Women Rights in Canada

Status of Women Report

Definition of Status of Women Report

The Canada social science dictionary [1] provides the following meaning of Status of Women Report: A Royal Commission Report tabled in the Canadian House of Commons in 1970. The Commission of Inquiry had been created in 1967 and, chaired by Florence Bird, held public hearings into the status of women in society and made numerous recommendations to government. The report is built on the premises of liberal theory and measures women’s status against the values of equality, individualism, and freedom.

History of Women and the Vote

The Bluebirds who voted at the 1917 federal election may have been the first Canadian women to do so with the official sanction of the electoral law behind them, but they were not the first North American women to vote.

At Confederation, all the original colonies had statutory provisions excluding women from voting,Footnote 1 and these were entrenched in section 41 of the British North America Act:

Until the Parliament of Canada otherwise provides, all laws in force in the several Provinces of the Union … shall … apply to elections of Members to serve in the House of Commons … [and] every male British Subject, aged Twenty-one Years or upwards, being a householder, shall have a vote.

The colonies (except for Lower Canada) inherited England’s common law tradition, under which women had not exercised the franchise for centuries; this was the result of convention, not statute law. (Garner, 156) In the colonies, the convention seems to have been less influential.

Only New Brunswick explicitly prohibited voting by women before 1800. There, the council banned women from voting in the colony’s inaugural election, held in 1785, but the assembly later failed to include the ban in the colony’s first electoral law, passed in 1791.

In Upper and Lower Canada, the Constitutional Act of 1791 was silent on the issue of women voting, extending the franchise to “persons” who owned property of a certain value. Not being subject to the common law, women in Lower Canada turned out to vote at several locations. Madame Rosalie Papineau, mother of Louis-Joseph, voted for her son at the 1809 election, declaring her choice “a good and faithful subject.” The women accompanying her also voted. By the 1820 election the practice had spread, and voting by women was recorded in Bedford County and Trois-Rivières, where a local citizen wrote later that two members had been elected by the “men and women of Trois-Rivières, for here women vote just as men do, without discrimination.” In Trois-Rivières, one man was even disenfranchised because he had placed his property in his wife’s name. On election day, “the unhappy man appeared at the polling place, only to find himself doubly humiliated by being refused the franchise and then sent to get his wife to the polls because she was the qualified voter in that family.” (Cleverdon, 215)

In Upper Canada, the common law tradition seems to have prevailed, since we have no written accounts of women voting or records of election-related complaints involving voting by women.

Two recorded incidents in Nova Scotia make it clear that women voted there. The first involved a disputed election in Amherst Township and the second an 1840 election in Annapolis County, where the Tories made great efforts to use women’s votes to save the riding from a Reform landslide and the Reformers countered by transporting their own female supporters to the polls. The Tory effort was in vain. The Reform women did not even have to vote – they turned out at the polls in such large numbers that the Tory women returned home without voting. (Garner, 156)

The 1840 Act of Union, uniting Upper and Lower Canada in the Province of Canada, contained no prohibition on voting by women, and neither colony had a law against it. At least seven women voted in the 1844 election in Canada West – the first recorded occurrence of a violation of the common law practice. This came to light as a result of a protest by the defeated Reform candidate that seven women had voted for his Tory opponent. When they returned to power in 1849, the Reformers used the occasion of a general consolidation of electoral laws to insert a clause excluding women from the vote.

The female franchise had already begun to contract in 1834, when Lower Canada’s legislative assembly attached a clause restricting voting by women to an act dealing with controverted elections. [2] The pretext was that polling stations had become too dangerous for women. (Violence during the 1832 election had resulted in three deaths.) The 1830s also saw the rise of ultramontanism, a conservative clergy-led movement that was to affect many aspects of Quebec society. The Imperial Reform Act of 1832, which restricted the franchise in the United Kingdom to men, may also have been influential.

Another force was at work as well: cultural politics. Events in Bedford County demonstrated that restriction of the franchise may have been less the result of hostility to women voting than of language and cultural tensions. In Bedford, the defeated candidate complained to the assembly that his opponent had been elected in part by the votes of 22 married women – in other words, husbands and wives had exercised the right to vote on the basis of the same pieces of property.

