Women's rights in Canada

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.

*First women elected in the British Empire were two Alberta women (Louise McKinney and Roberta MacAdams) elected in 1917.
** First woman elected to the House of Commons was Progressive candidate Agnes MacPhail, elected in 1921.

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. 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. 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.

Ultimately, the case was dismissed by the presiding magistrate Lester Clayon, who ruled that, as Palmer's actions were "in the public good", no charges could be held against her. In his final ruling, he explained that:

The mothers are in poor health, pregnant nine months of the year... What chance do these children have to be properly fed, clothed and educated? They are a burden on the taxpayer. They crowd the juvenile court. They glut the competitive labour market.

Second wave

Though feminism in Canada continued after the work of the Famous Five, during the Depression and the Second World War, feminist activism in Canada was not as clear to see as it was during the fight for suffrage and thereafter. However, women's engagement in the workforce during the Second World War brought about a new consciousness in women with regards to their place in public life, which led to a public inquiry on the status of women, as well as new campaigns and organizing for equal rights. Whereas the first wave was organized around access to education and training, the second wave of Canadian feminism focused on women's role in the workforce, the need for equal pay for equal work, a desire to address violence against women, and concerns about women's reproductive rights.

Canadian women during and after World War II

During the Second World War, Canadian women were actively pursued by the Canadian government to contribute to the war effort. One of the ways in which women contributed to the war effort was by joining the workforce. Prior to the war, some young and unmarried women had already joined the workforce; however, during the war an increased need for female workers arose in many industries due to the depleted pool of male workers who had largely been mobilized to fight in the war.Pierson, p. 23 Although women continued to work in their pre-war traditional fields of employment such as textile manufacturing, retail, nursing, and homecare services,Pierson, p. 10 as the demand for labour intensified in all industries, women became employed in many non-traditional fields including: manufacturing, trade, finance, transportation, communication, and construction.

In response to the labour needs of many industries, the Canadian government created a special Women's Division of the National Selective Service to recruit women into the workforce. The first groups of women to be recruited were single women and childless married women. The National Selective Service then recruited women with home responsibilities and later women with children. By 1944, more than one million women worked full-time in Canada's paid labour force.

The inclusion of women with children into the workforce led the federal government to develop a program known as the Dominion-Provincial Wartime Day Nurseries Agreement in order to assist working mothers with childcare during the duration of the war. Under the Agreement, the federal government offered to help the provinces subsidize childcare programs. Quebec and Ontario took advantage of the agreement and developed childcare facilities such as nurseries and after school programs.

Women also contributed to the war effort by volunteering. As soon as the war broke out, many local women's volunteer societies quickly mobilized to contribute to the war effort. Women in these organizations engaged in a range of activities including: sewing clothes for the Red Cross, cultivating "victory" gardens, and collecting materials like rubber and metal scraps for wartime production. By the middle of the war the Canadian government established the Women's Voluntary Services to coordinate the wartime activities of the local women's societies across Canada.

Women also participated in the war by joining the military. Prior to the war, with the exception of the Nursing Service of the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, the Canadian army was composed only of men.Pierson, p. 95 Yet, by 1942 women were recruited into the military, air force, and navy. In fact, by the end of the war 20,497 women were members of the army, 16,221 were members of the air force, and 6,665 were members of the navy.Pierson, p. 8 When women were first recruited they mostly worked in administrative and support positions such as stewardesses and clerical aides, but as the war carried on, women were promoted to more skilled positions such as motor vehicle mechanics, electricians, and sail-makers.

The Canadian government expected women to return to their roles in the home once the war ended. In 1941, the government created an Advisory Committee on Reconstruction to deal with the post-war reconstruction issues. Shortly after its creation, some Canadian women advocated for female representation within the Committee due to the vital contribution of women to the war effort. Consequently, in 1943, the government created a subcommittee to deal with issues women would encounter once the war ended. The subcommittee was headed by Margaret McWilliams, a journalist and notable women's organization activist and consisted of nine other women from across the country. The subcommittee produced a report with a number of recommendations including that women should be trained or retrained for jobs on the same basis as men and that household workers should receive labour benefits like unemployment insurance. The report received little public attention and ultimately failed to achieve any of its recommendations. However, many of its recommendations were discussed once again, decades later in the 1970 report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women.

When the war finally ended many Canadian women did as the government expected of them and returned to their roles in the home. Additionally, when the war ended some of the services the government offered working women during the war, like childcare, were discontinued.

Yet, in the years following the war, the number of women joining the workforce steadily increased as women's contribution became more and more necessary to sustaining both the home and the economy - a fact addressed by a number of government initiatives. In 1951, the Ontario government passed the Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act, and by the end of the 1950s, all provinces except for Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador had passed similar legislation. In 1954, the Government of Canada created a specialized women's department within the Department of Labour, and in 1956, it also passed legislation providing pay equity for women working in the federal civil service.

Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1970

The Royal Commission on the Status of Women was a Canadian Royal Commission that examined the status of women and recommended steps that might be taken by the federal government to ensure equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society. The Commission commenced on 16 February 1967 as an initiative of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Public sessions were conducted the following year to accept public comment for the Commission to consider as it formulated its recommendations. Florence Bird was the Commission's chair. The Commissioners appointed were: Florence Bird (chairperson), Elsie MacGill, Lola M. Lange, Jeanne Lapointe, Doris Ogilvie, Donald R. Gordon, Jr (resigned from Commission), Jacques Henripin, John Peters Humphrey (appointed following Gordon's resignation).

The National Union of Students and the Women's Movement in the 1970s

The National Union of Students (Canada) (NUS) formed in 1972 and became the Canadian Federation of Students in 1981. While student aid, education cut-backs and, by the late 1970s, tuition fees may have been the primary policy concerns of the national student organization, there was a definite undercurrent of women student organizing in NUS and on local campuses. Women and some men supporters rallied around issues of sexism on student councils and in NUS, violence against women, abortion rights and the establishing women centres and daycare on campuses. By 1979, NUS established the ''Declaration of the Rights of the Woman Student''. As Moses points out (p. 89), the "''Declaration'' avoided discussion of other serious social inclusions — issues of race, physical ability, and aboriginal people were not included" which perhaps speaks to why issues of racism and ability caused much discordance in the women's movement of the 1980s.

Moses (2010, pp. 76–77) cites several key sources on the long history of women student organizing in Canada going back to the late 1800s and suggests that "NUS women's student activism of the 1970s should not be viewed as an entirely new phenomenon arising amidst the clamour and legacy of 1960s liberation struggles". "Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, women's participation in he_Canadian_Union_of_Students_and_its_predecessor,_the_National_Federation_of_Canadian_University_Students_stayed_consistent:_around_the_15–17_percent_mark."_Moses_(2010,_p._92,_note_34).

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