To assist readers in approaching questions of suffrage and the democratic deficit, posts, other than those appearing in At the Ballot Box and On the Frontline, are generally organized by broad classification—namely ‘historical’, ‘contemporary’, ‘biographical’, ‘organizations and causes’, ‘elections’, and ‘ideas’. Within each category, posts will address our site’s continuing concern with activism, the democratic deficit, and race, class, and sexuality, but we are open as well to other perspectives. A post may well fall into several categories and readers are urged to use the search function (for example specifying particular nations) or the authors’ index to focus their investigation.
The Canadian Citizenship Debates: the Franchise Act of 1885
by Veronica Strong-Boag
In the years after Confederation in 1867 the character of the Canadian state was far from settled. The franchise increasingly became the key marker of power and belonging. From March to June of 1885 the House of Commons debated the specifics of a federal franchise law to replace the provincial regulations that determined voting eligibility.
Bill 103 originally offered to enlarge the electorate with two new groups of voters: spinsters and widows meeting male property qualifications and Indians who occupied land in fee simple with improvements of $150 or more on their reserves anywhere in the Dominion.
Youth Activism: the Case of Canadian Brigette DePape
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Canada has a long history of youthful protesters. In the 19th century, girls and young women demanded entry into Canadian colleges and universities. The youth of many first feminists should not be forgotten. Student doctors, such as Bishop’s Octavia Grace Ritchie (-England), Queen’s Elizabeth Smith (-Shortt), and Toronto’s Augusta Stowe (-Gullen) repudiated pervasive misogyny in their medical programs in the 1880s and went on to campaign for women’s rights (Hacker). Later on, generations of youthful activists honed their skills in groups such as the Student Christian Movement, the Council of Young Canadians, and the Student Union for Peace Action. Some found inspiration in political parties, notably but not only those of the left.
Christian Reformers: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
by Sharon Anne Cook
Founded in 1874 to counter the evils of alcohol, the Canadian Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) rapidly grew into a multi-faceted organization that championed various forms of childhood and adult education, homes for abandoned and ‘fallen’, poor, and orphaned women and children, humane care of the indigent aged, residences and ‘Travelers’ Aid’ for single working women, women’s hospitals, coffee houses, and reading rooms, traveling lecturers and missionaries.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Canadian-born, Indigenous activist and artist Buffy Sainte-Marie has championed democracy for over half a century. In 1963, her anti-war anthem “Universal Soldier” condemned the Vietnam War. In 2013, she stood before the Manitoba legislature to endorse Idle No More. Sainte-Marie’s remarkable life began in very difficult circumstances on the Piapot Cree reserve in Saskatchewan. Like many other poor children, especially those from Canada’s Indigenous communities after World War Two (Strong-Boag), she was adopted out, in her case to a family with a mother with Micmac ancestry in Massachusetts, U.S.A.
New Woman, New North: The Arctic Journey of Agnes Deans Cameron
by Tiffany Johnstone
As the 19th century drew to a close, the completion of the western portion of the C.P.R., along with the Klondike Gold Rush, spurred international interest in remote regions of Canada. In particular, well-known U.S. authors and journalists such as Hamlin Garland, Jack London, and W.H.H. Murray wrote about the Canadian northwest as a kind of mythic last frontier in which American (and by extension Canadian) men could somehow test their masculinity and relive frontier individualism (Bloom; Doyle).
Angela Merkel: The Iron Mother
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Angela Merkel, the first female Chancellor of Germany (since 2005) and leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is generally regarded as the most powerful woman in Europe and, given the power of Germany, one of the most powerful in the world. She has regularly topped Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful women.
A Double Life: The Legacy of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake
by Tiffany Johnstone
On March 10th, 1913, flags were lowered as Vancouver came to a stand still for the largest funeral in the city’s history. Huge crowds lined Georgia Street to witness the passage of E. Pauline Johnson’s coffin. Vancouver was saying goodbye to an icon. An internationally renowned poet and performance artist, Johnson played the difficult roles of defining Canada on the world stage and of making a place for women and First Nations people on that stage at the turn of the 20th century.