The assembly responded by resolving that the women’s votes had been illegal, but the resolution seems to have been prompted by the fact that the women’s votes had elected an English-speaking candidate at the expense of the French-speaking incumbent. This impression is reinforced by an incident eight years later, when petitioners contested the election of Andrew Stuart after an English-speaking returning officer in Québec refused to accept one woman’s vote for Stuart’s French-speaking opponent. (Garner, 157)

Whatever the source of the restriction, and regardless of the fact that the 1834 law was later struck down, increasing social conservatism seems to have done its work, and women in Lower Canada appear to have ceased voting in significant numbers. (Hamel, 227)

Between that time and Confederation, the female franchise was eroded further. Women were disenfranchised by law in Prince Edward Island in 1836, in New Brunswick in 1843 and in Nova Scotia in 1851. Two years earlier, in 1849, the Reform government of the Province of Canada had gained legislative approval for a law prohibiting women from voting: “May it be proclaimed and decreed that no woman shall have the right to vote at any election, be it for a county or riding, or for any of the aforesaid towns and cities.” This ended years of confusion about the validity of the female franchise in the Canadas.

This was the situation at Confederation: women of property in the various colonies had enjoyed the franchise (or at least had not faced legal restrictions), then lost it over a period of years and for a variety of reasons. With provincial law governing the federal franchise at Confederation, this exclusion was entrenched in the new dominion’s constitution.

Within a decade after Confederation, however, a women’s suffrage movement had begun in almost all the former colonies. The exception was Quebec, where extreme conservatism still held sway in social, political and religious matters. Elsewhere in Canada, the push for women’s suffrage had taken hold by the 1870s. The first suffrage societies were established by women seeking social, economic and political equality with men. Many were professionals, often pioneers in fields such as medicine, who had encountered discrimination first-hand. (Bacchi, 433) This decade saw the founding of the Toronto Women’s Literary Club by Dr. Emily Stowe, Canada’s first female doctor, in 1876. The club was in fact a screen for suffrage activity and thus was the country’s first suffragist organization, changing its name in 1883 to the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Association.

But soon the suffrage movement took on a different cast, attracting men and women of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon origins, most of whom belonged to the educated urban middle class – professionals, clergymen, a few reform-minded businessmen and their wives. (Bacchi, 433) These suffragists had a broad social reform agenda, one that embraced workplace safety, public health, child labour, prohibition of the production and sale of alcohol, prostitution, the “Canadianization” of immigrants as well as votes for women. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), for example, became a force in the suffrage movement, convinced that if women had the vote, temperance would be assured.[3]

Similarly, social reformers intent on combatting the evils of industrialization and the urbanization that accompanied it – abuse of alcohol, prostitution, venereal disease, neglect of children – joined the suffrage movement with the goal of bolstering the social order with what might now be called “family values.” Giving women the vote would double the family’s representation and extend maternal influence into the political sphere.

In Quebec, the picture was different. As the suffrage movement elsewhere in Canada was taking its first steps, Quebec moved to prohibit women voting in municipal elections and amend the Civil Code to make women legally “incapable” – of owning property, of inheriting an estate and certainly of voting. Advocates of women’s rights in that province therefore focused more on gaining legal reforms and equality of opportunity in education than on the vote. It was not until the 1930s that the focus shifted to women’s suffrage. Also apparent was the influence of conservative clergy and nationalists who objected to the Anglo-Saxon origins of the suffrage movement.

In the 1880s, debate about women’s suffrage became linked with provincial autonomy issues. Until 1885, under the terms of the British North America Act, the provinces determined who was eligible to vote in federal elections. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald changed that with the Electoral Franchise Act of 1885, whose passage he considered the greatest triumph of his life. (Stewart, 3) In consolidating control of the franchise at the federal level, Macdonald even included a clause giving propertied widows and single women the vote, though he later withdrew it: apparently it had been a sacrificial lamb never intended to remain in the final version of the law. Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government returned the federal franchise to provincial control with a new electoral law in 1898. The focus of suffragist activity therefore shifted to provincial governments and legislatures, where it remained for the next two decades.

By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the women’s suffrage movement was well underway, with organizations active in the Western provinces, Ontario and the Maritimes. The municipal franchise was extended gradually; by 1900, most women property owners across the country could vote in municipal elections.

In addition, bills to give women the vote had been introduced in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and British Columbia, though none was successful. Between 1885 and 1893, and again between 1905 and 1916, a bill introduced annually in the Ontario legislature to give women the vote provoked laughter and derision. Bills were also introduced in the New Brunswick legislature in 1886, 1894, 1895, 1897, 1899 and 1909; all were defeated (some by only a narrow margin) or allowed to die on the Order Paper. Women presenting petitions at the time the 1909 bill was introduced were greeted by insults, whistles and jeers from MLAs in the corridors, who asked the sergeant-at-arms to ring the division bells until the women left the building.

