How excluded groups wrested the vote from elected representatives of enfranchised groups remains one of the most fascinating puzzles of political development. This first book in UBC Press's Women's Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy series, by acclaimed historian and professor Joan Sangster, provides an overview of national suffrage history. Her intent is to “complicate” Canadian suffrage history by engagingly telling “a new, more inclusive story for a new generation” (dust jacket).
Sangster's commitment to telling the story of women's suffrage in Canada in all its complexity underpins the main strength of the work—a broadening of the historical focus of the suffrage narrative and the perspectives that inform it. Sangster lengthens the suffrage history time line by reaching back to anti-slavery debates, the role of property in defining the electorate during the colonial period and the role of race in shaping the idea of rights for women. She introduces new actors not much discussed in previous scholarship, such as female activists fighting for the much later inclusion of Indigenous and Japanese Canadian women. She shows that support for suffrage was linked to a diversity of ideas, including socialist, agrarian, maternalist and liberal feminism, but also white supremacism and eugenicist thought. She examines the ideological underpinnings of (predominantly male) anti-suffragism and briefly considers the more intriguing question of female opposition to suffrage (128–31). Sangster clearly rejects suffrage triumphalism, insisting that the path of progress was neither linear nor an “inexorable march toward democracy” (273). Rather, it involved gains and losses, as well as exclusions based on race, class and geography (273); furthermore, it was a “profoundly regional and provincial story” (273). The price of this complicating of suffrage history is to be bedevilled, as Sangster rightly is, by the question of what and whom to “leave out of this incredibly rich, complicated story” (6).
Although she broadly reflects an earlier generation of feminist historians’ skepticism regarding social science's ability to establish causality, Sangster categorically rejects the “reward for war work theory”—widespread in both academic and popular accounts of suffrage—on the basis that it “fails the basic test of historical evidence” (272). (Most political scientists will not be surprised that those with political power did not just willingly give it away.) Rather, Sangster asserts that the chances of suffragist success “had much to do with the energetic mobilization of the disenfranchised, who demanded their rights, made convincing arguments, developed innovative organizing tactics, and created temporary coalitions of dissimilar activists” (5).
While Sangster leans toward richness, a new generation of female historians and political scientists (most notably in the United States) is searching for patterns of causal regularity across national and subnational jurisdictions, attempting to impose some order on the apparent chaos that is suffrage history. However, these researchers are starkly divided as to the relative weight of the various causal factors discussed by Sangster. The claim that suffragists gradually won over male legislators and voters through the moral and logical force of their arguments, as well as the resonance of their arguments with existing public attitudes, has recently been compellingly reprised (see, for example, Egge, Reference Egge2018). For others, though, suffrage success is explained not by “progressive ideas about women or suffragists’ pluck” but rather by the degree of electoral competition and assessments by other political actors regarding opportunities for successful coalitions with suffragists (Teele, Reference Teele2018: dust jacket; see also McConnaughy, Reference McConnaughy2013; Boychuk, Reference Boychuk2020). Such explicitly political factors are much less evident in Sangster's account—seemingly placing her, perhaps unintentionally, on the ideational side of this debate.
The field's turn toward more inclusive and diverse perspectives—of which One Hundred Years of Struggle is both an exemplar and perhaps a culmination—is most welcome. The field also cries out for more and better empirical investigation. Sangster's greatest strength is to push the field to incorporate more diverse perspectives, which is not surprising given that her work is deeply self-reflexive. Indeed, she explicitly recognizes that the “intellectual standpoint of historians, the sources they can access, the audience for whom they write, and why, matter a great deal” (270). However, conventional accounts can also be complicated by novel historical evidence—empirical questions that do not tend to receive much consideration in Sangster's narrative. As just one example, new evidence establishes that the Alberta premier privately committed to the United Farmer's of Alberta (UFA) leadership to passing suffrage before suffrage received governing party support in Manitoba—a fact that was deliberately concealed from Alberta suffragist leaders. This is in stark contrast to Sangster's restating of the conventional claim that Manitoba set a precedent (181; see Boychuk, Reference Boychuk2018: 15). This novel chronology shifts emphasis away from developments in Manitoba (such as the oft-mentioned Winnipeg mock parliament headlined by Nellie McClung) and toward Alberta; it also shifts emphasis away from the card-carrying suffragist leadership that ostensibly “roused” the support of the UFA (181) and toward the long-standing organizational efforts of the UFA's women's auxiliary. Just as the addition of overlooked perspectives advocated by Sangster complicates the existing national story, so might more empirical investigation into conventional suffragist accounts.
One Hundred Years of Struggle is a must read for scholars of suffrage history and a crucial resource for teaching suffrage history. Although its arguments may be perhaps less novel for suffrage scholars than they will be for non-specialist audiences, it compellingly “looks beyond the shiny rhetoric of anniversary celebrations and Heritage Minutes” (dust jacket)with which students will be most familiar. It is an enticing invitation to explore the topic further and provocatively challenges readers to “perhaps dispute what [is] presented here” (6). Such disputes will undoubtedly enrich the study of suffrage history.
