Women have always been primary influences in the private life of their families, organizations, and communities. They give birth to the children and attend to their early growth and development.

Much of the detailed work in every type of institutional endeavour in society at large is done by women. With a few notable exceptions, women had been excluded from the professions, other than nursing and teaching, and from the public life of organizations and communities as well as from the work of nations until the beginning of this century. Anticipating a worldwide movement for the wide sharing of human freedom, Canadian women had to engage in difficult legal proceedings in the 1920s in order to overcome oppression and exploitation and to gain legal status as "persons."
 

A widely known author and leader in the Canadian women's suffrage movement early in the twentieth century, Emily Murphy was th first woman in the British Empire to be appointed a magistrate. A pioneer in the struggle for women's rights in Canada, she led a decade-long campaign to have women declared legal 'persons' in 1929 [NAC/PA-138847]

Early in the nineteenth century, thoughtful Canadian women created local organizations for charitable and religious purposes. They sought to help recently arrived immigrants and to assist needy women and children at local levels. Gradually, women began to establish organizations with broader regional and national objectives. Among these were the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Toronto Women's Literary Club, Canada's first suffrage group.

The WCTU, founded by Letitia Youmans, was organized in Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1874. Its influence quickly spread to other communities. The women who organized and carried forward its work were deeply conscious of the profound problems that alcohol consumption - the demon rum caused for wives and children for whom public agencies provided little if any assistance.

The organizers of the WCTU believed that alcohol was the primary source of many of the misfortunes that befell wives and children in the latter years of the nineteenth century. During that time primary industries such as agriculture, lumbering, and railway construction were major sources of employment, and manufacturing and mining were developing. Men employed in lumbering and mining camps were often away from their families for weeks, sometimes months at a time. After prolonged periods in the bush, many arrived home drunk and penniless. Their wives and children suffered. This was one of a variety of reasons members of the WCTU campaigned for prohibition of the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.

As the "White Ribbon Sisters" of the WCTU became more knowledgeable concerning the conditions that existed in many homes, their interest in reform widened. They began to campaign for mothers' allowances and women's suffrage. Leaders of the WCTU began to realize that, to effect the reforms they sought, women had to gain basic political rights.

Women virtually had no public role in early 19th century canada. Pioneering women writers of the time, however, afford us an opportunity to witness first hand what life then was like for them. Susanna Moodie, who witnessed the effects of the 1832 Montreal cholera epidemic, wrote three acclaimed volumes, all concerned with Canada: Roughing it in the Bush (1852), Life in the Clearings (1853), and Flora Lindsay (1854). Her sister, Catherine Parr Traill, was also a writer of distinction. Backwoods of Canada (1936) gave an impressionistic account of settlers eking out an improvished existence in the harsh hinterlands of Upper Canada. She also proved herself a gifted botanist and artist with Canadian Wildflowers (1868) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885). Much of the writing by Canadian women in early 19th century Canada took the form of letters, especially to family members or friends. Some of these letters have been published this century, including those of Anne Lengton who came to Canada in 1837. Her remarkable letters provide valuable information about the events surrounding the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada. Similarly, Anna Jameson, travelling the same year in Upper Canada, chronicled her eight-month stay there in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were attracted to this remarkable, independent woman's observation of pioneering Upper Canadaian social life at an important time in Canadian history [Masters and Fellows, Massey College]
 

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century small groups of women resolved to win for themselves and all Canadian women the right to vote in provincial and federal elections. To secure this right they embarked on what proved to be a long, difficult campaign. Historically men had argued that the primary responsibility of women centred in their homes. Many women agreed with them.
 