Rose Henderson
by Peter Campbell
Little is known about the early life of Rose Henderson, who was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1871. Arriving in North America in 1885, she married accountant Charles Henderson and seemed destined to settle into an unremarkable and respectable life in Montréal, Québec. When her husband died suddenly in January 1904 Henderson was still a young woman in her mid-30s, the mother of one daughter, Ida. Encountering poverty-stricken young people during Sunday School visits following her husband’s death, Henderson became committed to improving the lives of disadvantaged women and children.
Mary Ellen Spear Smith
by Veronica Strong-Boag
This first female member of the British Columbia Legislature and the first female cabinet minister in the British Commonwealth has often been overlooked by both the public and by scholars. She should not be. In many ways Mary Ellen Smith is the archetypal political representative of Canada’s first feminist movement. Her near oblivion until her designation as a National Historic Person in Canada in 2006 only confirmed the need to recover the activist generation that substantially enlarged the Canadian electorate and put so-called ‘women’s issues’ legislatively centre-front in the 1920s.
Idle No More
by Kelsey Wrightson
Idle No More, a grassroots protest originating in Canada and founded by four Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in early October, began to capture national and international attention by December 2012. The founders, Sheelah McLean, Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam and Jess Gordon hail from Saskatchewan, a Canadian province with a longstanding history of both Indigenous protest (such as Louis Riel) and progressive politics (it’s the birthplace of both the radical Saskatchewan Women Grain Growers and Canadian medicare).
First Nations’ Enfranchisement in Canada
by Kelsey Wrightson
First Nations peoples in Canada have a complex historic, legal, and symbolic relationship to enfranchisement. The vast majority could not vote in federal elections until a 1960 change in the Indian act legally reclassified ‘Indians’ as no longer “wards of the state.” Despite this long-delayed inclusion of Aboriginal people within the democratic electoral process, enfranchisement has never been a straightforward benefit.
Two Row Wampum Treaty
by Kelsey Wrightson
Relationships between Settler and Indigenous peoples in Canada have long been negotiated and organized by treaties. One of the oldest and most important in North America is the “Two-Row Wampum” treaty between the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and the Dutch. This treaty remains critical in understanding historic and contemporary relationships between settler and Indigenous peoples and the evolution and construction of political opportunity for both.
Tammy Baldwin
by Kelsey Wrightson
In the American Federal election on the 6th of November 2012, Tammy Baldwin was elected as Senator for the State of Wisconsin. Her victory is remarkable because she defeated well-liked Republican Senator Tommy Thompson. Even more importantly, she is also the first woman to represent Wisconsin in the Senate and the first openly gay Senator.
Liberalism’s blindspots = exclusionary Canadian democracy
By David Moscrop
In a recent op-ed about the Idle No More campaign I argued that liberalism, as a political philosophy, has blindspots. As a foundational philosophy in Canada and as the centre of our politics, liberalism, I suggested, has left many of us unable to understand where marginalized groups, such as Indigenous Canadians, are coming from when they try to advance so-called “special” claims that run counter to the liberal belief in pure equality and freedom. There are many such blindspots, and their history is complicated, but it’s worth identifying some of them and tracing their provenance.
Senator Muriel McQueen Fergusson Defends the Senate
by Gail Campbell
Calls for reformation and even abolition of the Senate predated Muriel McQueen Fergusson’s appointment to that body as a representative for New Brunswick in 1953. As she recalled, ‘one story told me soon after my appointment was that there were two brothers, and one went to sea and the other to the Senate and neither had been heard of since.’ But her own experience taught her that ‘though senators may not be heard of very much by the general public, many of them are working hard in ways that are very important to the country,’ and she became one of the Senate’s most eloquent defenders (1954). Her defence of the Senate remains relevant today.
Muriel McQueen Fergusson
by Gail Campbell
Diminutive in stature and self-deprecating in manner, Muriel McQueen Fergusson possessed an incisive mind and sharp wit. A lawyer by profession, she served as New Brunswick’s Regional Enforcement Counsel for the Wartime Prices and Trade Board during the Second World War and subsequently as Regional Director of Family Allowances and Old Age Security. Called to the Senate in 1953, she was appointed its first female Speaker in 1972.
Transsexual women and political presence
by Raewyn Connell
Transsexual women are a small group with a very complex political history, who – without wishing to – have been the focus of troubling problems in projects of political and social change. An inclusive democracy needs to include transsexual women’s voices; but how is their accent to be defined.
