Contributors to Canadian Life and Society

Martha Munger Black
(1866-1957)
Adventurer, Member of Parliament

Being the second woman elected to the House of Commons in 1935, at the age of 70, was just one of the many adventures that Martha Munger Black experienced during her lifetime. She gave up the wealthy Chicago life she was born into to partake in the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898. She also gave up her wealthy husband, William Purdy, who was reluctant to venture into the Yukon's rugged northern terrain, a voyage that necessitated travelling 92 kilometres on foot over the Rocky Mountains through Chilkoot Pass.

Martha survived this treacherous journey, the outbreaks of typhoid fever and smallpox, and the crushing northern winter. Unable to afford a doctor, she gave birth to the couple's third son alone in a small log cabin in January 1899. She went on to form a gold-mining partnership and later a successful sawmill business in Dawson City. In 1904 she married George Black, who became commissioner of the Yukon Territory and an MP. In 1935 Martha herself was elected to Parliament, replacing her ill husband as the representative for the Yukon. Among the issues she pursued as an MP were public health, pensions for the blind and nature conservation.

Martha Munger Black, "Mother" of the Yukon, died there at the age of 91. Black Street in Whitehorse commemorates the accomplishments of the Blacks, as do two mountain peaks in the Yukon, named in their honour.

Bassett, Isabell. -- The parlour rebellion : profiles in the struggle for women's rights. -- Toronto : McClelland and Stewart Limited, c1975. -- 223 p. -- ISBN 0771010966

Black, Martha Louise. -- Martha Black. -- Anchorage : Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, c1980. -- 166 p. -- ISBN 0882400622

Johnston, Jean. -- Wilderness women. -- Toronto : Peter Martin Associates Limited, c1973. -- 242 p. -- ISBN 0887780849

Martin, Carol. -- Martha Black: Gold Rush Poineer. -- Toronto : Douglas & McIntyre, c1996. -- ISBN 1550542451

Victoria Belcourt Callihoo
(1861-1966)
Métis Historian

Victoria Belcourt Callihoo was born in Lac Ste. Anne, a Métis community northwest of Edmonton. Living in Lac Ste. Anne for all her 104 years, she witnessed the many changes in Canadian life that took place in this time period. Questioning the value of money the first time she saw it, she preferred the "fur" system of barter which did not foster the hoarding of wealth. She was more approving of the telephone, as it permitted Callihoo, a woman related by blood or marriage to the Cree, Iroquois and French, to communicate in the language of her choice.

The daughter of a Cree medicine woman, she went to her first buffalo hunt in a Red River cart at age 13, when the great western bison herds could still be described as "a dark solid moving mass." She later farmed with her husband, Louis Callihoo, and raised 12 children. An expert teamster, she also freighted for the Hudson's Bay Company between Edmonton and Athabasca Landing.

Callihoo's vivid recollections, outlined in the Alberta Historical Review, are a remarkable window into 19th-century Métis daily life and customs. Indeed, she was still dancing the laborious Red River jig "the way it should be done" well past the age of 100.

Callihoo, Victoria. -- "Early life in Lac Ste. Anne and St. Albert in the eighteen seventies". -- Alberta historical review. -- Vol. 1, no. 3 (November 1953). -- P. 21-26

______. -- "The Iroquois in Alberta". -- Alberta historical review. -- Vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 1959). -- P. 17-18

______. -- "Our buffalo hunts". -- Alberta historical review. -- Vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1960). -- P. 24-25

MacEwan, Grant. -- "Victoria Callihoo : granny". -- Mighty women : stories of western Canadian pioneers. -- Vancouver/Toronto : Greystone, c1995. -- P. 190-199. -- ISBN 1550544160

Mary Shadd Cary
(1823-1893)
Editor and Civil Rights Advocate

Courtesy of the National Achives of Canada (c-029977)

Mary Ann Shadd was born a free black on October 9, 1823, in Wilmington, Delaware. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act threatened to return free northern blacks and escaped slaves to bondage, Shadd moved to Windsor, Ontario. Here, in 1851, she established a school to accommodate the influx of black refugees from the United States.

In 1853 Shadd established the Provincial Freeman, a weekly paper designed to cover the lives of Canadian blacks and promote the cause of black refugees to Canada. The first black woman in North America to edit a weekly paper, Shadd complemented her active anti-slavery efforts and editorials with articles on women and their contributions. At a time when it was still uncommon for women to speak in public, Shadd lectured frequently in the U.S. against slavery and for black emigration to Canada in an effort to keep the paper viable. Despite her efforts, the Provincial Freeman fell victim to the economic depression of the day and ceased publication in 1858.

After her husband's death in 1860, Mary and her two children left Canada. Mary became a recruiter in the Union army during the U.S. Civil War, and later a school principal. Finally, at age 60, she attained a law degree to further assist in her struggle for the rights of blacks and women.

Bearden, Jim and Linda Jean Butler. -- Shadd : the life and times of Mary Shadd Cary. -- Toronto : NC Press Ltd., c1977. -- 233 p. -- ISBN 0919600735

Hill, Daniel G. -- The freedom-seekers : blacks in early Canada. -- Agincourt : The Book Society of Canada, c1981. -- 242 p. -- ISBN 0772552843

Winks, Robin. -- The blacks in Canada. -- Montréal : McGill-Queen's University Press, c1971. -- 546 p.-- ISBN 0300013612

E. Cora Hind
(1861-1942)
Agriculturist and Journalist

Courtesy of the Winnipeg Free Press

E. Cora Hind was world renowned as an outstanding journalist, lecturer and writer and was a foremost authority on all aspects of agriculture.