By the end of the nineteenth century in Canada, women owning propery could vote in municipal elections. The 1894 election solicited both "ladies and gentlemen" to vote in the upcoming election being held on January 1 in the Ontario communities of Meadowvale, Peel Country, and Goderich, Huron County [ NAC/C-9480]

Politics it was argued, was a man's game and was often dirty. Participants were bruised and hurt. To protect themselves, women should keep out of politics. And most of them did. Thus the separation continued between Canada's private life, in which women played primary roles, and Canada's public life from which women were largely excluded. ideas such as "no taxation without representation" gained the attention of increasing numbers of women, those women who owned property began to press for women's right to vote. It should be noted that, for most of the first half of the nineteenth century women property holders in Quebec had the right to vote in elections. But in 1849 they lost that right when the Quebec Franchise Act was passed. In what is now Ontario, the situation of women property owners at that time was the reverse of what it was in Quebec. In the first half of the nineteenth century women property owners in Ontario did not have provincial voting rights. After the middle of the nineteenth century, Ontario women owning property had the right to vote for educational officials at the local level. By the end of that century, women owning property could vote in most municipal elections in Canada.

I n 1876, Dr., Emily Howard Stowe founded the Toronto Women's Literary Club which became the first group in, Canada committed to women's suffrage. She and her colleagues were aware that, in the late 1860s, John Stuart Mill, the English utilitarian philosopher and economist, had prepared- the first legislative bill for women's suffrage in England.
 

Born in Norwich, in Upper Canada - now Ontario - on May 1, 1831, Emily Stowe became a school teacher, but, as a result of her husband's illness, resolved to become a medical doctor. Since Canadian medical colleges would not accept a woman as a student, she sought and gained admission to the New York Medical College for Women and graduated in 1867. She became the first English-speaking Canadian woman to practise medicine in Canada. At first she had to practise outside the law as she was not granted a professional licence to practise medicine until 1880.

Through her own personal experience in gaining acceptance as a medical doctor, she gained first-hand knowledge on which to draw as she and her daughtet Dr. Ann Augusta Stowe-Gullen, the first woman doctor trained in Canada, campaigned for voting rights for women. By 1883 the Toronto Women's Literary Club had become the Toronto Women's Suffrage Association. Then in 1889 it became the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association. Prejudice against the granting of the franchise to women was deeply rooted in the minds and traditions of members of provincial legislatures and members of the Parliament of Canada. Opposition to the granting of voting rights to women was also widespread in the general public until the first quarter of the twentieth century.

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the WCTU made one of its objectives the securing of basic political rights for women. These included the right to vote in provincial and federal elections and to stand for election to provincial legislatures and the House of Commons. Two decades of persistent efforts were required, however, before -women began to enjoy these rights.

On January 28, 1916, women in the province of Manitoba were granted the right to vote in provincial elections and to hold office as members of the Manitoba Legislature. Women in Saskatchewan secured the same rights on March 14, 1916, and those in Alberta on April 19, 1916. British Columbia implemented the same policy on April 5, 1917 and a week later on April 12, women in Ontario were granted similar voting rights. Changes came more slowly in Eastern Canada.

Women in Nova Scotia were granted the right to vote provincially and to stand for election to the legislature on April 26, 1918. Similar laws were passed in Prince Edward Island on May 3, 1922 and in Newfoundland on April 13, 1925. Women were given the right to vote in provincial elections in New Brunswick on April 17, 1919, but it was not until March 9, 1934 that they gained the right to stand for provincial office.

Through the dedicated leadership of Therese Casgrain, who campaigned thoughtfully and ceaselessly on behalf of women, the Quebec Legislature finally gave women the right to vote in provincial elections on April 25, 1940.

By that time Canadian women had been exercising the right to vote in federal elections for more than twenty years. On May 24, 1918, all female citizens of Canada over the age of 21 were allowed to vote in federal elections whether or not they had the right to vote in provincial elections. Later, in, July 1919, they were allowed to stand for election to the House of Commons but were denied the right to sit in the Canadian Senate until 1929.

One of the key leaders in the campaign to secure for Canadian women the legal right to sit in the Senate of Canada was Emily Murphy, a writer, journalist, and magistrate. She was supported, in her ten-year campaign to have women declared "persons" under the British North America Act (and thus eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada), by four other Alberta women, One of these was Nellie McClung, a highly effective advocate. Her career merits special attention.