Park Geun-hye
by Veronica Strong-Boag
On 19 December 2012 Park Geun-hye won the tightly fought election that would make her in February 2013 the first female president for South Korea, which ranked 115th in the 2009 World Economic Forum’s Gender Equality Index. In 2005, the country had seen the appointment of its first female prime minister, Han Myeong-Sook (b 1944), a former Minister of Gender Equality (2001-2003), a long time progressive politician, and graduate of Ewha Woman’s University.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
by Veronica Strong-Boag
The eldest of 13 children, Quaker-educated Mary Ann Shadd was born to free Black parents active in the Underground Railroad, which moved African American slaves from the southern states into the free north and Canada. Like many ambitious young women, she became a teacher, first in Delaware, and then in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In 1849 she published the pamphlet, Hints to the Colored People of the North, endorsing the self-help agenda of industry, thrift, and schooling.
The National Day of Remembrance and Action Against Violence Against Women
by Grace Lore
December 6th marks the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. Twenty-two years ago the day was established by the Parliament of Canada to commemorate the death of 14 young women, thirteen students and one staff, at l’École Polytechnique de Montréal; all were murdered because they were women. In marking this day, it remains critical to consider exactly what ought to be remembered and what actions ought to result.
Mad Women’s Political Participation: Initiating Discussion of Potential Barriers in Canada
by Tobin LeBlanc Haley
In the last decade there has been an explosion of government inquiry into psychiatric disability accompanied by a call for “consumer/client” input into Canada’s mental health initiatives. Despite increased attention to psychiatric disability and calls for “consumer/client” participation, substantial gender analysis is absent from these reports and from broader discussions of psychiatric disability and welfare-state reform.
Ivan Coyote
by Samantha Lustig
Born and raised near Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada, to working class parents, Ivan Coyote is a lesbian poet, prose writer, and storyteller who has travelled throughout North America and Europe. Beginning in 1992, Coyote’s writing has raised awareness and promoted acceptance of the diverse queer community. She is an award-winning author of seven short story collections, and her most recent book One in Every Crowd was published in March 2012 by Arsenal Pulp Press. Coyote is also known for her novel Bow Grip (2006), as well as several CDs of storytelling set to music.
Aung San Suu Kyi
by Lindsey Massar
Renowned for her political activism and personal sacrifice, Aung San Suu Kyi has emerged as a global icon for human rights and democracy (Diamond, 2012). Aung San Suu Kyi’s upbringing fits the classic picture of the South Asian political elite: daughter of an eminent leader, and privileged by an international education, she was primed for a public life from early childhood.
Diane M. Kelly
by Lisa Hale
Diane M. Kelly of the Ojibway Onigaming First Nation was the first woman ever elected Grand Chief of the Grand Council of Treaty #3, which encompasses parts of northwestern Ontario and eastern Manitoba. She served in the capacity of Grand Chief from 2008 to 2012. Kelly was also the first Anishinaabe woman from Treaty #3 to become a lawyer. She was called to the Manitoba Bar in 1995 and the Ontario Bar in 1998.
Joan Jack
by Lisa Hale
Joan Jack (Aanishinaabe Ikwe) of Berens River First Nation is a lawyer and specialist in Aboriginal and treaty rights. Jack was called to the Manitoba Bar in 1996 and worked as Lands and Resources director with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation. She taught business and native studies at the Northern Lights College in Atlin, BC. In 2003, Jack returned to Manitoba and opened the Joan Jack Law Office. In January 2012, she was elected councilor in Berens River. She is leading a class action lawsuit seeking $15 billion in damages on behalf of “Indian day school” survivors.
Pamela Palmater
by Lisa Hale
Dr. Pamela D. Palmater (Mi’kmaq), member of the Eel River Bar First Nation, is a prominent lawyer and activist for the rights of Indigenous people and nations. During the 2012 leadership race for national chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Palmater challenged incumbent Sean Atleo, in hopes of becoming the first woman to lead the assembly.
