Women and the Vote

The war created a favorable environment for the final phase of the struggle for womens suffrage at the federal level. Women in early nineteenth-century British North America sometimes had access to the franchise because they held property or capital, but all the colonies by midcentury had passed legislation to restrict the vote to property-owning males. At the time of Confederation, only about one-fifth of Canadas males could vote. The struggle for female suffrage in Canada, part of an international impulse that included Britain and the United States, was linked to womens improved access to higher education and their activity in reform issues. After 1875 the Womens Christian Temperance Union, for example, targeted the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, but it also advocated womens suffrage and other reforms. The Toronto Womens Literary Club, formed about the same time by Dr. Emily Stowe, was really a forum for discussing womens suffrage. Canadian women made the greatest suffrage inroads in the prairies during World War I. Due to the energies of articulate suffrage champions such as Nellie McClung, a Manitoban writer, the movement gained momentum in the 1910s. In 1916 Manitoba became the first province to open the franchise to women, followed quickly by the other western provinces. Ontario (1917), Nova Scotia (1918), New Brunswick (1919), and Prince Edward Island (1922) took the western provinces lead. The combined impact of opening the franchise at the provincial level, coupled with the statutes passed by the Conservative government to ensure a Union victory in 1917, led to the national franchise for women in 1918. The province of Quebec, which no doubt responded according to its traditions and

the conservative power of the Roman Catholic church, resisted the progressive impulse; it denied women the right to vote provincially until 1940. The federal election of 1921 witnessed Canadas first elected female member of Parliament, Agnes Macphail, an Ontario schoolteacher who endorsed improved conditions for farmers. Although women broke the suffrage barrier in most of the country by the 1920s, they continued to be a small minority of the House of Commons, the Senate, and other elected and appointed offices (see A Case for Womens Suffrage in the Documents section).