Excerpts from

‘Ever a Crusader’: Nellie McClung, First-Wave Feminist

Veronica Strong-Boag

‘Never retract, never explain, never apologize-get the thing done and let them howl.’ Such were the fighting words of Nellie Letitia Mooney McClung (1873-1951), who captured the imagination of her contemporaries and who in many ways embodied Canadian feminism in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Nellie McClung was an activist: a prominent crusader in the successful drives for female enfranchisement in Manitoba and Alberta, a nationally known feminist and social reformer, an MLA in Alberta. An unpaid contributor to a host of good causes, she belonged to the first generation of female volunteers to have its expertise officially acknowledged and rewarded. As a representative of Canadian women, she was invited to the Canadian War Conference of 1918 and to the World Ecumenical Conference in 1921. Fifteen years later, she took her scat as the first female member of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Board of Governors and, in 1938, as a Canadian delegate to the League of Nations. Working with the Canadian Women’s Press Club and the Canadian Authors’ Association, she also commanded attention as a strong exponent of cultural nationalism. Sixteen books and numerous articles made her one of Canada’s best-known authors. Her fourth book, In Times Like These (1915), with its faith in women’s power for good, survives as a classic formulation of the feminist position of her day. Indeed its potent mixture of wit, satire, good humour, and down-to-earth common sense is hard to match among popular appeals from first-wave feminists anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Nellie McClung was born Nellie Letitia Mooney in 1873 in Grey County, Ontario, and in 1880 with her family joined the great rush to Manitoba’s wheat fields. Her stance towards life would be forever marked by her Scots mother’s strong sense of personal duty, by her Irish father’s storytelling abilities, and by her family’s commitment to the positive values of ruralism and hard work. During her lifetime, Canada was experiencing major upheavals, to which McClung, like many of her contemporaries, responded both as a citizen and as a concerned woman. The largely unregulated growth of the commercial and industrial sectors exacerbated problems of labour relations and transformed the conditions for earning a livelihood. On the land, the idealized family farm confronted new marketing and capitalization requirements that challenged its very survival. Rural emigration combined with immigration, increasingly from nations new to the Canadian ethnic mix, crowded the cities, multiplying problems to which there were no easy solutions.

These changes engulfed women as well as men. With the gradual but steady decline in importance of domestic production, many more women had to labour outside the home. The emergence of new employments in factories, offices, and shops offered not only opportunities to aid shaky family finances, but also the prospect of independence from oppressive authority within the family. The ultimate attraction, of course, for young women seeking work, whether in the new occupations or in traditional domestic service, was a living wage. Yet their limited range of options and their marginally skilled status increased the vulnerability of such workers in a labour market that treated them as a readily exploitable resource...2

Contemporaries were acutely conscious of distress within the confines of the patriarchal family The consequences for women appeared most visibly in desertions, alcoholism, appropriation of female wages and property, and domestic violence. Yet solutions for women facing bad marriages were far from obvious. Not only did they face social opprobrium for their ‘failure’ as wives, but when divorced or deserted they had little hope of getting a fair share of their husbands’ estate or any reasonable support for the children of the marriage. Even their right to child custody in preference to a delinquent father could not be taken for granted. At the same time, they and their daughters were routinely excluded from much of the training and schooling that gave entry to the better-paying craft and white-collar jobs and professions offering some prospect of independence. Confronted with the threats to their domestic position and with limited alternatives outside the household, many women became intensely conscious of their vulnerability and the need to do something about it.

Right from the beginning, the campaign to better the position of their sex was led by middle-class women. Their perspective and views on proper behaviour and standards infused the feminist movement, making it at times intolerant of ethnic, racial, and class diversity and often unwilling to confront profound inequities in capitalist society.4 Feminist leaders were often supportive of the European imperial project that defined other peoples as subjects for elimination, assimilation, or improvement. Canadian Native women were among its many victims. Imperfect as it was, however, the feminist vision of a more equitable future challenged some fundamental structures in a society where male authority was largely unquestioned. Lacking their wealthier sisters’ resources, working-class women concentrated instead on the demands of day-to-day survival….

