The history of feminism in Canada has been a gradual struggle aimed at establishing equal rights. The history of Canadian feminism, like modern Western feminism in other countries, has been divided by scholars into four "waves", each describing a period of intense activism and social change. The use of "waves" has been critiqued for its failure to include feminist activism of Aboriginal and Québécois women who organized for changes in their own communities as well as for larger social change.
Waves of Canadian feminism
First wave
The first wave of feminism in Canada occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This early activism was focused on increasing women's role in public life, with goals including women's suffrage, increased property rights, increased access to education, and recognition as "persons" under the law. This early iteration of Canadian feminism was largely based in maternal feminism: the idea that women are natural caregivers and "mothers of the nation" who should participate in public life because of their perceived propensity for decisions that will result in good care of society. In this view, women were seen to be a civilizing force on society, which was a significant part of women's engagement in missionary work and in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
The first wave in Canada was different in Québec. Although the first wave was developed at an earlier time, many women in Québec had to wait until April 1940 for their right to vote and run in elections.
Canadian women's social, political, and cultural roles and influence changed dramatically during WWII. Women had taken over many of the missing roles of men while they were off at war. Women worked in factories, took over farms, and proved their importance in society.
Early organizing and Activism
Religion was an important factor in the early stages of the Canadian women's movement. Some of the earliest groups of organized women came together for a religious purpose. When women were rejected as missionaries by their Churches and missionary societies, they started their own missionary societies and raised funds to send female missionaries abroad. Some of them raised enough to train some of their missionaries as teachers or doctors.
The first of these missionary societies was founded in Canso, Nova Scotia in 1870 by a group of Baptist women inspired by Hannah Norris, a teacher who wanted to be a missionary. Norris asked the women in her Church for help when her application to the Baptist Foreign Mission Board was rejected. They formed their own missionary society, and soon there were Presbyterian, Methodist, and Anglican women missionary societies forming across the western provinces, Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritimes. These new societies not only enabled women to work as missionaries, but they also gave women the opportunity to manage the funding, training, and employment of female missionaries in foreign countries.
Women's religious organizing was also a means through which women could advocate social change. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, for example, was formed in 1874 by Letitia Youmans of Picton, Ontario, in order to raise awareness of the negative consequences of alcohol consumption on society, and ultimately to ban alcohol and promote evangelical family values. Inspired by its American counterpart, the WCTU grew to become one of the first organizations to fight for suffrage while also being a training ground for future suffrage leaders. The Hebrew Ladies Sewing Circle (founded 1860) also worked to promote social change through religion-inspired organizing. It was organized in Toronto in 1906 by Ida Siegel to provide girls in their community training in sewing skills and as a response to the conversion attempts of Jewish youth by Protestant Evangelicals. It grew to establish a Jewish Endeavour Sewing School where they taught girls sewing, Jewish religion and history. in Toronto grew to establish a Jewish Endeavour Sewing School where they taught girls sewing, Jewish religion and history. Other examples include the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) which provided (and continues to provide) services such as reception centres, shelters, and educational programs for single working class women along with The Girls’ Friendly Society (Anglican-based), the Catholic Women's League, and the Grey Nuns of Montreal who provided daycare centres for working women.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women in Canada were also making inroads into various professions including teaching, journalism, social work, and public health. Grace Annie Lockhart became the first woman in the British Empire to receive a bachelor's degree, providing clear evidence of the justice of women's claim to full rights in the field of higher education. Advances included the establishment of a Women's Medical College in Toronto (and in Kingston, Ontario) in 1883, attributed in part to the persistence of Emily Stowe, the first female doctor to practice in Canada. Stowe's daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school.
Women also established and became involved with organizations to advance women's rights, including suffrage. In 1893, the National Council of Women of Canada was formed which was designed to bring together representatives of different women's groups across Canada, providing a network for women to communicate their concerns and ideas. When they endorsed suffrage, in 1910, the NCWC did so on the basis that women had an indispensable role in society which should give them the right to participate in public life by electing their government, in keeping with the maternal feminism prevalent in the period.
During World War I, women took on not only traditionally feminine jobs, but also heavy work such as in munitions factories. This changed role of women increased women's political prominence, and issues such as women's suffrage were raised.
During the 1920s, women adventurers pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior for women. From 1922 until 1929, Aloha Wanderwell (born in Canada) became the first woman to travel around the world in a car, beginning her journey at the age of 16.