Katsitsakwas Ellen Gabriel
by Lisa Hale
Katsitsakwas Ellen Gabriel (Kanien’kehá:ka Nation – Turtle Clan) first rose to prominence during her community’s resistance to a proposed expansion of a private nine-hole golf course into a sacred grove of pines near the town of Oka, Quebec in 1990. The resulting standoff at Kanehsatà:ke between Mohawk people and the Canadian army became known as the “Oka crisis,” and lasted for 78 days. Gabriel was chosen by the People of the Longhouse to act as a spokesperson for the community, and she became one of the faces of the struggle against the destruction of the pine grove.
Malala Yousufzai
by Kelsey Wrightson
On 9 October 2012, 14 year old Pakistani school girl Malala Yousufzai was shot in the head and neck by a Taliban gunman, targeted because she publically promoted education for girls. She was returning from school in the town of Mingora in the Swat Valley of Pakistan when two gunmen flagged down her school bus and fired on Malala and two other children. Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan, stated to the BBC Urdu service that the attack was justified because Malala “promoted secularism.” He said that if survives this attack she will continue to be targeted.
A Heritage Message: the Asian Canadian Wiki project
by Elena Kusaka, on behalf of the Asian Canadian Wiki Committee
In May 2012 two Canadian universities launched programs in Asian Canadian studies. From the Musqueam territory on the Westcoast, the University of British Columbia announced theirs in the midst of the hard-won Japanese Canadian UBC students of 1941 tribute ceremony. The ceremony was a bittersweet moment in Asian Canadian history. A university was making amends for wartime racism, and affirming a commitment to the potential of educators to illuminate rather than discriminate. In Ontario, the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Emerita, Vivenne Poy announced the minor in Asian Canadian studies at an Asian Heritage Month national videoconference. It was a fitting event for such a message. Read the full post here!
The Representation of Women and Women’s Issues in Canada’s Western Provinces
by Grace Lore
Women are under-represented in political arenas worldwide and Canada, where women make up only between one-tenth and one-third of all provincial politicians, is no exception. Equal access to political participation and representation is crucial to the quality of democracy and the under-representation of women is symbolically important. But does the relative absence of women in provincial politics also mean that issues important to women receive little attention? Do women politicians represent women’s interests in their speeches and statements? If they do, then having so few women in provincial politics may result in political discourse and policies that do not adequately address women’s issues and gender equality.
Japanese Canadian Soldiers of the First World War and the Fight to Win the Vote: Designated a ‘National Historic Event’ 2011
by Lyle Dick
Resolutely determined to serve their country despite not being fully recognized as equal citizens, 222 Japanese Canadian soldiers overcame prejudice and barriers to enlistmentand fought for Canada on the Western Front of the First World War between 1916 and 1918.
Fermement déterminés à se battre pour leur pays malgré le fait qu’ils n’étaient pas pleinement reconnus comme des citoyens canadiens, 222 soldats canadiens d’origine japonaise ont surmonté préjugés et obstacles pour s’enrôler et servir le Canada sur le front occidental entre 1916 et 1918.
Mary Russell Chesley
by Sharon MacDonald
The example of outspoken suffragist and peace advocate Mary Russell Chesley, from the small town of Lunenburg in Nova Scotia and an active leader in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), contradicts earlier historians’ assumptions that urban women led the struggle and those working through such organizations as the WCTU tended to be conservative in their politics.
Violet McNaughton
by Georgina M. Taylor
Violet Jackson, who went on to become one of western Canada’s most extraordinary suffragists, was born and raised in radical north Kent in England. Progressive politics were encouraged by co-operators and radicals in her family and others in the area. Her ancestors took an active part in rebellions in north Kent and James Terry, her great grandfather, was a founder of the Sheerness Co-operative. Founded by dockworkers in 1816 to supply good food and water for their families, it was the oldest co-operative in England in 1863. After work, James and his wife Sarah were water carriers for the co-operative. Violet had rickets as a baby so she was small in stature. All her life others called her “the mighty mite” and similar names indicating her small stature and her indomitable spirit.
Ellen Louks Fairclough
by Margaret Conrad
Ellen Louks Fairclough was Canada’s first female federal cabinet minister. Appointed in 1957 as Secretary of State in the Progressive Conservative (PC) administration led by John Diefenbaker, she served as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration from 1958 to 1962 and then as Postmaster General until both she and her party were defeated in the April 1963 federal election. Fairclough’s appointment, which came a generation after women were appointed to cabinets in Great Britain (Margaret Bondfield, 1929) and the United States (Frances Perkins, 1933) marked a significant milestone in the efforts by Canadian women to achieve political representation following the granting of female suffrage at the federal level in 1918.