Women whose temperament and circumstances permitted a feminist analysis soon turned to political solutions. This was hardly surprising. The increasing complexity of the Canadian economy with markets, corporations, and elites taking on regional or national dimensions appeared to demand political solutions on a similar scale. More than ever before, citizens of the late nineteenth century looked to legislative means rather than custom or individual action to regulate the activities of many sectors, public and private, of Canadian life. This meant that those who wanted some say in changing the terms on which life was conducted had to have access to electoral bodies-municipal, provincial, or national-both as voters and as elected officials. The absence of such power had meant little when most people’s lives went relatively untouched by governments but, in the last half of the nineteenth century, this situation was changing. The achievement of voting rights by the vast majority of males also highlighted, as never before, women’s special predicament and contributed to strengthening their sense of group identity.6 As a result, soon after Confederation, women began to focus their energies on enfranchisement as the enabling means to correct the many abuses and injustices they saw around them.

Feminists demanded the vote on two grounds. The first was special interest. Women themselves, like virtually everyone in Canadian society, identified their sex with a maternal role. A re-invigorated motherhood, the natural occupation for virtually all women, could serve as a buttress against all the destabilizing elements in Canada. just as the rich and the regions were to be represented and protected in the make-up of the Canadian Senate, women demanded that their distinctive concerns and needs be granted direct input into the legislative system. Vote in hand, they would be able to maximize their influence for good. Feminists also claimed the franchise on the basis of natural justice. Every human being, regardless of sex, had the right to participate in government to the fullest extent of his or her abilities. Women’s suffrage was no more or less than the natural culmination of democracy.

The implications of this claim to rights beyond the domestic sphere were enormous, Female enfranchisement, particularly by challenging the male monopoly on the public arena 7 and making women’s claim to full citizenship, called into question the appropriateness of women’s subordinate position within the patriarchal family itself. With their demand for the vote, women were suggesting that they should have a direct relationship to the state as individuals rather than one mediated through their fathers or husbands. As voters, women gained the potential to use the state to alter the balance of power between the sexes in the home and the world at large. Behind a political agenda that included demands for better married women’s property acts, women’s right to their own wages, equal guardianship of children and equal divorce, better-paying jobs with improved working conditions, access to institutions of higher learning, and protection of women from alcohol abuse among men lay a powerful threat to male supremacy.

At first women were largely alone in their insistence on the vote and in their sense of the urgent need for reforms for their sex. Their first assaults on an inequitable system brought few active male allies. In 1876 Dr Emily Howard Stowe founded the first Canadian suffrage organization, the Toronto Women’s Literary Club, but not until 1883 were its members sure enough of their ability to withstand the deeply ingrained misogyny of their society to ‘come out’ as the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Club.8 By organizing parades and study groups, by flooding the Ontario legislature with suffrage petitions, this band of middle-class women established the pattern for other feminist campaigns across the country.9

Only in the 1890s did feminists begin to find general support from liberally minded men and non-feminist women who rallied to them not so much because of any enthusiasm for women’s rights but more out of a general interest in community betterment. The emergence of a major middle-class progressive movement in the last years of the nineteenth century created an environment in which the suffrage campaign could flourish, and it forced reluctant governments to pay heed to their female citizens. Like the feminists who preceded them, the new reformers concentrated on transforming the state in order to bring its full weight against the abuse of private power, whether it be in unregulated industry, in an unmanageable urban environment, or in the nation’s homes. In the course of their investigations, they repeatedly encountered women’s special plight. The identification of women as the particular victims of social disarray helped legitimize the older feminist analysis and cement a feminist-reform alliance. The acceptance of women as allies in public reform movements, and in public life generally, in this period was based more on the belief in women’s higher morality than on any abstract notion of justice, but the latter rationale never completely disappeared from the feminist agenda. Nellie McClung represents that generation of women who were active in both the reform and the feminist communities. As such, she was in the mainstream of turn-of-the-century feminism,

Canada’s reform and feminist communities were close-knit. An intense network of friendships and alliances maintained energy and spurred enthusiasm. Winnipeg was one centre of reform agitation, and women like Nellie McClung, Francis Beynon, and Cora Hind were enthusiastic apostles of a fairer world.10 The crusades of such progressive women -- temperance, urban renewal, social welfare, social purity, female suffrage -- were undertaken while the Social Gospel of the Protestant churches was prompting the entire society to self-examination. 1 1 When Nellie McClung pitched in to help the Methodist minister, later leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, J.S. Woodsworth, in Winnipeg’s All Peoples Mission, she embodied suffragists’ links with a semi-evangelical, nation-wide crusade to purge Canadian society of its immoralities and to make it a beacon to the rest of the world. Like many other feminists, McClung drew on a deep religious faith to help sustain her optimistic liberalism.

