Web page presentation

Members of the Political Equality League pose

with their women’s enfranchisement petitions

presented to the Manitoba legislature, December 23,

1915. Clockwise, from bottom left: Dr. Mary

Crawford, A.N. Thomas, F.J. Dixon, and Amelia Burritt,

aged ninety-three.

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Winning Back

the Vote Although Canadian women officially

won the vote a century ago, in reality some had cast ballots much earlier than that.

by Cec Jennings

N OCTOBER 1809, an “elderly lady, long a widow” did what few women had done before her and what few others in Canada would do for more than a hundred years after her — she voted. You

voted orally in those days, in intimidating circumstances. You had to announce your choice openly in the polling place. Your right to vote could be challenged and frequently was. No one, though, challenged Marie-Josephte Papineau. She was eighty but “still fresh and vigorous,” according to Les Deux Papineau, David Laurent-Olivier’s 1896 biog- raphy of the family. When a polling official in Montreal East asked Madame Papineau who she was voting for, she replied in a “voice strong and filled with emotion: ‘For my son, Joseph Papineau.’”

Her vote helped to elect her fifty-seven-year-old son to the Assembly of Lower Canada. Her determination to vote, and the family’s promi- nence, encouraged other women to do the same. It was a step toward female equality that was reversed — oddly enough — by her grandson, Louis-Joseph Papineau.

Louis-Joseph also won an Assembly seat in the 1809 election, for the Montreal-area riding of Kent. He was twenty-three, and his mother, Rosalie, hoped he would be a priest; but he opted for law, which didn’t enthuse him, and politics, which led him to leadership and to rebellion against British rule.

It also led him away from his family’s progressive past. In the 1830s he pushed to make it illegal for women to vote.

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B efore voting by women became a crime, there were a num- ber of occasions when some women cast ballots. There were cases of women voting in New Brunswick, Nova

Scotia, Upper Canada (Ontario), and Lower Canada (Quebec). Possibly the first women to vote in what is now Canada were

the six who did so in Windsor County, Nova Scotia, in 1793. Since the women met the qualification of owning property of a certain value, their votes were allowed to stand. In all likelihood, the legislative Assembly had no idea what else to do about some- thing so unusual.

British colonies, except Lower Canada, were governed by English common law. The law didn’t specifically bar women from vot- ing, but it was assumed they wouldn’t. After all, by the time most women were of voting age, they were married, and under the law they didn’t legally exist.

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law,” Sir William Blackstone wrote in his widely followed Commentaries on the Laws of England. “The very being or the legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorpo- rated into that of her husband.”

Lower Canada was governed by French civil law, which made it easier for women to own and control property than did English common law. This was important, since, at the time, owning prop- erty was often a qualification for being able to vote.

Consequently, voting by women was especially prevalent in French Canada. According to one study, between 1820 and 1844 a total of 950 women there tried to vote. In many cases, they were not challenged. The peak turnout was in 1832, during a by-elec- tion in Montreal West. A total of 199 women voted in that elec- tion, and another 26 were turned away.

A June 20, 1820, editorial in New Brunwick’s Royal Gazette complained of what was happening in the neighbouring province,

calling it “an absurd and unconstitutional practice.” It warned that women voting would lead to a “petticoat polity.”

New Brunswick had its own situation to deal with. A total of forty-four women voted in the hotly contested 1827 election in Kings County. Being either widowed or single property owners, they were technically eligible. However, the election results were challenged, and the forty-four votes were later cancelled by the leg- islative Assembly. In 1839, thirty-nine women who tried to register were struck off the poll book of the Sunbury County election. To prevent similar happenings in future, New Brunswick banned vot- ing by women in 1843. Nova Scotia followed in 1851.

Some politicians were quick to complain when the women’s vote did not go their way. In the 1844 Province of Canada (present- day Ontario and Quebec) general election, seven women voted for James Webster, the Conservative candidate in Halton West, a riding near Toronto. James Durand, the Reform Party candi- date, protested that he lost by four votes because the women were among “a great number of [ineligible] persons” allowed to vote by an election official who was also Webster’s business partner.

Durand’s complaint to the Conservative-controlled legislature got nowhere, but that was not the end of the affair. When Reform- ers won the next election in 1848, they made it illegal for women in the Province of Canada to vote.

One argument for banning women from the polls was that elec- tions were too violent for them. Elections were certainly violent — the rules almost guaranteed it. Oral voting made it easy to know if bribed or intimidated voters did as they were told. Another rule kept a poll open as long as voters continued to come forward. This meant an election could drag on for weeks. A poll only closed if an hour went by with no one stopping by to vote. That made it tempting to try to keep voters from reaching it. During the 1832 Montreal West by-election, which lasted twenty-two days, violence broke out between supporters of the opposing parties. British soldiers opened fire to disperse the crowd, resulting in the deaths of three French Canadians.