To counter these attitudes, Canada’s suffragists relied on petitions to provincial governments – sometimes containing as many as 100,000 names; on lecture tours and speaking engagements; on meetings with politicians; and on public meetings and events, such as mock parliaments (see box below). The confrontational tactics adopted by British and American campaigners for women’s suffrage had no counterpart in Canada.

The suffragists were well organized, willing to buck social convention and skilful at enlisting the help of influential organizations, particularly in the West, where they gained the support of the United Farmers’ Association of Alberta and the Grain Growers Association. As has been the case with other social issues in Canada, the Western provinces led the way in enfranchising women. Manitoba was the first, extending the provincial franchise to women in January 1916. Saskatchewan and Alberta followed suit in March and April respectively. The next year, 1917, Ontario women got the vote in February and British Columbia women in April. Also that year, Louise McKinney of Alberta, a temperance and women’s rights advocate, became the first woman elected to a Canadian legislature.

This broadening of the provincial franchise, coupled with extension of the franchise to propertied women in municipal elections, created pressure for change at the federal level. But the immediate impetus was political, and women’s first access to the federal franchise was almost accidental. On the eve of the 1917 general election, the government of Sir Robert Borden faced a complicated situation: women in all provinces from British Columbia to Ontario had the vote by virtue of provincial electoral law; women living east of the Ontario/Quebec border did not. Without some standardization of the franchise, ridings in Ontario and the West would have twice as many electors as those in Quebec and the Maritimes.

The temporary solution that presented itself had less to do with women’s rights than with the pressing political issue facing Borden’s government: conscription. As described earlier in this chapter, Parliament extended the franchise through two new laws in a transparent effort to expand the pro-conscription ranks. The Military Voters Act, intended to enfranchise soldiers under the age of 21, inadvertently benefited women as well, so that the Bluebirds – military nurses serving in the war effort – became the first Canadian women to exercise the right to vote in a federal election.

The second law, the War-time Elections Act, gave the vote to close female relatives of people serving in the armed forces (swelling the electoral lists by some 500,000 names), but it also effectively withdrew the vote from women who would otherwise have had it by virtue of provincial law but did not have a relative in the armed forces. This situation would not be tolerated for long.

The following year, Borden’s re-elected government moved to correct the situation, introducing a bill to provide for universal female suffrage on March 21, 1918. Again, the bill was not universally welcomed. Declared MP Jean-Joseph Denis, “I say that the Holy Scripture, theology, ancient philosophy, Christian philosophy, history, anatomy, physiology, political economy, and feminine psychology all seem to indicate that the place of women in this world is not amid the strife of the political arena, but in her home.” (Debates April 11, 1918; 643) Facing strong opposition, Borden compromised by stipulating in the bill that women electors would have to meet the same requirements as men – for example, property requirements where they existed. The compromise worked, and the Act to confer the Electoral Franchise upon Women received royal assent on May 24, 1918. A 1919 law gave women the right to be candidates in federal elections.

Women’s suffrage was “in the tide,” as Nellie McClung told Alberta legislators in 1915. The “fresh wind” of change felt by McClung in Alberta had now swept across the land. Nova Scotia women gained the provincial franchise in 1918.

Legislation in 1920 provided universal access to the vote without reference to property ownership or other exclusionary requirements – age and citizenship remained the only criteria. Provincial control of the federal franchise was now a thing of the past. The general election of 1921 was the first open to all Canadians, men and women, over the age of 21. Agnes Macphail, the first female member of Parliament, won a seat at that election.

Source: “A History of the Vote in Canada”(Ottawa, Office of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, 2007)

The Suffrage Movement in Canada

For more information on the Suffragette Movement in the world, please see here. In relation to the British Suffrage Movement, in Britain, the woman -suffrage movement roughly paralleled that of the United States.

The Suffrage in this Encyclopedia of Canadian Laws is covered here, describing how, at the beginnings of the suffrage movement in Canada, the movement can be dated to the founding of the Toronto Women’s Literary Society in 1877.

Nellie McClung was a women’s rights activist who helped found the Manitoba Political Equality League in 1912 and led the movement to enfranchise Canadian women. In 1916, Manitoba women were the first to gain the right to vote in provincial elections. Women gained the right to vote in 1918 at the federal level.

Resources

See Also

• Elections
• Vote
• Suffrage

Notes and References

1. Drislane, R., & Parkinson, G. (2016). (Concept of) Status of Women Report. Online dictionary of the social sciences. Open University of Canada
2. The law was later overturned by colonial authorities in London for reasons unrelated to women’s right to vote.
3. The first Canadian section of the WCTU was founded by Laetitia Youmans at Picton, Ontario, in 1874.

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This entry was last updated: July 10, 2017