Women’s special capacity for nurture was also central to McClungs feminism…. She regarded successful motherhood as the fulfilment of her sex. Like other feminists, however, she took the logic of women’s particular nature further than conservatives could tolerate. Women must emerge from the home to use the state to protect their interests and thus serve and save humanity McClung again parted company with conservatives in laying claim to the full inheritance of liberal democracy Feminism was, as she put it, the demand for ‘plain, common justice’ or equal rights.13 The distinction between maternal and egalitarian arguments was not always spelled out in McClung’s thinking or in that of many of her contemporaries. For this hard-pressed generation, politics was a pragmatic exercise: the niceties of theory dissolved before the need to win supporters. Defenders of male prerogatives appreciated, however, that feminism, empowered by such beliefs, constituted a critical threat to patriarchal authority

In the forays for equal rights, the ebullient McClung was in her element. Well known as the author of the best seller Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), and already active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the 38-year-old gravitated towards progressive circles when her husband, a pharmacist turned insurance agent, was transferred to Winnipeg in 1911. By this time, British and American feminists were making frequent lecture tours across the continent, and the visit of England’s militant suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst to Winnipeg in 1912 strengthened McClung’s long-felt resolve to do something for her sex.

That same year she joined the Winnipeg Political Equality League, an association acknowledged as ‘one of the most enterprising and successful suffrage organizations in the Dominion’. 14 An outspoken critic of barriers to women’s economic equality, the League had taken up the cause of female wage earners in the city To demonstrate the urgent need for state supervision, McClung led Manitoba s Premier Rodmond Roblin through city sweatshops employing large numbers of women. His procrastination in acting on conditions hastened McClung’s political quickening. Roblin’s assertion that ‘nice women’ did not want the franchise brought a characteristic retort from the woman who would be the most energetic stump speaker against him in the next election: ‘By nice women ... you probably mean selfish women who have no more thought for the underprivileged, overworked women than a pussycat in a sunny window for the starving kitten in the street. Now in that sense I am not a nice woman for I do care.’15

Rodmond Roblin’s resistance to polite female instruction spurred the suffrage forces. Unfortunately for Roblin, McClung had dimensions unforeseen by the government apologist, the Winnipeg Telegram, when it dismissed her as a pesky mosquito. Showing better judgement, the provincial Liberals endorsed women’s suffrage, thereby acquiring an outstanding campaigner. To publicize their case, the Winnipeg suffragists presented ‘The Women’s Parliament’ in January 1914. This tactic, in which women replaced male legislators and men petitioned women for the vote, was an old feminist manoeuvre, previously employed in Toronto and Vancouver. Manitoba feminists had been rebuffed in another suffrage petition just before they restaged this farce in Winnipeg, the premier had suggested that female sensibilities would be offended by the sordidness of politics. Like many anti-suffrage arguments, this stance was, at best, paradoxical. If women were inherently purer, as was implied, they might be the saviours rather than the victims of the electoral system. Nellie McClung had listened particularly intently to Premier Roblin. To the great entertainment of all, she mimicked and mocked his presentation for three packed performances of the ‘The Women’s Parliament’. The implications of feminists’ claim to public power were dramatically revealed as upsetting the ‘normal’ order in which women petitioned and men stood in authority One of Nellie’s novels, Purple Springs (1921), which dramatizes the incident of ‘The Women’s Parliament’, leaves readers with little doubt that women’s direct access to the state would better their situation and the nation’s in general. During the provincial election campaign of June 1914, McClung addressed at least a hundred meetings for the Liberals. The Conservative party retained power with a reduced majority, but it had not lost its nemesis: in the summer of 1915 McClung returned from her new home in Edmonton to help topple Roblin’s scandal-ridden Tories.

