Women's Rights and Lives, 1914–1929

"Never retract, never explain, never apologize"

That was a motto often linked to Nellie McClung, a Manitoba and Alberta writer and one of Canada's most famous campaigners for women's rights. In 1914, women could not vote in any Canadian province or federally, could not sit in the Senate, and in most provinces, a married woman had few rights over property or her children. By 1929, much had changed, and much had not. This lesson covers expectation B3.3: developments in the rights and lives of women.

War work changes minds

You learned that women worked in munitions factories, offices, farms and as nursing sisters during the war. Women's organizations also raised huge sums for the war effort. Suffragists argued: if women can do all this for the country, how can they be denied a voice in governing it? Many men who had opposed women's suffrage changed their minds.

After the war, many women were expected to leave paid work, especially married women (the federal civil service, for example, generally did not keep women on after marriage). But the number of single women in paid jobs kept rising: as clerks, typists, telephone operators, sales clerks, teachers and nurses, as well as in factories and domestic service. Their wages were usually much lower than men's. Manitoba and British Columbia passed the first minimum wage laws for women in 1918, and several provinces created mothers' allowances for widows and other mothers raising children alone (Manitoba 1916, Ontario 1920).

Winning the vote

• Provinces: Manitoba was first, in January 1916, followed by Saskatchewan and Alberta (1916), British Columbia and Ontario (1917), Nova Scotia (1918), New Brunswick (1919) and Prince Edward Island (1922). Quebec women did not win the provincial vote until 1940, after a long campaign led by women such as Thérèse Casgrain and Idola Saint-Jean.
• Federal: in 1917 the Military Voters Act let nursing sisters vote, and the Wartime Elections Act gave the vote to women relatives of soldiers. In 1918, Parliament gave the federal vote to most women who were British subjects aged 21 or over, starting in 1919. In 1919 women won the right to run for Parliament.
• Firsts: Louise McKinney and Roberta MacAdams were elected to the Alberta legislature in 1917, the first women elected to a legislature in the British Empire. Agnes Macphail became the first woman elected to the House of Commons, in 1921.
• Who was still left out? The vote was not won by "all women". Many women of Chinese, Japanese and South Asian origin were excluded, because federal voting depended in part on provincial lists, and British Columbia barred Asian Canadians. Status First Nations women and men could not vote federally without giving up their status until 1960. Inuit were not given the federal vote until 1950.

The Persons Case (1927–1929)

The British North America Act said that qualified "persons" could be appointed to the Senate. For years, governments argued that "persons" meant only men. Emily Murphy, a magistrate in Edmonton, organized four other Alberta women, Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Muir Edwards, to ask the courts. In April 1928 the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not "persons" for this purpose. The women appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Britain, then Canada's highest court. On 18 October 1929, it ruled that women were persons. Lord Sankey wrote that the constitution was "a living tree capable of growth and expansion", an idea Canadian courts still use. In 1930, Cairine Wilson became the first woman appointed to the Senate.

Heroes with flaws

Historians honour the Famous Five's achievement, and they point out that some of them, including Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung, promoted racist ideas about immigrants and supported eugenics. Alberta's Sexual Sterilization Act (1928) allowed people judged "unfit", disproportionately poor people, people with disabilities and later Indigenous people, to be sterilized without proper consent. Recognizing both sides of these women is a good example of historical perspective: we can understand their context and still judge their views as wrong.

Many women, many experiences

• French-Canadian women: in Quebec, the Civil Code gave married women very limited legal rights. Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie wrote a popular guide to women's legal rights, co-founded the Fédération nationale Saint-Jean-Baptiste (1907), and in 1922 helped form a committee to campaign for Quebec women's suffrage.
• First Nations women: under the Indian Act, a First Nations woman who married a man without Indian status lost her own status. And when a husband was enfranchised, for example a veteran who gave up his status to gain the rights other veterans had, his wife and children lost their status too, often without being asked. They could lose their right to live in their community and its membership. These rules were not changed until 1985.
• Inuit women: their skills in preparing skins and sewing warm clothing were essential to Arctic whaling crews and to the fur trade economy.
• Black women: the Black Cross Nurses, part of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), organized in places such as Toronto, Edmonton and Sydney, Nova Scotia, from the early 1920s: they visited sick members, taught first aid and hygiene, and supported new mothers, building community where public services often excluded Black Canadians.
• Changing social mores: young urban women had more freedom: shorter skirts, cars, movies, dance halls and sports (the Ladies Ontario Hockey Association, the Edmonton Grads, the 1928 Olympians). A 1925 federal law let wives divorce husbands on the same grounds as husbands could divorce wives.