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Chapter Ten
BC Women and the Great War: Breaking Barriers
While some women headed overseas as nursing sisters, many remained on the home front, where they had to make do under difficult circumstances. Whether it was keeping a farm going, or raising children alone, or working in a factory, the challenges were sometimes overwhelming. In too many cases, fathers, brothers and husbands never returned. In other cases, they returned as changed men, strangers who brought their traumas and sometimes an unwelcome violence back with them. The war also changed some things for the better and brought the vote for most, though not all, women. Here are some stories that illuminate that difficult time.
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Getting the Vote During the Great War
Sidebar: From Our Listeners
Getting the Vote during the Great War
By Jean Barman
Among the many changes in British Columbian life prompted by the Great War was women’s gaining the right to vote alongside their menfolk. The campaign was already under way, but it took the war to break the stalemate.
The assumption that only men could make decisions in the public realm was passed down from Britain’s common law tradition to its North American colonies and then into section 41 of the British North America Act that brought Canada into being in 1867. Since BC joined Canada in 1871, the women of British Columbia had been determined to secure equal rights at the ballot box. Later in that same year the leading American proponent, Susan B. Anthony, argued for women’s suffrage, the right to vote, to an enthusiastic audience in the new provincial capital of Victoria. Eight months later the first of numerous unsuccessful suffrage bills was introduced in the provincial legislature. Support came from middle-class reformers and from moderate elements within the labour movement but it was not enough. Women did gain the right to vote for local school boards, an area of public life considered within their realm of expertise as mothers. A turn-of-the-century bill giving women the franchise was supported by a petition signed by some twenty thousand British Columbian men and women and nearly, but not quite, received legislative consent.
The suffrage campaign was notable for cutting across the class lines that sometimes divide British Columbians. Among the activists were Helen Gregory MacGill, a genteel wife and mother, and Helena Gutteridge, a strident working-class reformer making her own way in the world. Despite their different emphases in reform, they were joined in perceiving the legal status of women as, in MacGill’s words, “outmoded, harsh and morally repugnant.” The organizing efforts of the two women and their supporters kept the issue alive, as did opposition Liberal Party support as of 1912.
The Great War turned the tide. Across Canada patriotism was perceived on the home front as a fight to eradicate the ills of society, including women’s prohibition from voting. The national stalemate was broken when in 1915 Manitoba gave women the vote, followed in short order by Alberta and Saskatchewan. Backed by a broad coalition of reform groups, British Columbian Liberals made suffrage part of its successful 1916 election campaign, which included a referendum on the issue. Suffrage was approved and the resulting April 1917 act gave women the right both to vote and to be elected to the legislature. Nationally women received the franchise in two stages: war nurses and immediate relatives of military men in 1917, followed by all women the next year.
The Great War’s aftermath would see a consolidation of the gains that had been signalled by female suffrage, cutting across gender, social class and, over time, skin tones. As summed up by MacGill’s daughter Elsie, “The drive for social legislation was now so steady and continuing a force that it and the other benefits due to the women’s voting potential were accepted as natural features of the social landscape.” British Columbia would be a leader in enacting a spate of legislation so doing.
From Our Listeners
The Women Left Behind: There are no medals for the women who are left behind to carry on alone when men heed the clarion call of war. In 1914 all the able-bodied men of the Gulf Islands left for a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas. [Read more]
The Family William Morris Left Behind: The family doctor told William that with so many children and another one soon to arrive, he must not go overseas to war, but William was resolute. [Read more]
An Ambulance Driver with the Voluntary Aid Detachment: Women on the home front stepped up by the thousands to work—from farms to factories. Some volunteered overseas as nurses; others, like Grace Evelyn MacPherson, got close to the front lines behind the wheel of an ambulance. [Read more]
Socks for the Troops: My great-grandparents Mary Ann and Alfred Deardon were members of the Salvation Army from the time the Salvation Army “opened office” in Victoria in 1887. [Read more]
My Mother’s War: My grandparents didn’t consider the “wilds” of Canada to be an appropriate place to raise a daughter, so they left her in England. She lived a privileged life, learned all the things an Edwardian girl should learn, from needlework to music. [Read more]
A Love Story—W.J. Johnston’s Postcards and Letters: In 1916, “Dos” decided to enlist even though he was well over forty, because by then he and Granny had two girls of their own as well as the seven children she had brought to their marriage. [Read more]