In Edmonton she joined forces with another prominent feminist, Emily Murphy, or Janey Canuck’ as her pen name identified her.16 Murphy had been instrumental in the passage of the province’s Married Women’s Relief Act of 1910 assuring wives of certain, albeit limited, inheritance rights, and she remained in the forefront of the crusade to better women’s legal position until her death in 1933. Her friendship provided Nellie with the basis of a feminist support network much like the one she had known in Winnipeg. The shift westward was all the more auspicious since the suffrage campaign in Alberta never met the same kind of bitter opposition it faced in Manitoba. The Liberal government was sympathetic to many reform causes and, as an ally of the most powerful organization in the province, the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), McClung’s reception by legislators was cordial.

Like many feminists and progressive reformers, including farm activists, McClung favoured ending the party system. Long years of obstruction from governments of all persuasions had made her cynical about the cronyism and favourtrading of political parties. Nevertheless, like most western feminists, McClung also opposed the creation of a purely women’s party.17 Instead she envisioned a great body of independent, intelligent women who would judge political issues solely on the basis of the public interest. Standing virtuously above political strife, but holding the balance of political power, women would be decisive in shaping the policies of every party Unlike many suffragists in central Canada, the heart of ‘separatist’ politics, Prairie activists like McClung were optimistic about the potential for influencing male politicians, especially those in the organized farm movement. This role depended heavily, however, on women maintaining their reputation for superior moral judgement. Without this they could easily become but one more interest group striving for political favours.

McClung’s activities were not confined to the West. She was on call to feminist forces anywhere. If the movement had a national voice, it was hers. One observer wrote,

No Canadian woman has spoken to both parts of the Dominion as she has

spoken. Women from Great Britain have come to Canada to advocate the

cause of suffrage, but their words have not exactly fitted the case on this

side of the water. The need was for the awakening of consciousness of

reform from within, and not so much for advice from without. 18

McClung herself, however, was also intensely aware of feminism’s international character. She frequently cited feminists in the United States and Great Britain. On her visits to these countries she shared in the friendships that made feminism broader than any national community She also felt considerable sympathy for British militants like Emmeline Pankhurst, but she retained her faith in the efficacy of more peaceful tactics in the New World. Her comic sense, acerbic wit, and close relationships with other women armed her well for dealing with her Canadian opponents. Confident of mass support in her own region, she was never tempted for too long beyond the impulse to use her umbrella on the obdurate Roblin.

The First World War was important in broadening the appeal of woman suffrage. Manpower shortages highlighted the extent of female employment, making the image of the sheltered female more obviously inapplicable to Canadian circumstances. The Union government, indebted for the support of the female relatives of military personnel after the Wartime Elections Act of 1917, and anxious to increase its popularity, was especially vulnerable to feminist demands. At the same time, women’s patriotic work gave governments a ready justification for reversing their position. Manitoba became the first full suffrage province in January 1916, closely followed by Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia in the same year. Ontario joined them in 1917, and by 1918 Nova Scotia and the Dominion government had espoused the widened franchise. New Brunswick’s women had to wait for the provincial vote until 1919, Prince Edward Island’s until 1922, and Quebec’s until 1940.

While she campaigned for the franchise, McClung, the mother of a son serving overseas, also worked for the Canadian Red Cross and the Patriotic Fund. Armistice and enfranchisement freed her to test the results of such labours. In 1921 she ran for the Alberta legislature as a Liberal, adopting that label more out of a sense of gratitude for the conferral of suffrage than any strong sense of partisanship. The entry of eight female candidates was a noteworthy feature of the campaign. They covered the political spectrum, including one Conservative, two United Farmers of Alberta members, one Independent, one Socialist, one Labour candidate, and two Liberals. One of the latter was Edmonton’s Nellie McClung. Like the other women, she campaigned for the retention of prohibition as one sure way of protecting women and their children from male abuse. Her defence of the Liberal record brought her success, but elsewhere the tide ran strongly against the government. When the count was in, the UFA held 29 seats, the Liberals 14, Labour 4, Independents 3, and Conservatives 1.19

Unlike Agnes Macphail, the federal parliamentarian elected from Grey County for the United Farmers of Ontario in 1921,20 McClung was not the only successful woman candidate in Alberta. She was not even the most powerful. This title fell to Irene Marryat ParIby, the former president of the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA) who swept her rural constituency.21 The results of the 1921 election set the character of McClung’s five-year term in the provincial legislature. As a parliamentary novice she could not easily overcome the disadvantages facing herself and her party Dispirited by their losses, the Liberals lost the initiative. The party’s difficulties were all the greater when members like McClung insisted on their freedom to break party lines. She could be an uncomfortable colleague and her ‘best’ friend in the Legislature was undoubtedly Irene Parlby. As Nellie was the first to admit:

