Joan Sangster's One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada is the first volume in the growing UBC Press series “Women's Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy.” Edited by Veronica Strong-Boag, the series aims to bring the complex history of women's suffrage to a broader audience. Sangster's contribution sets out the big picture, while other volumes in the series have a provincial or regional focus (e.g., We Shall Persist: Women and the Vote in Atlantic Canada by Heidi MacDonald) or take a more particular perspective (e.g., Working Tirelessly for Change: Indigenous Women and the Vote in Canada by Lianne Leddy). There are volumes on women and the vote in Ontario, British Columbia, the Prairie Provinces, and Quebec.
Sangster introduces us to several generations of women who played an important role in the struggle for suffrage, beginning with Rosalie Papineau, who, being propertied, voted in Lower Canada in 1809, before voting's incompatibility with a Quebec Catholic woman's proper role as a wife and mother took over the political imagination. Recognizing race as politically foundational, Sangster moves next to Black activist Mary Ann Shadd, who moved to Canada West in 1851, established a newspaper, and worked hard for education and political rights for African Canadians. While relating the contributions of a multiplicity of people—not only suffragists but also their opponents (male and female)—Sangster demonstrates the operation of conditions that have qualified and disqualified voters: religion (in early days), lack of sufficient property or income, affiliation with troops overseas, skin color and ethnicity, indigeneity and collective entitlements to land, and cross-cutting all, of course, gender. Women's actual and ideological situatedness within patriarchally-governed families made their independence as voters suspect and provided cover for both seeking the ballot and refusing it. Ideologies of the family and labor were also mustered for both purposes.
One Hundred Years of Struggle introduces readers to the complex interplay of ideas and personalities that drove the suffrage movement in Canada. We learn of the organizational life that connected suffragists to those who shared their goals to one degree or another. Sangster illuminates how the intellectual currents of the later nineteenth and the twentieth century—including socialism, agrarianism, liberalism, Christianity, maternalism, progressivism, racism, eugenics, imperialism, and nationalism—combined with the lived experiences of women in all reaches of society to animate and divide them. Canadians grappled with what the ballot might portend: perhaps the entire upending of society, with women working and holding public office, men caring for children and homes, extramarital sex, and other unthinkable outcomes. Uneducated laboring women could gain political influence. Suffrage might be, as Sangster puts it, the “gateway drug to socialism” (130).
Passive and aggressive anti-suffragism met this movement. Sangster describes the feminist counterculture that developed, partly in response, with its rich satirical vein, expressed in mock parliaments and political cartoons and in other ways. These strategies were often, however, entirely insensitive to race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and class, and indeed at times involved middle-class white women differentiating themselves, as educated but disenfranchised mothers of the nation, from uneducated, non-English speaking, laboring men who could nonetheless vote. This type of argument worked especially well in the tempest of the World War I period, when Borden and the Conservatives selectively enfranchised and disenfranchised Canadians to win the 1917 election over conscription. Sangster overhauls the common narrative that (some) women won the federal ballot in 1917 through their hard wartime labors. Conscription and commitments to militarism and pacificism cleaved the women's movement.
Despite being enfranchised federally, women in Quebec, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland still could neither vote provincially nor stand for election. The careful struggle with patriarchy, religiously infused gender norms, and, in Quebec, nationalism, continued, alongside long-standing campaigns for social and property reform. Sangster's last substantive chapter addresses the mid-century efforts of women—and men—to overcome barriers based on race and indigeneity. She describes the complex bind gradually overcome by Indigenous people, who had endured the suppression of their own governance practices and the forced choice between political rights and the retention of their cultures. She outlines Japanese Canadians’ long struggle, before and after World War II and the Internment, to claim political rights against the backdrop of changing international norms.
Wrapped up with an insightful Afterword about the silences and slants in Canadian writing on women's suffrage and a helpful bibliographic essay, One Hundred Years of Struggle is a model of how to write a complex but gripping and compact history. Sangster weaves together ideas and ideologies, personal conflict, material culture, and gently wry analyses of human motivations. One Hundred Years of Struggle deserves the highest recommendation for those seeking an insightful, balanced overview of the long history of Canadian women and the ballot.