Women's right to vote in Canada
Organizing around women's suffrage in Canada peaked in the mid-1910s. Various franchise clubs were formed, and in Ontario, the Toronto Women's Literary Club was established in 1876 as a guise for suffrage activities, though by 1883 it was renamed the Toronto Women's Suffrage Association. Compared to other English speaking industrialized countries, Canada's suffrage movement gained success rather easily, and without violence. The tactics adopted by the movement in order to bring about reform included collecting petitions, staging mock parliaments and selling postcards.
Widows and unmarried women were granted the right to vote in municipal elections in Ontario in 1884. Such limited franchises were extended in other provinces at the end of the 19th century, but bills to enfranchise women in provincial elections failed to pass in any province until Manitoba, and Saskatchewan finally succeeded in early 1916. Alberta followed the same year and Emily Murphy became the first woman magistrate not just in Canada, but the entire British Empire. At the federal level it was a two step process. On September 20, 1917, women gained a limited right to vote: According to the Parliament of Canada website, the Military Voters Act established that "women who are British subjects and have close relatives in the armed forces can vote on behalf of their male relatives, in federal elections." About a year and a quarter later, at the beginning of 1919, the right to vote was extended to all women in the Act to confer the Electoral Franchise upon Women. The remaining provinces quickly followed suit, except for Quebec, which did not do so until 1940. Agnes Macphail became the first woman elected to Parliament in 1921.
Large numbers of women continued for many years to be excluded from the right to vote, based on race or indigeneity. British Columbia, for example, denied persons of Asian, Indian (Southeast Asian), and Indigenous origin the rights to universal adult suffrage that came about with the Dominion Elections Act of 1920.
Province Date of Women's Suffrage Date of Women's Ability to Hold OfficeManitobaJanuary 28, 1916January 28, 1916SaskatchewanMarch 14, 1916March 14, 1916AlbertaApril 19, 1916April 19, 1916British ColumbiaApril 5, 1917April 5, 1917OntarioApril 12, 1917April 24, 1919Nova ScotiaApril 26, 1918April 26, 1918New BrunswickApril 17, 1919March 9, 1934Prince Edward IslandMay 3, 1922May 3, 1922NewfoundlandApril 13, 1925April 13, 1925QuebecApril 25, 1940April 25, 1940Dominion of Canada (federal government)Relatives of individuals in the armed forces - September 20, 1917. All female British subjects in Canada, not included under racial or Indigenous exclusions - May 24, 1918July 7, 1919
Women ruled legally to be "persons"
The Famous Five were a group of five women from Alberta who wanted courts to determine women were considered to be "persons" for the purposes of being called to the Senate under section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, the main provision of Canada's constitution.Section 24 of the Constitution Act, 1867 provided that "The Governor General shall from Time to Time, in the Queen’s Name, by Instrument under the Great Seal of Canada, summon qualified Persons to the Senate." The Senate was the body which at that time approved divorces in some provinces of Canada, among other decisions important to women. The Famous Five petitioned the Federal Cabinet to refer this issue to the Supreme Court. After some debate, the Cabinet did so. The Supreme Court, interpreting the Act in light of the times in which it was written, ruled in 1928 that women were not "persons" for the purposes of section 24 and could not be appointed to the Senate.
The five women, led by Emily Murphy, appealed the case to the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council, at that time the highest court of appeal for the British Empire. In 1929, the five Lords of the Committee ruled unanimously that "the word ‘persons' in Section 24 includes both the male and female sex". They called the earlier interpretation "a relic of days more barbarous than ours".
Eastview Birth Control Trial The Eastview Birth Control Trial of 1936–1937 was the first successful legal challenge to the dissemination of information and the possession of materials relating to birth control being illegal in Canada, and it marked the beginning of a shift in Canadian society's acceptance of such practices.McLaren, Angus and Arlene Tigar McLaren. The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880–1980. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986, pp. 85–87. In September 1936, Dorothea Palmer was arrested in Eastview (now Vanier, Ontario), and charged with possessing materials and pamphlets related to birth control, then highly illegal under Canadian law. As she was working for the Kitchener-based Parents' Information Bureau (PIB), her arrest could have led to the collapse of the organization and as many as two years' imprisonment for Palmer. However, the PIB was the brainchild of industrialist A. R. Kaufman, a eugenically-minded industrialist whose support eventually saw Palmer's charges dropped. The trial lasted from September 1936 to March 1937.Beswick, Lorne. Birth Control or Red Regime': Toronto, Eugenics and the Eastview Birth Control Trial", MA Thesis: Queen's University, 2011, p. 2