I was not a good party woman.... I could not vote against some of the government measures which seemed to me right and proper, and I tried to persuade my fellow members that this was the right course to pursue. I believed that we were the executive of the people and should bring our best judgment to bear on every question, irrespective of party ties.22

McClung’s role in the legislature can be quickly summed up. As an opposition member, her opportunity to press for women’s rights was limited. In 1922, for instance, Parlby introduced a bill for ‘An Act to Provide a Minimum Wage for Women’, despite McClung’s greater, although still limited, familiarity with the issue. In the same year, another prominent government member brought forth a bill for ‘An Act Respecting the Rights and Property of Married Women’. A year later, Parlby ushered in a bill for ‘An Act for the Children of Unmarried Parents’ and another UFAer produced a bill to amend the Mothers’ Allowance Act. Not until April 1924 did McClung get a real opportunity to lead the House in the matter of women’s rights. Then she moved, seconded by Parlby:

That in the opinion of this House the Parliament of Canada should amend the divorce laws of this Dominion now in effect in the province of Alberta in such a way as to grant equal rights and privileges to husbands and wives, with respect to the causes or acts which entitle them to remedy by way of divorce.23

Nellie was a long-time supporter of equitable divorce laws, arguing in one of her inimitable comparisons, ‘Why are pencils equipped with erasers if not to correct mistakes?’24 Here was a clear instance where women could use their new public power to rectify abuses in the private sphere.

Another intervention from McClung about the same time also recalled traditional feminist concerns. With the unanimous agreement of the House, she moved that naturalization laws put the two sexes on an equal footing and no longer dis-enfranchise a British woman marrying an alien. Since these reforms were the prerogative of the federal government, both were forwarded to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. In her reply to the Throne Speech in 1924, however, McClung identified an area of provincial jurisdiction. Urging the UFA to reform the Married Women’s Property Act, she spoke forcefully of ‘the women of the country ... looking to this legislature to do something to remove the last relic of barbarism which sullies our laws’.25 For all the symbolic significance of such initiatives, neither they nor those introduced by Parlby and the UFA matched the great hopes of the suffrage campaigners. Nellie discovered, as did other feminist office holders, that women could not set the agenda in a public forum where they remained a tiny minority and where their training and traditions were at odds with the male majority

The provincial defeat of prohibition heralded the crusader’s political demise. Prospects for a dry Alberta were shattered in 1924 when the UFA, responding to pressure for relaxed laws, became a convert to the idea of government sale. McClung and the temperance cause failed to rally the voters. Nor could Nellie count on the support of an active feminist movement. Like the forces of prohibition, this too had declined steadily since 192 1. A move to Calgary and a new constituency exacerbated her political difficulties. Whereas Edmonton had offered the advantages of a familiar and sympathetic reform milieu, Calgary’s was not nearly so promising. Yet even there the 1925 election was close and for a time uncertain. Nellie blamed anti-temperance forces for her defeat, but she also expressed some disillusionment with female voters, concluding:

Some of us thought emancipated women would do this [regenerate the world]; we thought that their love of conservation, love of beauty, love of child welfare, would spur them on to finer things. But women hadn’t the nerve; hadn’t the courage, They were too afraid of being considered ‘queer’ if they failed to fall in line with custom.26

Her loss could be interpreted as enfranchised women’s failure to redeem the reform pledge that the feminists had made on their behalf. Certainly such betrayal was one way McClung explained the unfulfilled expectations of the 1920s.

