An Election/Voting themed article to read. This article is a celebration of voting and why we need to all go out and do it. People have fought long and hard, for a long time, to give you this right. Enjoy 🙂
In June 1889 the magazine The Nineteenth Century printed "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage." It carried the names of 104 prominent British women. Mrs. Humphry Ward was one of them. They argued that the push for women's freedom had "reached the limits fixed by the physical constitution of women." Letting married women vote, they warned, would bring "changes in family life" that had "never been adequately considered."
Let me say where I stand before anything else. Women were right to demand the vote, and it was right that they won it. This column asks a different question: why did some women of that day say no? There is a moral to this story, and it waits at the bottom of the page. I simply ask for your patience to read the whole thing.
Many people carry a simpler story about those years. In it, every woman of that century was desperate for the vote, and only men stood in the way. I find that story too tidy. It leaves out the women who said no and wrote their reasons down, some of them famous. I went back to what they actually said, because understanding an argument is not the same as agreeing with it, and they deserve to be heard in their own words.
Ontario had its own opponents. You'll know some of the names. Tarah Brookfield records in The Canadian Encyclopedia that Adelaide Hoodless, founder of the Women's Institute, objected to the vote "on the grounds that women already could effect change by asserting their influence within the family and community, thus avoiding the corruption of politics." Stephen Leacock, in a book published in Toronto, was shorter about it: "Women need not more freedom but less."
Some of the case against the vote rested on what the law already gave a wife, and I think that part had something real under it. Under the old English common law that Ontario inherited, a married woman's "very being or legal existence" was "suspended during the marriage," in Blackstone's words. Her husband had to pay for the necessaries she bought and for any debts she brought into the marriage, and she generally couldn't be sued without him. That shelter had a price. The same law handed her property to her husband and folded her legal person into his.
In 1912 Grace Duffield Goodwin, an American anti-suffragist, made the shelter a reason to keep things as they were. A woman given the ballot, she wrote, would "surrender these many privileges and take her place as man's financial equal in the eyes of the law."
In Ontario, the old rule was being rewritten in stages, decades before women won the provincial vote. The province passed a new act on the property of married women in 1884. The historian Constance Backhouse writes that it seems to have been modelled in part on England's act of two years earlier. That English law let a wife contract, sue and be sued, liable "to the extent of her separate property."
Even some suffragists treated wives as a case apart. Answering the Appeal, Millicent Fawcett backed votes for single women and widows "and not wives during the lifetime of their husbands." Part of her reason was the law itself: "Wives are bound by law to obey their husbands." Ontario had drawn the same line the year it passed its property act, when it gave unmarried women and widows a vote in municipal elections.
Then there was the home. Goodwin predicted that once women went into politics, "another source of discord will speedily appear," though she granted it "will not break up all homes by any means." In Massachusetts, Lily Rice Foxcroft went further: "The strongest motive for anti-suffrage action is the deepening dread of woman suffrage as a menace to the home."
The suffragists answered. One of the best was Nellie McClung, an author born in Chatsworth, Ontario, in 1873, who grew up on a Manitoba homestead and fought for the vote there, then in Alberta. Her replies still read well to me. In 1915 she met the "family quarrels" argument head on: "Father and son have been known to live under the same roof and vote differently, and yet live!" To those who said women must never vote because they didn't want to, her answer was dry: "It sounds so chivalrous and protective and high-minded."
So did most women oppose the vote? Neither side ever measured it. There were no opinion polls, only turnout, petitions and partisan canvasses. Take Massachusetts. In 1895 women there could vote in a non-binding referendum on municipal suffrage. Only about 4 per cent of eligible women took part. Those who did voted 22,204 to 861 in favour, by the suffragists' own count, while the men voted roughly two to one against. The antis said that thin showing sustained their claim that "over 90 per cent. of the women do not wish the vote." It was the same ballot box, and each side found what it wanted in it.
Set the antis' fears beside the numbers, and watch the dates. The American divorce rate more than doubled between 1867 and 1900, according to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. In Canada, a growing share of women and girls were in paid work between 1891 and 1921, the Canada Year Book shows, though many women left it at marriage. Both changes were under way before women in either country won the national vote, so neither shows what the vote itself did.
Ontario women won the provincial vote on April 12, 1917, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. The federal act giving women the vote was enacted on May 24, 1918. It didn't reach everyone. Elections Canada says voting restrictions on Japanese Canadians lasted until 1948, and that First Nations people gained the federal vote without conditions only in 1960.
Here is the moral I promised, and it has nothing to do with 1917. The moment a subject gets a team, people stop reading and start picking a side. If your first reaction to this column was to ask what I must secretly believe, that is the reflex I am writing about. It has a cost. When we refuse to hear why the other side said what it said, nobody can answer it. An argument nobody answers gets buried, and sooner or later it comes back. McClung met their argument head on, as we saw. Be willing to do the same, even when you are certain you are right. I am.
The tidy story is easier to carry. The women who said no argued from the law as they knew it and from their fears for the home. Their words are still there to read, with McClung's replies beside them, and she was right. Reading both is a habit we could use in North Frontenac, where a story can cross the township faster than any paper can print it. When someone tells you what "most people" here want, ask who counted. If nobody did, don't pass it on.