Web page presentation

The victory of `Calamity Nell.’ (cover story)

Authors:

Nemeth, Mary

Source:

Maclean’s. 7/6/92, Vol. 105 Issue 27, p61. 1p. 1 Black and White Photograph.

Document Type:

Article

People:

MCCLUNG, Nellie L., 1873-1951

Abstract:

Profiles Nellie McClung, `lady terror,’ `Calamity Nell,’ who led the campaign to win the vote for women, became one of the first women elected to the Alberta legislature and helped wage a court battle to prove that Canadian women were legally `persons.’ McClung was a `role model’ whose commitment to social change is as relevant today as it was two generations ago. Her disappointment at the slow pace of change; Changes since McClung was born; Her political history.

Full Text Word Count:

926

ISSN:

0024-9262

Accession Number:

9207202471

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THE VICTORY OF `CALAMITY NELL’

Full Text

Section:

Special Report

McClung helped win the vote for women

Dateline: Edmonton, Alta.

Inside Alberta’s towering sandstone legislature building, at the far end of the east-wing hallway, hangs a photograph of a handsome middle-aged woman with curly hair, a strong chin and thin, determined lips. In her day, critics called Nellie McClung a ``lady terror’’ or ``Calamity Nell.’’ Admirers called her a heroine. She led the campaign to win the vote for women, became one of the first women elected to the Alberta legislature and helped wage a court battle to prove that Canadian women were legally ``persons.’’ Meanwhile, she married, raised five children, published 16 books and delivered fiery speeches across Canada and the United States. To Elaine McCoy, now Alberta’s 46-year-old minister responsible for women’s issues, McClung is ``a role model’’ whose commitment to social change is as relevant today as it was two generations ago.

During the battle for women’s suffrage, McClung argued that the vote would usher in a new era of equality and justice. But in the years before her death in 1951, she wrote of her disappointment at the slow pace of change. In fact, it was not until the late 1960s that a new wave of feminism surged onto the national scene with a message as radical as McClung’s had been in her time. McCoy was at the University of Alberta by then – an ambitious young law student convinced that all barriers to women’s advancement had crumbled. ``I thought that the doors were open,’’ says McCoy. ``I was naïve. Here I am 23 years later, and there’s still a wage gap, there’s still sexual harassment and family violence. We don’t have true equality. We’ve inherited all of those issues.’’

And yet, so much has changed since 1873, when McClung was born in Chatsworth, Ont., and women – lumped in with lunatics and criminals – were still denied the right to vote. McClung’s family moved to an isolated homestead in southern Manitoba when she was six years old. Pioneer life shaped her fiercely independent spirit and later inspired her folksy, homespun novels. After finishing the eighth grade, she taught school in Manitou, Man., where she met and married Wesley McClung, a pharmacist. ``They had a very happy marriage,’’ says Marcia McClung, the couple’s 48-year-old granddaughter, who owns a Toronto public relations firm. ``Wesley had been brought up by an emancipated woman and he was very proud of Nellie.’’

Wesley McClung’s mother, Annie, was an ardent activist. Nellie soon joined her in the temperance cause, campaigning for universal suffrage in the belief that women’s maternal instincts would compel them to ban the demon alcohol as soon as they won the vote. Opponents of women’s suffrage argued that politics would take women away from their duties at home, and they often accused McClung of neglecting her family. ``I wish you could see the proportion of my mail that tells me to go home and darn my husband’s socks,’’ she wrote a friend. Still, McClung’s married respectability, her pretty hats and witty speeches made her more socially acceptable than some of her more radical colleagues.

In 1911, when the McClungs moved to Winnipeg, Nellie’s political horizons expanded. Already a skilled orator, she began campaigning for better factory conditions and women’s rights to family property. During Manitoba’s 1914 election campaign, she played a leading role in the battle to unseat Conservative Premier Rodmond Roblin, who had rejected women’s suffrage. She stumped the countryside and took part in a popular mock parliament in which she played premier to a fictitious delegation of men. ``Man is made for something higher and better than voting,’’ she told the delegates, mimicking Roblin’s tone. ``Politics unsettle men, and unsettled men means unsettled bills – broken furniture, and broken vows.’’

The McClungs had moved to Edmonton by the time the new Liberal government gave Manitoba women the vote in 1916. Saskatchewan and Alberta followed the same year; British Columbia and Ontario in 1917, Nova Scotia and the federal government in 1918. ``More has happened in the last four years and a half,’’ McClung wrote in 1919, ``than in the 400 years that preceded that time.’’ In 1921, McClung won a seat in the Alberta legislature as a member of the Liberal opposition. She crusaded for women’s rights and prohibition. When the prohibition campaign failed, wrote The Edmonton Journal, she ``scorched the government with acidulated and bitter tongue.’’

Later, she joined four other women to fight the famous Persons Case. Under the British North America Act, only ``persons’’ could sit in the Senate, and the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1928 that that did not include women. Undaunted, the five women took the case to the Privy Council in Britain – and won. Later, McClung served on the CBC’s first board of governors and was a delegate to the League of Nations in 1938. She continued writing until her death in 1951, at 77.

After helping to bring the vote to more than half of the Canadian population, McClung was largely forgotten until a feminist revival in the 1960s. ``It’s been two steps forward and one step back,’’ says 68-year-old Alberta Liberal MLA Bettie Hewes. Women now, she adds, must join the battle where the early suffragists left off. ``I feel some obligation to them because of what they accomplished,’’ says Hewes. ``I feel some duty to live up to their legacy.’’

Photo: McClung: a commitment to social change that is still relevant (BC ARCHIVES/HP39858-B-6795)

By Mary Nemeth

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