Some years later, Prime Minister King asked Nellie to take to the Calgary hustings against R.B. Bennett, but never again would she test voters’ gratitude or idealism. Fortunately, the activist’s voice continued to be heard in other forums. In 1927 she joined her old Edmonton friend, now Magistrate Murphy, the Honourable Irene Parlby, the ex-MLA Louise McKinney, and a vice-president of the National Council of Women, Henrietta Edwards, in petitioning Parliament for an interpretation of the clause in the British North America (BNA) Act dealing with senators. Although the question of women’s eligibility to the Senate was specifically at issue, the judgement had much wider implications. It, would determine whether women were ‘persons’ within the whole context of the BNA Act. The Supreme Court of Canada declared against them in 1928, but the case was carried before the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council where, in October 1929, a favourable decision in the ‘Persons case’ was received.27 This victory capped McClung’s career as a feminist and, in a symbolic way, that of Canada’s first wave of feminists as well. The decision asserted once again that womens right to equality in the public sphere was the cornerstone of any strategy for remedying injustice in private relationships. The continuing significance of such public rights was reaffirmed many years later in 1981 when a powerful feminist lobby secured section 28 of the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms of Canada’s Constitution. This read that, ‘Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.’28 McClung would have understood the importance of that guarantee.

Nellie McClung’s activism did not end in 1929. Church work, for instance, remained an important part of her life. Her old dreams of an invigorated and activist Christianity took root in the new United Church of Canada. Such hopes did not preclude feminist criticism. The absence of women ministers was the outstanding grievance. ‘There was’, she reminded listeners, ‘no bar in reason or religion against the ordination of women.’ Obstacles were man-made, since ‘no biological difference can hinder the soul’s relationship to God’.29 McClung’s active espousal of their cause helped United Church women gain the right to serve as ministers in 1936.30

Ecumenicalism was basic to many of her hopes for the Dominion; it was also a partial explanation for her internationalism between the wars. Blaming traditional and masculine diplomacy for the errors of World War i and its aftermath, she looked to the League of Nations for idealistic inspiration and practical guidance in preserving the peace. Despite her disillusionment with the initial results of women’s enfranchisement, the western feminist maintained her faith that ‘it is easier for women to see to the heart of the peace issue than for men’.31 The prominence of women and their organizations in the Dominion’s League of Nations Society, like the work of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, identified the postwar peace movement as one heir of feminist hopes. Here was an issue that attracted both the older generation of feminists like McClung and many of their successors as well.32

in the years after her electoral defeat, McClung also remained in demand across the country as a well-established novelist and lecturer. Books such as All We Like Sheep (1926), Flowers for the Living (193 1), Leaves from Lantern Lane (1936), and the two autobiographical volumes, Clearing in the West (193 5) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945), reiterated her commitment to feminism and social reform and her hostility to apathy and corruption. Responding to critics who claimed that her ‘didactic enthusiasm’ had ‘marred’ her ‘art’ she asserted:

I hope I have been a crusader.... I have never worried about my art. I have written as clearly as I could, never idly or dishonestly, and if some of my stories are ... sermons in disguise, my earnest hope is that the disguise did not obscure the sermon.33

Such sentiments did not lack sympathizers between the wars, but feminism, while it frequently survived strongly as an individual creed, faltered as an organized movement. The loss of confidence in women’s moral superiority, the victim of its failure to deliver on overly sanguine suffragist hopes and of the Freudian-inspired psychology, undermined maternalism as a justification and explanation for public service. Female biology no longer implied special talents that were readily transferable to a broad range of employments within the community, but a fundamental irrationality that was best expressed within the nursery and the bedroom. Yet for all its shortcomings, only the maternal ideology had the power to give women confidence in the wider applicability of their experience and to direct women’s attention as a group beyond the home….

Nellies success as an agitator and a politician depended in large part on the presence of a healthy, highly conscious, and well-organized women’s movement. Yet in the 1920s feminism could not mobilize its sympathizers under any single banner. Unable to capitalize on its proud traditions of pioneer work, its energies were dispersed throughout a multitude of causes and often lost. individuals like McClung, Violet McNaughton of the Prairie Producer, Agnes MacPhail, MP, Emily Carr, artist and author, Dorothy Steeves, politician, and Dorothy Livesay, writer and social worker, remained committed to feminist ideals, but few could find a comfortable home in the postwar years, either as feminists or progressives.37 All their courage could not make up for the absence of an organized feminist community to interpret and support their initiatives. Yet, in time, their vision of a world in which women both shared public power and experienced equality in private relationships would constitute an essential legacy for Canada’s second wave of feminists.

For endnotes, see the original copy in the History 103 folder in St. Jerome’s Library, or consult the article in:

Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History

Third Edition

Edited by

Veronica Strong-Boag & Anita Clair Fellman

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997