6.5 Suffrage and Prohibition
Women’s Suffrage
Objections to women having the vote — federally, provincially, and municipally — were many. Keeping in mind that the right to vote was closely tied in the 19th century to property ownership and that women’s legal right to own property was significantly circumscribed, one of two changes needed to take place in Canadian society. Women had to have improved access to property ownership and/or that requirement had to be mitigated, if not eliminated. In the 1870s, working men’s campaigns for the vote did much to reduce the strength of the property issue but it was not eliminated entirely. At the municipal level, female property owners (who were, thus, civic taxpayers) started gaining the vote in the mid-19th century. Although the laws permitted these women to vote, the culture — which viewed landownership through a patriarchal lens — didn’t help.[1] The women’s franchise stalled at this point, needing another issue to activate it as a movement.
Enthusiasm for women’s suffrage in the post-Confederation era was catalyzed by experiences of women in pro-temperance organizations (see Section 7.5). By 1900, the early feminists were campaigning on two fronts: the end of alcohol sales and the start of female enfranchisement. Increasingly at the turn of the century, the movement was influenced by what many middle- and upper-class women regarded as the pernicious effect on Canadian society of new immigrants. Many newcomers were raised in cultures where consuming alcohol did not carry the moral stigma that was often found in Anglo-Celtic societies. What is more, many of the newcomers were quickly made into property-owners and that meant that the men among them enjoyed electoral rights that were not available to French- and English-Canadian women whose family roots perhaps ran very deep in Canada. Increasingly, maternal feminists (including Nellie McClung) framed the suffrage issue in nativist terms: Canadian society faced degeneration by foreign arrivals and only Canadian-born women, they argued, could offset that influence.
There were powerful cultural themes that stood in the way of women getting the vote, too, and these should not be ignored. It was seen as unfeminine by some, immoral by others, and unnecessary by many. In a patriarchal culture with a pronounced division between the private and public sphere, an invitation to women to leave the safety of the former for the (oft-claimed) rough-and-tumble of the latter was to put their very womanhood at risk. Politics, it was claimed, was about moral compromises and if, as the maternal feminists declared, women were the uncompromising moral bedrock of the community, then the two should not mix. Finally, so long as fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons executed their electoral rights responsibly, the democratic interests of women were looked after. To some commentators it seemed unthinkable that a woman would vote differently from her husband and, therefore, her vote