Canada 150: Suffrage, labour activist was first woman elected to Vancouver council
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
Helena Rose Gutteridge came to B.C. in 1911 with British activists intent on helping organize the women’s suffrage movement. They intended to devote four years to the cause. Gutteridge spent the next half century in Vancouver fighting tirelessly for the eight-hour work day, minimum wage, equal pay, social housing and the rights of women.
Born in 1879, she was the second child of Charles Gutteridge, a blacksmith, and Sophia Richardson. She left home at 13. Her parents disapproved of higher education for girls. But she worked in the garment industry, saving meagre pay for more schooling. She studied at Regent Street Polytechnic, forerunner of the University of Westminster, and at the Royal Sanitary Institute, a pioneer in public health. It was there that she encountered militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters.
Gutteridge found her voice speaking at women’s rallies. Shewas there when police attacked women demonstrating at 10 Downing St., the prime minister’s residence.
She sailed for Canada on the ill-fated Empress of Ireland — it would later sink with 1,014 passengers and crew after a collision in the St. Lawrence River in 1914. Upon her arrival in Vancouver, she worked in the garment trade. Soon the vice-president of her union local, she began attending B.C. Federation of Labour and Vancouver Trades and Labour Council meetings as a delegate.
Women were a minority in the labour force and those who did work earned less than half a man’s wages. They were actively discriminated against by labour union men. Gutteridge was fearless and persistent in challenging that status quo. She became the first woman elected to the executive council of the VTLC, representing female workers, and then convinced unenthusiastic colleagues to support the principle of equal pay for equal work.
In 1937, she became the first woman elected to Vancouver City Council. She promptly led a successful campaign for low-cost social housing. During the Second World War, she served as a social worker for interned Japanese-Canadians. After the war, aged 66, she took work at a cannery.
“Helena Gutteridge worked tirelessly to improve conditions for women in the workplace,” said the federal government when it designated her a person of national historic significance in 2010. “She was a visionary reformer.”
She died Oct. 1, 1960.