3.8 Early Women’s Movement(s) in Canada
Nancy M. Forestell, Department of History, St. Francis Xavier University
Alongside and sometimes overlapping with the various social reform causes which emerged in the latter part of the part of the 19th century was the first wave of the Canadian feminist movement. While historians once identified the creation of the Toronto Women’s Literary Society in 1876 as marking the official origin of a women’s movement, more recent scholarship indicates that a variety of women and organizations were engaged in pursuits related to fair treatment and equal rights at least several decades earlier. The specific context of British North America as a settler society shaped by histories of colonialism and slavery had a significant influence on women’s activism from the outset. Belated acknowledgement is now being given to the Indigenous roots of the first wave in North America with documented cases of Aboriginal women demonstrating a critical gender consciousness, acting “in what they perceived to be their own best interests as women as human beings,” and most often to combat the deleterious consequences of colonialism.[1] One prominent example involved the Anishinaabe woman, Nahebahwequa (also known as Catherine Sutton), who protested in 1860 against her dispossession from land she considered a birthright, an event that arose because she had married a non-Aboriginal man. Another key element in the genesis of feminist activism was the ongoing legacy of slavery and female engagement in international abolitionist networks. By the mid-19th century, concerns about the injustices of slavery became increasingly connected with another kind of bondage seen to be experienced by women. It remains unclear the extent to which Black and White female abolitionists were able to easily or consistently overcome the racial divide, but there is a record of mixed race attendance at lectures on anti-slavery and women’s rights as well as mutual support for integrated education in the 1850s and 1860s. These initiatives were accompanied by efforts to secure women’s property rights, the quest for higher education, and the formation of female-exclusive church organizations. Altogether, they laid the basis for women to pursue the attainment of additional rights and play a more significant role in public campaigns for social reform. As in other national contexts, there was not a singular women’s movement in Canada as such; rather, a diverse range of activists who dedicated themselves to a wide array of political, social, economic, and cultural issues.
In the latter part of the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, two main arguments were put forward by feminists to secure greater civil and political rights, and to achieve greater influence for Canadian women in civil society. One was premised on an equal rights ethos that women and men shared a common humanity, and hence, women should be able to attend university, gain access to selection