The Assembly held an inquiry into the violence and concluded that women needed to be shielded from such life-threatening situ- ations. Louis-Joseph Papineau, by now leader of the Patriotes, said it “was odious to see wives dragged to the [polls] by their hus- bands, girls by their fathers, often even against their wishes.” That didn’t square with the fact that most women voters were widows, but Papineau continued: “The public interest, decency, the modes- ty of the sex demand that these scandals should not be repeated.... A simple resolution of the [Assembly] would exclude such people from the right to vote.” And so it was done.

By 1851, laws against women voting were in effect in all the British colonies that united to become Canada in 1867. Women didn’t regain the right to vote — or to run for office — in pro- vincial and federal elections until well into the twentieth century.

G etting the vote back was a demeaning fight. Queen Vic- toria, despite her own position as ruler of much of the world, opposed including other women in the political

fray. Upon learning that Lady Amberley, a free-thinking member of the aristocracy, had become president of a suffrage society in 1870, she declared: “Lady Amberley ought to get a good whipping.” In a

A 1909 cartoon in the American magazine Puck satirizes opposition to women’s suffrage. It suggests women voters would disturb the “existing order of things” —— such as graft, corruption, and poverty.

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Militant suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst is arrested in London, England, in 1914. Canadian women adopted much milder tactics to win the vote.

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letter to her friend Theodore Martin, the queen said, “I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in check- ing this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors…. Were women to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men they would become the most hateful, heathen and dis- gusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

Women who wanted the right to vote were left to seethe and bear it, since the movement was seen as too radical to go pub- lic. That started to change in Canada in 1883, when the Toronto Women’s Literary and Social Progress Club dropped its cover and changed its name to the Canadian Women’s Suf- frage Association. It wanted “to discuss the advisability of granting the fran- chise to those women who possess the property qualifications which entitle men to hold it.”

The Toronto Globe called it a “bold announcement ... sufficient to set politi- cians thinking as to how the movement is going to affect them, and cause a thrill of hope or despair, according to the con- clusions reached.” The newspaper asked members of the association, “what are the grounds for your request for the suf- frage?” It got an earful.

“We ask for it as a simple right, and on the grounds that there should be no taxation without representation,” said Jessie McEwen, first president of the suffrage organization. “Another officer of the club [said] we want the franchise because in every step we make in the moral or social direction we are met by laws that discriminate against women. We don’t have equal pay for equal work.... Two ladies identified with the movement said we ought to be able to enter colleges and the higher educational institutions now exclusively used by men.”

The Globe devoted about a column to the women’s comments, which “will enable readers to form a fair estimate of the nature of the demands of the Women’s Suffrage Club.” That suggests the Globe suspected readers hadn’t previously given those demands much thought, which was likely the case.

The suffragists’ arguments seem to have had some effect, for a year later, in 1884, Ontario granted “widows and spinsters” with property the right to vote in municipal elections. British Columbia had done the same eleven years earlier. By the turn of the twentieth century, most women with property could vote in municipal elec- tions in Canada.

Winning the right to vote at the provincial and federal levels proved more difficult. Starting in 1885, provincial legislatures in Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia all debated bills on women’s enfranchisement. Their defeat was often accompanied by laughter and derision. Men who supported women’s suffrage were not spared.

When Warren Franklin Hatheway in 1909 introduced a bill in the New Brunswick legislature to enfranchise women, the proposal was rejected twenty-four to fourteen, with insult added to defeat when seven women — including Hatheway’s wife, Ella — were mocked while pleading their case. The members yelled “Help!” and “Police!” and, according to one account, were particulary crude to Ella, “openly laughing over a sexist and sexually deriding ‘verse’ inspired by the suffragists’ presence.”

These politicians were boors, but whose who patronized wom- en were perhaps harder to take. One of them, Nova Scotia Attorney General James Longley, was said by a compa- triot to be “conceited, unlovable and unbearable.” That rang true in his deal- ings with suffragists. In 1895 he said women’s role was not to vote but “to be kindly and loving, to be sweet and to be cherished, to be weak and confiding, to be protected and to be the object of man’s devotion.”

In Great Britain, the suffragettes — as the members of Britain’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) were called — were ridiculed, taunted, and patron- ized by politicians determined to keep women powerless. Formed in 1903, WSPU and its members grew increas- ingly militant, resorting to setting fires, breaking windows, chaining themselves to iron fences, and other attention- getting tactics. Their actions eventually escalated to bombing public buildings, burning down stately homes, and send- ing letter bombs in the mail. When ar- rested and imprisoned, some went on hunger strikes, to which authorities responded by subjecting the women to

painful force-feeding. In Canada, the movement was much milder in its approach. Activists stuck to petitions, lectures, public meet- ings, and mock parliaments to get their point across.