By the 1920s, when she joined Emily Murphy in the struggle to ensure that women were declared "persons" under the British North America Act, Nellie McClung was widely known in Canada as an author, lecturer, and social reformer. She had grown up with the early movement for women's rights. Born Nellie Mooney on October 20, 1873, in Chatsworth, just south of Owen Sound, Ontario, where the WCTU had originated, she moved with her family when she was seven years old to a homestead in the Souris Valley, Brandon, Manitoba. Although she did not begin her formal schooling until she was ten years old, she made excellent progress and secured an elementary teaching certificate when she was 16.

In 1896 after teaching for six years, she married a Manitoba druggist, Robert Wesley McClung. Since her motherin-law was the President of the WCTU in Manitoba, it was not long before Nellie became one of its key members. The WCTU had been brought into being by women whose religious convictions Nellie McClung shared. Thus she had a natural interest in its activities and dedicated herself to realizing its objectives.

A primary objective of the WCTU was the legal prohibition of the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages on the grounds that such beverages were destructive of individual, family, and social life. Prohibition was finally approved in Canada during World War I. Since many women had suffered and were suffering grievously as a result of alcoholism and its concomitants, they were determined, against great odds, that prohibition should continue.

The work of the WCTU, while important to Nellie McClung, had not been her only interest. She and her husband were busy bringing up their children and Nellie devoted time to writing. Her first novel, Sewing Seeds in Danny, a witty description of a small town in Western Canada, was published in 1908. It quickly gained popular attention and soon became a best-seller. Three years after its appearance she and her husband moved to Winnipeg where she gave birth to her fifth child.

In Winnipeg Nellie was soon in demand as a speaker to women's rights groups and to reform organizations. Members of the Liberal Party persuaded her to share in their efforts to reform Manitoba's political life which was then dominated by the Conservative Government led by Sir Rodmond Roblin. In the midst of her reform efforts in Manitoba, however, she and her husband and family moved to Edmonton, Alberta. There she found many opportunities to continue her activities.

As her reputation as an author and lecturer spread, she received many invitations to speak publicly. :'In 1921 she lectured widely in England where she was enthusiastically received by her audiences. That same year she was elected as a Liberal member of the Alberta Legislature for Edmonton and served there from 1921 until 1926. Later in the 1930s she served as a member of the first Board of Governors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was a delegate to the League of Nations in 1938.

Nellie McClung was, of course, only one of a considerable number of women who made important contributions to the winning of political rights for women and to the general improvement of the status of women. Her friend, Agnes McPhail,    had a much longer career as an elected representatives of the people. She was a member of the House of Commons in Ottawa from 1921 until 1940 and was a member of the Ontario Legislature from 1943 until 1945 and again from 1948 until 1951. Nonetheless as a teacher, an advocate of women's rights, a reformer, an author, and member of the Alberta Legislature, Nellie McClung made a comprehensive contribution to the achievement of political rights for Canadian women.

When Nellie McClung died in Victoria, British Columbia, on September 1, 1951, major advances had been made in the widening of political opportunities for women and the redefinition of their place in Canadian society. But much remained to be done. Further progress was made in 1957 when Ellen Fairclough was appointed Secretary of State of Canada in the Cabinet of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. As a member of the Federal Cabinet, Mrs. Fairclough shared in the executive authority that governs Canada at its highest levels. As Canada's first woman Cabinet Minister, Mrs. Fairclough was a key contributor in the winning of essential political rights for Canadian women. Finally, in 1993, Canada's first female Prime Minister, Kim Campbell, received the seals of office. Her appointment came at a most difficult political and economic time and she and her government were soon defeated in the federal election of October 1993. But a woman had served in the highest political office in Canada. This was yet another key step in the winning of political rights for women in Canada, indeed in the world. Reflecting a global trend since World War 1, the traditional exclusion of women from political office has slowly come to an end   not just in Canada but worldwide. The election of such world leaders as Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Mary Robinson, Gor Harlem Brandtland, and Indira Ghandi clearly demonstrates this dramatic development.

But the need to strengthen the base and widen opportunities for women continues.