She was the first typist and stenographer in western Canada, and the first western woman to succeed in journalism. She initiated the western farm reports, pioneered the preparation of crop reports, was the early secretary of the Manitoba Dairy Association, and was the first woman to navigate a boatload of wheat out of Manitoba's Port Churchill. Cora was also active in the Winnipeg Women's Christian Temperance Union and petitioned with Nellie McClung for the franchise of women.

The Western Canada Livestock Union, the Wool Growers of Manitoba and the Canadian Society of Technical Agriculturists all honoured E. Cora Hind for her contributions to agricultural life. She received an honorary LLD degree from the University of Manitoba in 1935, and the Winnipeg Free Press gave her a world tour in recognition of her long and faithful service. Following her death in 1942, the United Grain Growers established the Cora Hind Fellowship for research in agriculture at the University of Manitoba, and the Free Press established the Cora Hind Scholarship in Home Economics.

Haig, Kenneth M. -- Brave harvest : the life story of E. Cora Hind, LL.D. -- Toronto : Thomas Allen, Limited, c1945. -- 275 p.

Hind, E. Cora. -- My travels and findings. -- Toronto : Macmillan, c1939. -- 185 p.

MacEwan, Grant. -- "Cora Hind : voice of the agricultural west". -- Mighty women : stories of western Canadian pioneers. -- Vancouver/Toronto : Greystone, c1995. -- P. 100-109. -- ISBN 1550544160

Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie
(1867-1945)
Pioneer Quebec Feminist

In 1907, Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie founded the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, an organization of francophone women from various professional and charitable organizations, dedicated to the promotion of civil and political rights for women.

In addition to teaching, and lecturing at l'Université de Montréal, Gérin-Lajoie, a self-taught legal expert, authored two treatises, Traité de droit usuel in 1902 and La femme et le code civil in 1929, as part of her efforts to reform the civil code, which attributed a married woman the inferior legal status of a minor.

She struggled to amend laws that had changed little since the 16th century, working to achieve the right of married women to control their own income, the right to limit the husband's freedom to unilaterally give away family assets, and the right to be guardians of minors. She also supported efforts to obtain simpler and cheaper separation procedures, the rights of separated women to manage their own property, and demands that a fixed proportion of a husband's estate go to the wife.

In 1922, she led a delegation of 400 suffragists to meet with the Quebec premier in an unsuccessful bid to obtain the vote for women. It would require 18 more years of hard work by feminists like Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie before Quebec granted women the right to vote in 1940, the final province to do so.

Her daughter, Sister Marie-Joséphine Gérin-Lajoie, was Quebec's first francophone woman to receive a BA in 1911. She pursued her own style of women's suffrage, social work and education, through her foundation of a new religious order, les Soeurs Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil in 1923.

Cleverdon, Catherine L. -- The woman suffrage movement in Canada. -- 2nd edition. -- Toronto : University of Toronto Press, c1974. -- 324 p. -- ISBN 0802021085

Quebec women : a history. -- By the Clio Collective, Micheline Dumont ... [et al]. ; translated by Roger Gannon and Rosalind Gill. -- Toronto : Women's Press, c1987. -- 396 p. -- ISBN 0889611017

Prévost, Robert. -- Québécoises d'hier et d'aujourd'hui : profils de 275 femmes hors du commun. -- Montréal : Stanké, c1985. -- 230 p. -- ISBN 2760402614

Trifiro, Luigi. -- "Une intervention à Rome dans la lutte pour le suffrage féminin au Québec (1922)". -- Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française -- Vol. 32, no. 1 (juin 1978). -- ISSN 00352357. -- P. 3-18

Emily Jennings Stowe and Augusta Stowe Gullen
(1831-1903 and 1857-1943)
Pioneer Women Doctors

Left to right: D^r Emily Jennings Stowe and
D^r Augusta Stowe Gullen

Emily Jennings Stowe pioneered the struggle for women's equality in Canada as the first woman school principal (1852) and physician (1867). She organized the country's first suffrage organization, initially called the Toronto Women's Literary Club (1877). Five years later its name was changed to the Toronto Women's Suffrage Club. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe Gullen, continued in her mother's extraordinary path, becoming the first woman to study medicine and graduate from a Canadian university in 1883.

In 1865, Emily Jennings was refused entry to the University of Toronto on account of her sex. She returned to Toronto in 1867, after graduating from medical school in New York, to practise medicine in the face of fines, threats of imprisonment and opposition from the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons. Along with Dr. Jennie Trout, she endured the harassment of her male professors and fellow medical students when the Toronto School of Medicine reluctantly admitted them in the early 1870s. Emily continued to practise illegally until the College of Physicians and Surgeons finally granted her a licence in 1880.

Her daughter, Augusta Stowe, was forced to endure similar hardships when she enrolled in the Toronto School of Medicine in 1879. However, after she delivered one particularly stinging rebuke, the taunts came less often. Following Stowe's graduation in 1883 as the first woman to take her complete medical training in Canada, she married fellow graduate Dr. John B. Gullen, and was appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy at the new Women's Medical College, and later Professor of Pediatrics.

In 1896, both mother and daughter participated in a mock parliament, organized by the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association, humorously debating and defeating a motion to permit men the vote. Following her mother's death, Augusta became president of the final incarnation of the Toronto Women's Literary Club, the Canadian Suffrage Association, and then vice-president of the National Council of Women.

Hacker, Carlotta. -- The indomitable lady doctors. -- Toronto/Vancouver : Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, c1974. -- 259 p. -- ISBN 0772007233

McCallum, Margaret. -- Emily Stowe. -- Toronto : Grolier Limited, c1989. -- 47 p. -- ISBN 0717225097

Ray, Janet. -- Emily Stowe. -- Toronto : Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, c1978. -- 63 p. -- ISBN 0889022364

-- 100 years of medicine, 1849-1949. -- Saskatoon : Modern Press Limited, c1949. -- 52 p.