The Women’s Parliament — a satirical play featuring prominent suffragist Nellie McClung — drew a sold-out crowd at the 1,798- seat Walker Theatre in Winnipeg on January 28, 1914. McClung played the role of a premier greeting a delegation of men peti- tioning for the right to vote. “Man is made for something higher and better than voting,” she tells them, mimicking what Manitoba Premier Sir Rodmond Roblin had said of women the day before. “Premier McClung” congratulated the men “on their splendid gentlemanly appearance” and dismissed them.

The public’s reaction to the event suggested society was open- ing up to women’s enfranchisement. “To say that everyone [in the audience] was delighted is to put it mildly,” the Winnipeg Free Press reported next day. The Winnipeg Telegram suggested “the cause of women may not be so hopeless after all and the vote may not be so far away as one might be inclined to fear.”

The vote for women was just two years away, it turned out.

Suffragist Nellie McClung in the Winnipeg Evening Tribune after women in Manitoba

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P ublic attitudes had been changing for some time. The set- tling of the West in the late 1800s and early 1900s added to the pressure for equal rights. Women worked as hard

as men making a new home, so how could they be denied vot- ing rights? Consequently, farming organizations such as the Grain Growers Association threw their support behind women’s suffrage.

Proponents of extending the vote to women also gained allies when other groups pushing for social change realized their causes would be helped if women voted. The Women’s Christian Tem- perance Union was particularly keen on this as a way to achieve prohibition. Women were “the greatest sufferers in all countries on account of drink,” a WCTU meeting was told in 1883. “When they get the franchise, good-bye to whiskey.”

The First World War from 1914 to 1918 was another factor. Women took over the jobs left by men who joined the services. How could women praised for making munitions not be allowed to vote?

In Manitoba, the provincial Liberal party seized the moment, saying if it won the next election it would enfranchise women as long as a petition favouring it was signed by “a number equivalent to fifteen per cent of the vote cast at the preceding general election.”

The Liberals won in 1915. The suffragists went to work getting the necessary signatures. They needed 17,000; they got 43,834. Among those who petitioned door-to-door in Winnipeg was nine- ty-three-year-old Amelia Burritt, who single-handedly obtained 4,250 signatures. She said suffrage “won’t do me much good, but I want my daughter and her children to have the benefit of the vote.”

The petitions were presented to Premier Tobias Norris in De- cember 1915. On January 27, 1916, the Winnipeg Evening Tri- bune reported the groundbreaking news that, “for the first time in Canada, a woman’s suffrage act received the official sanction of a provincial parliament this afternoon.”

Only one member of the legislature spoke against the bill. The Free Press said James Hamelin “did not question the ability of women to vote or legislate, but he thought in [an election] cam- paign men would have to stay home and mind the children while the women went to vote and attend meetings.” But he abstained from voting, and the bill passed unanimously.

When it did, the Tribune said, “the entire audience rose en masse” and cheered. Women sang “O Canada” and “For They Are Jolly Good Fellows,” and then Hamelin “seized a glass of water, and holding it at arm’s length, cried: ‘Success to our new citizens, the ladies.’ The cheering broke out anew and in the midst of it the members sang ‘For They Are Jolly Good Fellows’ in return.”

That triumph opened the dam. Saskatchewan and Alberta followed shortly after. The federal government opened voting to all female British subjects over twenty-one in 1918. By May 3, 1922, women could vote in most jurisdictions. The exceptions were Newfoundland (1925), Quebec (1940), and Northwest Territories (1951).

In 1917, Louise McKinney became the first woman in Canada to hold provincial office when she was elected to the Alberta legisla- ture. In 1921, Agnes Macphail became the first female Member of Parliament. The last hurdle was cleared in 1929, when McClung, McKinney, Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, and Irene Parlby — known collectively as the Famous Five — won the consti- tutional right for women to become senators.

As for Manitoba’s Amelia Burritt, suffrage did end up doing her some good. Her first chance to vote came during the provincial election of June 29, 1920. During another election on July 18, 1922, the newspaper reported that she “walked from her home to the polling station.” She was just two weeks shy of her one hun- dredth birthday. Burritt lived to be 106. // See a video at CanadasHistory.ca/WomensVote

On June 11, 1938, Nellie McClung, far right, joined Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and others to unveil a plaque commemorating the Persons Case, a legal victory allowing women to be appointed to the Senate.

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