals. These included journalist Mrs. E.M. Murray in Halifax, Professor Carrie Derick and Madame Marie Gerin-Lajoie in Montreal, Dr. Margaret Patterson in Toronto, journalist Lillian Beynon Thomas in Winnipeg, writer Emily Murphy in Edmonton, and Mrs. Helen Gregory McGill in Vancouver. Such dynamic personalities helped keep spirits and hopes high when victory seemed very far away.
As Canada entered the twentieth century the steady growth in the number of well-educated and professional women gave the movement increasing stability and resources. The involvement of such individuals in a wide variety of social reforms also won them the sympathy and support of like-minded men. Political parties which hoped to cash in on the progressive spirit had become increasingly attentive to women by August 1914. Manitoba's opposition liberals were the only major party to officially endorse a suffrage platform, yet men in opposition and government across the Dominion were no longer so reluctant to voice personal support for woman suffrage. Steady, tiring campaigns had made many legislators, especially those west of the Ottawa River, ripe for final conversion.
The Great War and the Last Push
The First World War marked the high tide of Canadian feminism. Female activists often greeted the conflict as a time of great opportunity for national regeneration and purification. Women hurried to aid the allies through assistance to the soldiers abroad and relief for their dependents at home. Some joined recruiting drives; many sent husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons off to fight for democracy. Such patriots and the nation they served became increasingly aware of women's potential. Associations like the National Council of Women, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and the YWCA benefitted from this awareness by spectacular membership gains. The extensive organizational expertise built up in the suffrage and reform efforts was put to work in dealing with the problems generated by the international struggle. Mothers' pensions, the Canadian Patriotic Fund (which served and supervised soldiers' families), day nurseries, health inspectors, Canadianization programmes, and urban housing benefitted from female input. More glamorous still was the work undertaken by nurses employed with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. Sensitized by the demands of war, Canadian men finally admitted the nation's debt to its women. Growing public support was confirmed by the appointment of women to court benches, police forces, and government commissions and by the election in 1917 of the first female members to a provincial legislature (in Alberta). Emboldened by wartime patriotism, attentive governments and popular sympathy, suffragists like Nellie McClung in her bestseller, In Times Like These (1915), predicted great things when enfranchisement finally occurred.
Yet for all the broadening of female initiatives, a number of issues disrupted feminist solidarity. Women's suffrage was one. Some women continued to direct their major efforts to this goal. Others, especially those who previously opposed the suffrage campaign, insisted that this cause detracted from the more important war effort, something to be set aside during the conflict. The dilemma of the National Council of Women was typical. Its attempt to compromise by committing itself to petitioning for suffrage while maintaining other wartime activities satisfied no one. Such divisions made the federal Wartime Elections Act of 1917, with its enfranchisement of the female relatives of men serving overseas and its disenfranchisement of certain categories of the foreign-born, all the more controversial. Support for a franchise restricted either to the propertied, the educated, or the English-speaking had always existed among feminists. The war, with its fears of the Germans abroad and social agitators at home, strengthened such opinions. There were always, however, more liberal suffragists who opposed any restriction whatsoever on the franchise. Reactions in 1917 to the limited franchise depended very much on an individual's political loyalties. Liberal supporters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier attacked the bill as a plot by the Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden to re-elect the government by enfranchising probable supporters and disenfranchising those likely to be hostile. Conservatives and Liberals sympathetic to the coalition, or Union Government, proposed by Borden, retorted that the measure merely restricted the vote to citizens whose patriotism was unquestionable and thus safeguarded the nation. In any case. they insisted that the Act was only a temporary expedient to be followed quickly by full suffrage. Suffragists never came to any agreement on the relative merits of these arguments.
In March 1918 the politically harassed Prime Minister Borden referred both to women's important war contribution and to his new faith in their uplifting influence as he introduced a full franchise bill. The still uncertain acknowledgement of women's equality was reflected in the measure's failure to include the right to a seat in the House of Commons. This was deferred until 1919. During the passage of the 1918 biIl, several French Canadian MPs reiterated their opposition; enfranchisement would lower the birthrate, destroy marriage ties and generally increase immorality. For the next twenty-two years these arguments would flummox Quebec feminists in their struggle for the provincial vote.
The Provinces
In a number of instances the federal victory was preceded by action at the provincial level. The widespread sympathy won by prairie feminists, loyally supported by the farm and radical movements in their region, was evident in the sequence of provincial victories: Manitoba (January 1916); Saskatchewan (March 1916); Alberta (April 1916); Ontario (February 1917); British Columbia (April 1917); Nova Scotia (April 1918); New Brunswick (April 1919); Prince Edward Island (May 1922); Newfoundland (April 1925); and Quebec (April 1940). The relative slowness of eastern provinces in embracing suffrage can be witnessed in their occasional retention of restrictions. New Brunswick, for example, did not simultaneously confer the right to political office, while Newfoundland initially set a higher age requirement for women, reflecting both the lower level of feminist agitation and the greater conservatism of those provinces. French Canadian suffragists like Professor ldola Saint-Jean and Therese Casgrain suffered the further disadvantage of provincial administrations which had equated enfranchisement with secularism, the Anglo-Saxons, and modernity in general, all perceived as threats to the survival of the French Canadian nation. The 1920s and 1930s brought strengthened organization and new French-English co-operation, but no greater support in the legislature dominated by Maurice Duplessis and the ultra conservative Union National Party. Not until the wartime election of a Liberal government, indebted to the federal Liberals under William Lyon Mackenzie King, would a favourable measure be at last forced through. Even at that late date there still appeared to be relatively little popular support.
