A century ago, Prairie women won the right to vote
Suffrage centennial a reminder of life before rights revolution
In 1913, a group of about 150 women, who called themselves the Edmonton Political Equality League, marched on Alberta’s legislature to petition Liberal Premier Arthur Sifton for the right to vote.
Sifton, to put it mildly, sniffed at the suggestion.
“Did you ladies wash up your luncheon dishes before you came down here to ask me for the vote?” he asked them. “If you haven’t, you’d better go home because you’re not going to get any votes from me.”
A year later, a group of men and women, led by suffrage spokeswoman Nellie McClung, made a similar appearance at the Manitoba legislature. Manitoba Premier Rodmond Roblin was equally dismissive, telling the protesters women’s suffrage would break up the home and “throw the children into the arms of servant girls.
“The mother that is worthy of the name and of the good affection of a good man has a hundredfold more influence in shaping public opinion around her dinner table than she would have in the marketplace, hurling her eloquent phrases at the multitude,” he huffed.
Exactly two years later, women in Manitoba triumphantly won the right to vote. On Jan. 28, 1916, Manitoba became the first province in Confederation to allow suffrage for women and men. Saskatchewan followed suit that March. Alberta joined the party in April.
Suddenly, what had seemed impossible, even laughable, was the new law of the West. And in 1917, when Albertans went to the polls and women cast ballots for the first time in an Canadian provincial election, Louise McKinney and Roberta MacAdams became the first two women elected to any legislature in the British Empire.
It was no accident that the three Prairie provinces were the first in Canada to grant women voting rights. The women’s suffrage movement was a western phenomenon.
Wyoming had been the first to let women into the polls, in 1869. By the time Manitoba women had won that rights, the western states of Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona had all embraced suffrage.
In the polite urban drawing rooms of Toronto and Ottawa, London and New York, ladies had always been told that involving themselves in the dirty world of politics would make them less refined.
In the West, where women of every class and background had to roll up their sleeves and work alongside men, traditional gender roles were perhaps more mutable.
There was a liberating sense here that Old World conventions didn’t quite apply.
But it wasn’t just that frontier iconoclasm that spurred this rights revolution.
The suffrage movement was cross pollinated with other profound social forces. It was part and parcel of agrarian prairie populism, rooted in movements like the United Farmers, early advocates of votes for women.
It was driven, too, by the rise of the temperance movement, propelled with the reformist utopianism of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who sought the vote as part of their fight for Prohibition.
And on the Prairies, especially, the fight for women’s suffrage coincided with the Great War, and all the social upheaval it brought with it.
As confidence in traditional political leaders and traditional political practices faded, as women stepped up to take on the jobs the men in the trenches had left behind, the case for denying women the vote became absurd.
Demography also played a role. As immigrants from the Western U.S. and immigrants from Scandinavia, where suffrage was a major political force, flooded into the Prairies, they brought their voting expectations with them.
Manitoba, where the first battle was won, was a microcosm of all those social forces. The province had already granted women the right to vote in municipal elections in 1887 and to vote for and serve as school trustees in 1890.
The province was home to a remarkable group of crusading women journalists, including the likes of Cora Hind, Lillian Beynon Thomas and Nellie McClung, who used their stories to advocate for social justice. In parallel, there was a whole community of powerful Icelandic women, led by Margret Benedictsson, who founded her own Icelandiclanguage weekly monthly, Freyja, which advocated for women’s rights in Canada and Europe.
Not all the leaders of the Manitoba suffrage moment were journalists. They included professional pioneers, too, such as Amelia Le Sueur Yeomans and her daughter Lillian.
Lillian became one of Canada’s first female physicians. She inspired her mother Amelia to go to medical school.
Did you ladies wash up your luncheon dishes before you came down here to ask me for the vote? If you haven’t, you’d better go home. ALBERT SIFTON, Premier of Alberta
When they started their practices in Winnipeg, the despair and poverty they witnessed convinced them that improving public health was a feminist cause.
The suffrage cause in Manitoba brought together women who were rural and urban, new immigrants and members of the Anglo elite, socialist progressives and conservative Christians. And it united women across the Prairies.
Saskatchewan suffragists drew heavily on resources from Alberta and Manitoba. And many of the women who’d battled hardest for women’s rights in Winnipeg, including McClung and the Yeomans, moved on to Edmonton and Calgary and brought their passion and fight with them.
A hundred years ago, women in Winnipeg won the right to vote. It set the dominoes falling. By 1919, Canadian women had won the right to vote in federal elections, a year before their American sisters were given the same equality. Universal suffrage didn’t arrive in Great Britain until 1928.
Not that all Canadians were in the vanguard. Quebec only allowed women to vote in provincial elections in 1940.
A hundred years on, where has our great social suffrage experiment left us?
In 1916, many had argued, with more hope than realism, that giving women the vote would change electoral politics for the better, that women would somehow tame and civilize government and give it a gentler, more noble, face.
“We do not want to vote as men. We want to vote as women — and more womanly, the better,” Henrietta Muir Edwards, one of Alberta’s original suffrage leader once said.
But any idea that the “the ladies” would somehow bring a kinder, gentler, less partisan approach to politics soon proved illusory. And while some early female politicians fought for things like dower reform and a minimum wage for working women, many were also racists and champions of eugenics who used their new political powers to undermine the human rights of some of the marginalized and vulnerable. In reality, of course, women voted and governed as people, as passionate and flawed as their husbands, son and brothers.
Suffrage failed to usher in the social utopia some of its advocates had dreamed. But hurling eloquent phrases at the multitudes gave us, instead, something far more enduring and real: fundamental democratic equality, an equality far too many now take for granted. The fact so many people today treat voting itself as a boring inconvenience, or something that just has no meaning to them, would surely astonish those who fought so fiercely for the privilege.
On this centennial, the best way to remember those suffrage rebels isn’t with a plaque or a monument or a newspaper essay. It’s with a vote.