{"id":3011,"date":"2019-10-16T23:18:46","date_gmt":"2019-10-17T06:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muddyvalleyfarm.com\/?p=3011"},"modified":"2019-10-16T23:18:46","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T06:18:46","slug":"a-womans-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/?p=3011","title":{"rendered":"A Woman\u2019s Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align:center;\"><span class=\"s1\">TL;DR It took 84 long years for all Canadian women to win the right to vote. On Monday October 21 I will go to my local school gym, and cast my vote. I can\u2019t wait!<\/span><\/p>\n\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Almost 150 years ago, in 1876 in Toronto, Ontario, Dr. Emily Howard Jennings Stowe started Canada\u2019s very first women\u2019s suffrage organization. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Born in 1831, Dr. Stowe was a woman ahead of her time. She had been refused entry to the University of Toronto in 1852 because she was female. Not until 1886 did U of T change that policy. So she got her teaching certificate, then taught public school, eventually becoming the first female principal in Canada.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3019\" src=\"https:\/\/muddyvalleyfarm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/17732943-2658-4791-9fc4-c83e87b34ced.jpeg?w=600\" alt=\"17732943-2658-4791-9FC4-C83E87B34CED\" width=\"300\" height=\"265\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">After marrying and having 3 children she tried to enter medical school in Canada but was refused because, you guessed it, she was a woman. So she went to med school in New York instead, graduating in 1868 at age 37, then moving back home to Toronto where she became the first woman to practice medicine in Ontario.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">It took eight years, until 1884, for Dr. Stowe\u2019s Dominion Suffrage Club to achieve their first victory, winning the vote for women in some Ontario municipal elections. But only for widows and spinsters. Married women didn\u2019t need the vote you see&#8230;they had their husbands to take care of all that!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-full wp-image-3014 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/muddyvalleyfarm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/4f5f6daa-4577-4f50-a6c9-a9c8e716e644.jpeg\" alt=\"4F5F6DAA-4577-4F50-A6C9-A9C8E716E644\" width=\"333\" height=\"244\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">Dr. Stowe and the suffragettes didn\u2019t stop there.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In 1889 they petitioned Canada\u2019s Conservative Attorney General to give widows and spinsters the federal vote. They were refused.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In 1903 Dr. Stowe died and her daughter Augusta, Canada\u2019s first female MD trained in her home country, took over the club presidency.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In 1905 and again in 1906 the club petitioned Ontario\u2019s Conservative premier for the vote and were refused.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In 1907 they organized a thousand person march, presenting the Ontario government with a 100,000 name petition. For a third time they were refused.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In 1912 the club petitioned Robert Borden\u2019s Conservative federal government. \u201cNo\u201d, they were told. Not until all the provinces say yes.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">So they focused on supporting efforts to gain women the vote at the municipal level, and by 1915 women had won the right to vote in a few more Ontario municipalities. Then the suffragettes went back to the province to try again. But the answer was still no.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"s1\">Between 1915 and 1917, BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba women all won the right to vote provincially. But not in Ontario, where Canada\u2019s suffrage movement had been born. After yet another monster petition the provincial Liberals made the womens\u2019 vote one of their election planks. But the Conservatives stayed in power. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">And then finally in 1917, with the First World War raging, \u201ca change came over the hearts of men\u201d. Canadian men and women were making untold sacrifices for the war effort. In the spirit of the times, Premier Hearst\u2019s Conservative Ontario government endorsed a private member\u2019s bill, the Premier intoning solemnly:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em><span class=\"s1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" size-medium wp-image-3020 alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/muddyvalleyfarm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/6e51e592-362b-46c9-8bb4-b6ad7767f61d.jpeg?w=438\" alt=\"6E51E592-362B-46C9-8BB4-B6AD7767F61D\" width=\"219\" height=\"300\" \/>\u201cHaving taken our women into partnership with us, in this tremendous task, I ask, can we justly deny them the right to have a say about the making of the laws they have been so heroically trying to defend? I think not!\u201d <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">The Liberals united with the Conservatives, (can you imagine that happening today??? \ud83d\ude33\ud83e\udd23\ud83d\ude44)\u00a0and Ontario\u2019s women\u2019s suffrage bill passed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">In Ottawa, where Mr. Borden\u2019s wartime Unionist Party (an amalgam of Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals) had won a landslide election victory the previous year, on April 12, 1918, a bill was passed to extend suffrage to \u201call women in Canada\u201d. But they really only meant non-quebecois caucasian women. \ud83d\ude20<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">When the federal bill passed, the remaining provincial and territorial hold outs gave in. Except Quebec, where women did not win the right to vote provincially until 1940. Oh, and except for women<\/span>\u00a0of colour, who couldn\u2019t vote in federal elections either, until the 1940s. Oh and except for First Nations women covered by the Indian Act, who couldn\u2019t vote federally until 1960!!!<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">All in all, it took 84 years; from 1876 to 1960, for <strong>all<\/strong> Canadian women to win the right to vote in any election in Canada. Close to a century of prejudice, of hard fought battles and rejection, of being knocked down and getting right back up, of derision and scorn heaped on the suffragettes year after year.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">I am so grateful to the women (and men) who fought for this right on behalf of all of us, so tenaciously and for so long. Our society is the better for it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">On October 21 I will be thinking about Dr. Stowe and all the women whose shoulders I\u2019m standing on, as I again relish the freedom, as a woman, to engage fully in our participatory democracy. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Voting is awesome and good for the soul. I can\u2019t wait.<\/span><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TL;DR It took 84 long years for all Canadian women<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminist-farmer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thestablecomicstore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}