Gert Harding
by Gretchen Kelbaugh
Are you starved, as I am, to read more books about heroic Canadian women? To see movies on the big screen about brave women – from any country – who stand up to oppression and help change the course of humanity? Not many know it, but Canada has such a heroine.
Gert Harding, who grew up on a farm in rural New Brunswick, joined one of the most radical groups of women ever to fight for a woman’s cause: the militant suffragettes of Great Britain (members of the Women’s Social and Political Union were dubbed suffragettes by the press.)
Singapore Feminism: Fertility and Transnational Immigration
by Syahidah Ismail
Post-World War II Singapore witnessed crucial nation-building decisions. Women were given the right to vote and right to stand for election on July 18th, 1947, two years after the end of the Japanese occupation. In subsequent decades, public policy targeted fertility and immigration, issues that directly affected women. Although today its international image as an Asian tiger has afforded this tiny island-nation notoriety as one of the richest countries in the world (“The World’s Richest Countries”, 2012), progress remains gendered, raced, and classed.
Improving Canadian Democracy: From Theory to Practice
by Kennedy Stewart
The dominant democratic challenge of our time concerns reversing declining public participation in politics. Disappointing voter turnout levels are well documented in practically every newspaper and magazine article in which election results are discussed as well as a huge body of academic work. I focused a good deal of my university career on discovering how to improve voter turnout and, as a recently elected politician, now turn my attention to implementing these ideas.
Wilma Mankiller
by Kathryn Magee Labelle
Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee Nation) dedicated her life to the specific betterment of her people and Native America in general. She participated in the Native American Red Power movement and was present at the occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969—calling attention to the importance of Indigenous rights, self-governance and decolonization. Her passion translated into a long a successful political career as one of the first women to lead a Native American tribe in the 20th century.
Canadian Native Homemakers’ Clubs
by Kathryn Magee Labelle
The Canadian Native Women’s Homemakers’ Clubs serve as an example of how 20th century Native women used small-scale, locally-based associations to promote social justice and welfare, targeting not only their particular communities, but First Nations in general. The Clubs began officially in 1942, although similar groups, such as sewing circles and traditional women’s councils, had a long history within Native communities. By the 1950s the Clubs had become an integral part to many reserves across Canada.
A Conflicted Alliance: Canadian and American Suffragists in Times of War
by Shannon Risk
For the final stretch of the women’s suffrage movement in Canada and the United States in the early 1900s, suffragists continued a conflicted alliance with their government in times of war. The World War I era differed from previous ones when it came to the association between women’s war work and gaining the vote. Women had engaged in patriotic organizations in the 1800s, for example, advancing goals of the state in the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Through organizations like these, women entered into war and governmental work in the World War I era.
International Women’s Day
by Veronica Strong-Boag
By the end of the 20th century, March 8th was globally celebrated as International Women’s Day or IWD. This recognition has slowly become more than a doff of the hat to the world’s women. It now serves as an inspirational call for sisterhood in action. Its origins date to 1910 when an International Women’s Conference associated with the Second Socialist International endorsed a special day of global recognition (following up a 1909 claim for a national day by the Socialist Party of America).
Female Nobel Peace Prize Winners
by Veronica Strong-Boag
(Photo by: Harry Wad)
Why should this be a distinctive post in this website? Women Nobel Prize winners represent a persisting dream of the global women’s movement. Since the latter’s emergence in the 19th century, particularly in association with the International Council of Women (founded 1888), peace and arbitration have been widely embraced as core goals of global feminism. This was even more dramatically expressed in the vision of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (founded 1915) and initiatives such as Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (established 1981).
Women Governors General of Canada
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Canada is a self-governing member of the British Commonwealth, previously the British Empire. The official head of state remains the British monarch and the governor general is their representative. The office’s origins are closely tied to the military and diplomatic power of the United Kingdom and the assumption that colonial politicians needed guidance, if not discipline, from London.