Governments surrendered to suffragists for a great variety of reasons. In every legislature some parliamentarians believed justice a sufficient explanation. Wartime sacrifices also offered many an old opponent the chance for a tactful about-face. Undoubtedly a few legislators did experience real conversion, but many more felt driven by political necessity to woo the previously unwanted female voters. For some administrations, like those in Manitoba and British Columbia, enfranchisement was in part at least a prize given for political assistance in recent electoral victories. In some cases, as with Quebec in 1940, it was a question of "catching up" combined with pressure from other more "advanced" governments. Whatever the precise explanation for long delayed enactments, all governments hoped that their show of generosity would tie female loyalties to their own parties.
The Results of Woman Suffrage
The road to woman suffrage in Canada was long and often difficult. The results in terms of office-holding, however, have not been spectacular. Until 1949 the federal House greeted only five female MPs; the first, Agnes Macphail, was elected as a Progressive, in 1921, representing the United Farmers of Ontario. Only two female senators were appointed during the same years, apt reflection of politicians' attentiveness to the new voters. Between 1921 and 1975 the total number of MPs has been only twenty-seven. The record was hardly more inspiring in the provinces where some chambers had yet to welcome women members. Instead of seeking political nominations for themselves, large numbers of women had shown considerable dedication in raising money, canvassing voters and recruiting new members for the traditional parties. This largely anonymous and unpaid activity has rarely been rewarded by party executives who regularly discriminate in favour of male candidates. The few who have run under the aegis of the Conservative or Liberal Parties have usually been allocated marginal or hopeless ridings. Radical or left of centre parties have traditionally been more receptive to women candidates but then their sex merely adds to the nearly insurmountable difficulties of winning a seat as a member of a minority party.
Although they soon confessed disappointment about office-holding, feminists, particularly those from the West, pointed to a broad range of social legislation enacted at the provincial level as one proof of women's broadening influence for good. Certainly factory acts, child protection codes, dower acts, mothers' allowances and a variety of other reforms demanded by feminists did follow the conferring of the franchise. It is difficult, however, to credit feminists with sole responsibility for any single reform. Progressive men were also interested in many of these measures. The slow progress of social welfare legislation suggests that female voters have, in general, been no more willing to support enlightened legislation than their male counterparts. Nor were discriminatory practices in employment, education, and law eliminated. The winning of women's right to become senators in the famous 'Persons Case' of 1929 was one of the few achievements for which former suffragists could take major credit. The Report of the Royal Commission of the Status of Women in 1970 chronicles the enormous burden of discrimination still facing female citizens. In light of suffragist hopes, the overall record is unsatisfying. How can it be explained?
The Limitations of the Suffrage Campaign
Agitators for women's enfranchisement drew widespread support so long as large numbers of Canadians accepted and approved of a uniquely female activism. From the beginning a majority of suffragists - including such leaders as Nellie McClung, Augusta Stowe Gullen, and Marie Gerin-Lajoie - argued that the maternal instinct formed the core of the female personality. This instinct determined all "normal" female behaviour and justified distinctive participation in social and political decisions at all levels. A few more radical feminists, like Professor Carrie Derick of McGilI, questioned this assumption of a special and superior kind of human nature, but faith in its existence has characterized the woman's movement in Canada as elsewhere. Popular agreement with this point of view was hardly surprising when one remembers that theology, custom and often science itself, echoed and substantiated the same assumptions. Nevertheless, however attractive it was to argue that a distinctive female nature dictated separate political representation, the argument was double-edged. It could also justify a wide range of discriminatory practices in the world at large. The dominant feminist view of women did not free the sex for any uninhibited exploration of potential roles in the world beyond the home. Nor did a female unity, based on a faith in a distinctive character, withstand the test of political power.
In the 1920s and later, women revealed that they thought much like men on a wide variety of issues. It was not readily apparent that female voters brought any higher moral purpose to the tasks of citizenship. The undermining of the faith in moral superiority was accompanied by a falling-off in the attraction of maternalism as a call to public service. Propelled by the stress on personal fulfilment which followed both World Wars and the widespread popularization of the Freudian dogma which dictated that "anatomy is destiny," women turned from the political engagement advocated by the suffragists. Canada's first female activists offered their sex no critical theory with which to undertake a wide-ranging examination of the role of women in society. As it was, old prejudices against women in education and employment remained, symptoms of an entire community's acceptance of largely different spheres of activity for men and women.
The middle-class make-up of the feminist movement hampered any sustained re-evaluation of basic principles. Once ensconced on official committees, sought out for advice and applauded for national leadership, the majority of suffragists were content to accept piecemeal, often desultory, reforms of the community. Only a very few, like the communist BelIa Hall Gauld, and the Christian socialist Frances Beynon, advocated massive socio-economic change. Only they reacted directly to the needs of the mass of working-class women. Yet as long as poor women remained outside of the mainline feminist movement, the potential for feminist action per se was undercut. Although suffragists repeatedly insisted that a person's sex was the determining factor in social relations, their programmes contradicted this argument by responding most directly to the wishes of a small and privileged group of middle-class women.
Yet for all its shortcomings, the suffrage campaign did bring certain women to a fuller understanding of their sex's place in the Canadian community. At the same time the movement offered many women the opportunity to share experiences and resolve personal dilemmas. Workers in the suffrage cause were also among those who helped eliminate the worst abuses of the capitalist system. As a result, the lives of many Canadians were improved. Nor was the enfranchisement of their sex an insignificant achievement. If it did not eliminate Canada's exploitation of its women, it did reduce the heavy burden of discrimination. The suffrage campaign made Canada more like that "Land of the Fair Deal" which Nellie McClung and her sister crusaders promised. The completion of the transformation was left for subsequent generations.
