Borden's Suffrage Campaign

TARAH BROOKFIELD

Divided by the Ballot Box: The Montreal Council of Women and the 1917 Election

Abstract: Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden’s controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act’s limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife
Under Ritchie-England’s leadership they organized a series of high-profile events, including the visits of British suffragettes and an exhibit of suffrage literature that featured a petition addressed to the Premier of Quebec, demanding the vote.16 With the help of the Toronto Council of Women, MCW successfully pushed the NCW to finally adopt suffrage as part of its national platform in 1910. They also encouraged widows and spinsters, eligible to vote because of their property, to support Reform candidates in Montreal’s municipal elections of 1910 and 1912.17 In 1913 executive members of the MCW decided to start an affiliated group, the Montreal Suffrage Association, led by Ritchie-England’s good friend Carrie Derick, an instructor of botany at McGill. Having a distinct suffrage association, one that included anglophone and francophone women, allowed for a more distinct recognition of the suffrage cause and solved the problem of the MCW directly alienating any critics. This was deemed necessary, since the boom in suffragist activity by the MCW did not transfer over to the Canadian public and had even less impact within Quebec.18 In 1912 the Montreal Daily Star published a
In particular, Ritchie-England’s own interpretation of feminism placed little emphasis on the superiority of her race. As an egalitarian rather than maternal feminist, she described her vision as a desire for ‘full liberty, perfect justice and equality of opportunity without discrimination between sexes, races and creeds,’ a belief that would not be compromised by the war.27 This determination set her apart from more conservative firstwave feminist leaders, including her fellow physicians from Ontario, Dr Augusta Stowe-Gullen and Dr Elizabeth Smith Shortt, who are accused by historians of representing a ‘constrained’ form of feminism.28 Ritchie-England’s commitment to these principles was shaped by her family’s evangelical and liberal traditions, her own struggle for equality in education and medicine, a non-patriarchal marriage, and her close relationship with French Canadian men and women. Considering how much trouble