When Helen Letitia Mooney married pharmacist Wes McClung in 1896, she was already a seasoned pioneer, for, when she was six, her family had moved from Grey County in Ontario to homestead on the banks of the Souris River. Both before and after her marriage, Nellie was also a pioneer in everything to do with Women’s Rights, including campaigns for suffrage, temperance, and the decade-long, all-important Persons’ Case which finally, in the celebrated Privy Council judgement of 1929, changed the demeaning and inferior status of women as previously set down in the British North American Act.
 

A dynamic lecturer, Nellie McClung was one of the few women speakers of her day who could fill Toronto’s Massey Hall. Her name appears on a plaque in Ottawa at the entrance to the Senate Chamber, with those of four other fighters for women’s suffrage who succeeded in opening the doors of the Senate to women. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star]

Because of the difficulties and poverty associated with establishing the family farm, Nellie couldn’t begin school until she was ten, but she was a clever scholar and an eager one, and she was just 16 when she finished Normal School in Winnipeg and began teaching in a country school. As soon as she could save enough money, she returned to Winnipeg to finish the Collegiate Institute there. Always, wherever she was, she became a reforming activist in the organizations she believed in. Living in Winnipeg, and later in Edmonton, she became prominent politically for her outspoken convictions and her quick wit. She saw humour in a situation as readily as she saw corruption, and pompous politicians were one of her most frequent targets. She toured Manitoba in a mock Parliament that was a wicked satire on certain Members of the day, and the enfranchising of Manitoba women in 1916 was in no small part her victory.
 

1. Sowing Seeds in Danny, originally serialized in Collier’s, sold over 100,000 volumes following its 1908 publication. [photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection] 2. The youngest of her family, Nellie, aged six, in May 1880, the day before the family sailed from Owen Sound, Ontario, bound for Manitoba. [Photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

After the McClungs moved to Edmonton, as part of a worldwide movement in support of women’s rights she played a leadership part again in the Alberta Suffrage movement, and in 1921 was elected as a Liberal to the provincial legislature. Her political activities were only a part of her very busy life, for she bore five children and somehow found time to write and publish short stories, novels, and essays. Always a committed moralist and social reformer in her writing as in her life, she also had a novelist’s keen observational powers and a talent that ranged from gentle humour to pointed satire. Originally written as a short story for Collier’s in 1902, Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), her first book, was a best-seller. More than 100,000 copies were sold of the tales about Danny and Pearlie Watson and their hard-up Irish family struggling to succeed in a harsh prairie environment. Pearlie Watson was the first of a line of McClung heroines who were determined to better themselves in the face of any and all hurdles that society could throw in their paths. Helmi, a Finnish immigrant to Canada, the heroine of Painted Fires (1925), is perhaps the most memorable of all, and in the telling of her story McClung displays her greatest strengths and weaknesses as a writer: on the one hand, a documentary grasp of details, and, on the other, a pervasive, over-romantic sentimentality.

Nellie was an indomitable fighter and spokesperson for prohibition, women’s suffrage, safety legislation, and social reforms of all kinds, was in demand as a lecturer in Canada and the U.S., and gained wide prominence in Britain at the Methodist Ecumenical Conference of 1921. After the McClungs retired to Victoria in 1933 she wrote the two vivid volumes of autobiography that are still much admired today, Clearing in the West and The Stream Runs Fast. They tell the story of Nellie McClung’s remarkable, indomitable, and productive crusade for the betterment of society in her day and in ours.

Clara Thomas