Women's Suffrage Movement in Canada

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the role of Canadian women in the social reform movement during the time period 1870-1921. The paper focuses on the role that Canadian women played in achieving social reform with regard to winning the vote for women. It explains that suffrage is the focus of the paper, because, it is argued, once women had a political voice, other social reforms for women (such as the right to work, or the right to work for equal pay) could more easily follow. The writer then looks at how suffrage may be seen as the fundamental social reform that paved the way for the continuing reform of social conditions, and more especially for the continuing reform of social conditions for women. The writer also strongly asserts that it is also important to see it within the context of what women saw as important aspects of social reform, such as combating problems associated with industrialization and urbanization. The writer notes that while the suffrage movement was impacted by larger historical factors, such as the First World War, ordinary Canadian women played an important role in the fight for votes for women.

From the Paper:

"These missionary groupings were the most common alliances in the 1870s and 1880s, but these decades also saw the rise of somewhat more secular organizations, such as The Woman's Christian Temperance Union. These organizations have been described as "testaments to women's growing awareness of social, and particularly urban, problems" (Strong-Boag 89). Women hoped to work within these organizations to rehabilitate the degenerate and the poor - reflecting the common assumption that women were the morally superior sex (Strong-Boag). Indeed, many historians agree that the suffragists justified their fight to penetrate the public sphere by the argument that as women were morally superior, their presence in the public sphere would benefit society, due to the fact that the public sphere would be improved by the influence of what were seen as women's traditional virtues (Bacchi)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bacchi, Carol Lee. Liberation Deferred? The ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983.
• Cleverdon, Catherine L. The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada. Toronto, 1950.
• Fausto-Sterling, Ann. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
• Fraser, Wayne. The Dominion of Women: The Personal and the Political in Canadian Women's Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
• Hill, Irene. "Female Suffrage." The Encyclopedia of Canada. Ed. W. Stewart Wallace. Vol. II. Toronto: University Associates in Canada, 1948, 325-7.

More papers on Women's Suffrage Movement in Canada:

• Article Review # 105200 : "Bacchi, Cleverdon and Suffrage"
• Term Paper # 132013 : "Canadian Women and the Social Reform Movement"
• Essay # 90072 : "Suffragists and Second Wave Feminists"

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