Temporary Foreign Workers and Political Agency in Canada
by Genevieve LeBaron
Temporary foreign worker programs have accelerated rapidly in Canada in recent decades, with important consequences for democratic participation in Canada and migrants’ countries of origin. Since Canada’s Non-immigrant Employment Authorization Program was established in 1973, and expanded with the introduction of Bill C-11 in 2001, a number of programs have facilitated the entrance of (im)migrants as workers, but make it increasingly difficult for certain groups to enter, live, and work as permanent residents and, eventually, formal citizens (Sharma 2001: 416).
Gloria Steinem
by Genevieve LeBaron
A staunch advocate of reproductive freedom and women’s equality, Gloria Steinem is a writer and activist who has embraced feminist and social justice movements for over forty years. She is widely considered one of the original founders of the modern American women’s movement and travels within the U.S.A. and worldwide as an organizer and lecturer on issues of equality.
Barney Frank
by Genevieve LeBaron
Widely considered the most prominent gay politician in the U.S.A., Barney Frank is the Democratic US Representative for Massachusetts’ 4th congressional district (1981- present). He is the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, where he remains the ranking Democrat. He has been outspoken on many civil rights issues, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
Harvey Milk
by Genevieve LeBaron
Harvey Milk was a city supervisor of San Francisco and the first openly gay officer in the city’s history. He, along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone, was shot and killed on November 27, 1978 by Dan White, a former supervisor who had resigned his post in protest of Milk’s only significant piece of legislation—a landmark gay rights ordinance.
Viola Desmond
by Genevieve LeBaron
A successful businesswoman and beautician in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Viola Desmond is often described as Canada’s Rosa Parks since on November 8, 1946 she refused to sit in the balcony designated exclusively for blacks in the Roseland Theatre. After deciding to see a movie while waiting for her car to be repaired, Desmond requested floor seats and paid for the ticket, then, although a Black Nova Scotian, took her seat on the ground floor, designated white only.
Philippines Suffragist Movement
by Leonora C. Angeles
Feminism and nationalism have often been closely allied in the Philippines as elsewhere. The first official recognition of women’s suffrage rights came from the nationalist Katipunan movement, most notably Apolinario Mabini, who noted it in the draft of the 1989 Malolos Constitution but his proposal did not interest the all-male Aguinaldo government and Malolos Congress,which adopted a more conservative draft.
The Opponents of Woman Suffrage
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Wherever feminism reaps success or threatens the status quo, anti-feminist movements tend to arise (Chafetz and Dworkin, 37). Allied, as they often have been with other defenses of existing privilege, they can be powerful, as Genevieve had indicated in her post here on anti-suffragists in the USA South. Suffrage campaigners everywhere faced determined opposition.
R.E.A.L. Women and the ‘Pro-Family’ Movement
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Opposition occurs along side demands for equality and justice. Patriarchy, like related prejudices such as racism and homophobia, always has defenders. Canadian ‘antis’ who had resisted women suffrage had successors in R.E.A.L. (Realistic, Equal and Active for Life) Women founded in 1983 as a supposedly ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-family’ lobby. Claims to those values were a clever tactical move.
Leymah Gbowee
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Gbowee was born in Liberia and in her teens was deeply influenced by that nation’s descent into civil war. Married with children, she faced near starvation as a young mother. She became increasingly committed to Christian peace activism and earned an undergraduate degree at Mother Patern College of Health Sciences.
Tawakkol Karman
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Tawakkol (spelling varies) Karman was born into a prominent political family in Yemen and is married and the mother of three children. She has an undergraduate degree in commerce and a graduate degree in political science. Karman is a prominent Yemini human rights activist, journalist, and co-founder of Women Journalists without Chains (2005).
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Ellen Johnson was born to an ethnically mixed family in difficult circumstances in Monrovia. She studied economics and accounting at the College of West Africa and completed a Master of Public Administration at Harvard in 1971. She married at age 17 and has four sons. In the 1970s she worked for the Liberian government in a period of great political turbulence.
John Campbell Gordon
by Veronica Strong-Boag
The Earl of Aberdeen has been best known as the British Viceroy of Ireland (1886; 1905-1915) and Governor General of Canada (1893-96). His grandfather, Lord Aberdeen, had been prime minister of the United Kingdom and his family were leading landlords in eastern Scotland. Deaths of a father and two older brothers brought him unexpectedly to the title in 1870.
Ishbel Marie Marjoribanks Gordon
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Ishbel, commonly referred to after her marriage in 1877 to John Campbell Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen, as the Countess of Aberdeen, was born the third of five children and the second daughter of an ambitious and wealthy family with connections to Scotland and India. As a teenager she was deeply influenced by the Protestant social gospel, as evident for example in the early settlement house movement, and determined to apply its message of hard work and individual responsibility to her own life.
Seneca Falls Convention of 1848
by Genevieve LeBaron
Standing at the opening of the world’s first women’s rights convention, at the front of the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19, 1848, the convention’s main organizer Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared that the time had come for public action, to inaugurate, as she later recalled, “the greatest rebellion the world has ever seen.”
Anti-Suffrage Movements in the USA South
by Genevieve LeBaron
While the cause helped unify diverse groups with different agendas in the United States (US), as in Britain and Canada, suffrage roused great controversy and opposition. Peaking at a time of considerable ferment in the meanings and configurations of race, gender, and class in the US, advocates themselves split over white supremacy, the role of the state, and property ownership. The American South proved a special battlefield.
Margaret Thatcher
by Veronica Strong-Boag
In 2011, the film, “The Iron Lady,” directed and written by and starring a woman, reignited longstanding controversy about Britain’s first female prime minister. Once again feminists wondered what to make of her and the social and print media went wild with debate.
Kim Campbell
by Genevieve LeBaron
Canada’s first and only female prime minister, in office for only four months (June 25, 1993 to November 4, 1993), Kim Campbell has long been a subject of feminist debates about representation, gender, and politics in Canada. She was also its first female Minister of Justice, Attorney General, and Minister of National Defence, in the latter case a first in NATO as well. As the first woman to have held office in all three levels of government (municipal, provincial, and federal), Campbell is often heralded as trailblazer for women.
Hilary Rodham Clinton
by Genevieve LeBaron
In the late 1990s, many in the United States loved to hate then First Lady Hillary Clinton. Indeed, after her husband Bill had been president for four years, scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1996 that “Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the elite and the lumpen.”
USA Suffrage Literature
by Mary Chapman
From the early 1850s, when an organized national women’s rights movement emerged, to 1920, when the 19th Amendment enfranchising women was ratified, U.S. women writers from a variety of racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds published hundreds of short stories, novels, poems, plays, essays and conversion narratives in support of woman suffrage.
The Vote and Presumed Mental Ability
by Veronica Strong-Boag
Groups excluded from the vote have often been told that they didn’t have the ‘right stuff’ to participate in choosing governments. When women have been denied, they have been regularly described as too emotional and lacking in critical judgment. Much the same has been said about similarly disadvantaged racial groups. Literacy requirements have made the same link between political competence and particular evidence of intelligence.
The History of Women’s Suffrage in Quebec
by Genevieve LeBaron
Until the end of the 19th century, women in Quebec enjoyed more possible rights than their counterparts in Canada’s other provinces and territories. In those jurisdictions ruled by Common Law, a wife had no legal existence separate from her husband since, at marriage, a man obtained absolute control of the woman’s person and assets. In Quebec, however, the Civil Code initially permitted women political and legal status (however limited).
Prisoners and the Right to Vote in the United States
by Genevieve LeBaron
The United States bars nearly 5.3 million American citizens from the vote on the grounds that they committed a crime: only 25% are in prison or jail and 75% are either on probation or parole or have completed their sentences (ACLU 2006: 3). Indeed, while it may not come as a surprise that 48 states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated for a felony offense, lesser known is that even after the terms of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one’s life.
Women’s Suffrage in Japan in the 20th Century
by K. M. Christensen
In 1931, the women’s movement might have seemed ready for a great leap forward. Legislation providing restricted suffrage had passed a vote in the Lower House of the Diet. Soon enough, however, that victory proved hollow when the bill failed in the Upper House (Mackie 92). Worse was to come. Shortly thereafter the Japanese government had no time for anything but the pursuit of war on the Asian mainland. Japan’s 1933 withdrawal from the League of Nations confirmed the worsening scenario for civil rights generally.