Women in confederation Canada had very few rights. They had no right of pursuing their higher education and neither could they vote. Their legal rights were very limited, and naturally, they were subordinate to their husbands when it came to matters concerning law. The Canadian Society, just like any other society of the time, did not allow the woman to initiate divorce proceedings. Husbands went to the extent of even controlling all their earnings since women had no right to ownership of property. The woman’s place was in the home where she was expected to carry on with her reproductive role and housekeeping duties while the man was busy in the public sphere of politics and business. Only a small number of women worked, but they had low paying jobs such as waitresses, teachers, domestic servants, clerks or even working in needle trades in the textile industry. By the turn of the nineteenth century, they began to work as nurses. However, working in the mentioned fields, women were expected to abandon their jobs for marriage to play their roles as housewives.
The first cartoon represented the first wave of women feminism in Canada and was set inside the House of Representatives in 1912. The issue of women’s right to vote is a major theme in the cartoon. It is clear that there was a motion on hand, but the house was fully dominated by men with only one woman on the right side of the page. The cartoon signified the poor representation of women at the province level and the state level. Previously, women were only allowed to vote in some scenarios. In the nineteenth century, the only place a woman would demand a right to vote was during the municipal voting. She was, however, required to have property. According to Historica Canada, the women’s primary principle was “no taxation without representation,” Later that century, the women were given more rights to vote in the school trustees. It is, however, clear that the women of this century did not vote for political representation, and they only did so at the lower levels.
On the top of the cartoon page, there is a song being sung probably by a man with the words, “my wife is a suffragette” in 1910. The Suffragettes movement was formed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It advocated for the right of women to vote in public elections. Emmeline Pankhurst, a British feminist, led the movement. Her main motivation was the Russian way of protesting. On the bottom part of the cartoon, the publisher voices her belief that time would come when women would sit in the Canadian parliament.
In Canada, however, the movement was under the leadership of Dr. Emily Howard but the woman believed to have the greatest influence was Helen (Nellie) McClung. By the turn of the nineteenth century, women sought to improve their social conditions through the reform movement. Apart from the suffragettes’ movement, women joined other groups such as the Young Women’s Christian Association, the National Council of Women and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Together, these groups had one motive, which was to influence change that would ensure that women got equal right with their philosophy being, “maternal feminism”. The philosophy suggested that women had the nurturing capabilities that would help deal with the society’s issues such as prostitution, poverty and alcoholism. The suffragists lay down a condition that if they got the vote as they requested, vices such as domestic abuse, evils of drink and warfare would be banished.
In this first cartoon, it is clear that there is only one woman in the whole room, a clear symbol that the representation of women in the legislation was minimal. The utterances of the various men clearly suggest that the woman was not capable of handling matters politics and her place was in the house or behind the man. A particular man was asking her whether she would mind having a cup of tea with him while another held her waist - a sign of sexual harassment at the workplace. The cartoon’s perspective is that women were denied right to vote; however, that soon changed with the arrival of Helen McClung. She played a major role in fighting for women’s equality in Canadian politics. She was one of the few women members of the Alberta’s legislative assembly just as the cartoon suggests.
McClung was a gifted orator and author; McClung championed for women’s reforms such as women political equality in Alberta and Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Her social commentary made her writing career flourish, and she was an outspoken woman who pushed for the enactment of the Alberta government prohibition in 1916. She was in the forefront of satirizing premier Roblin’s government, and after they had won the 1915 election, the women were granted the vote in 1916 in the province of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The federal government gave a franchise in 1918, two years later after women started to vote at the provincial level. Although most women in other provinces sought for the same right, the indigenous women and those in Québec were not allowed to vote until 1960 and 1940 respectively.
The First World War contributed to Helen’s success on behalf of all the suffragettes in Canada. At this time, the federal government under Robert Borden made a move to impose conscription and consequently, women in the armed forces and those related to the military men acquired a right to vote at the federal level. All women who were of legal age were automatically allowed to vote even though they did not have the provincial franchise. By 1919, women could comfortably participated in the House of Commons. It is their sacrifice and service in the First World War that made them acquire this right.
As a legislator, McClung later challenged the Canadian senate’s regulation, which forbade women from getting appointments in the Senate just because the society did not consider them as “persons”. Alongside her, there were more suffrages; namely, Emily Murphy, Louise McKinney, Henrietta Louise Edward and Irene Parbly. They were famously known as the famous five. After challenging the regulation, the five finally won the appeal, which they had made to the Judicial Committee in 1929 and finally just as Emmeline had predicted, women were finally entitled to serve alongside men.
Although women got their right to vote, this did not mean that the society was up for women equality immediately. It was evidently a slow process, which would take several years to actualize. The second cartoon, “Hell hath no fury,” which was published during the Second World War in 1941, signified that although women were capable of handling certain jobs in the field such as the judicial system, men would dominate these fields simply because the woman was the gentler sex. The woman’s height signified her capability to handle the judicial system. The short man meant that men were weak at times; despite that, they still got to run the big institution in government. The woman in the cartoon stood behind the man and watched him try to hang the poster. This is by history where women were considered as the second sex, which could not manage the duties assigned to the men. They were never given the chance to try. It was until 1952 that the cartoon’s perspective changed as women got the right to sit on juries. Women through the Second World War acquired new roles and skills and probably, it is until then that some got to practice law.
The fact that women got to sit on the jury did not mean that equality in the judicial system or any other field was already achieved. Just like in the First World War, women were allowed to take outside jobs due to reduced manpower in the Second World War. The move caused the workforce to double up. For the first time, women were recruited as auxiliaries in the armed service. They, however, faced many negative attitudes from the rest of the society since it did not embrace the idea of working wives, or women wearing trousers. Most men believed that working women would contribute to instability in families and already blamed them for delinquent juveniles. It is important to note that although the women got employment, they still received very low wages than men for the same job. Those who worked in the army were assigned the clerical and service duties. Once the men returned from the war, the women were expected to leave their jobs and reassume their roles as homemakers. The war propagated a new wave of women. They got a chance to acquire new skills, and their sense of self-worth was increased. They no longer believed that a woman’s proper place was in the home and were quickly not getting pleased by the slow pace of evolution towards acquiring equality. Professions such as law were male dominated with very few women pursuing them. It was until 1957 that Ellen Fairclough joined the federal cabinet as the first woman.
Women were getting upset by the fact that they could not control their reproductive functions. Information that dealt with dissemination or birth control was illegal. Abortion was punishable by life imprisonment. The first guide to contraceptive information was, however, published in 1968 by the McGill student society opening up the society ideology on matters to do with women’s sexuality.
Florence Bird was appointed in 1967 to chair the royal commission of status for women, which would deal with the issue of women inequality as suggested in the second cartoon. She later released her report in 1970, which shed light on how the government would deal with questions to do with gender discrimination, childcare programs among other issues. Although the proposal was not acted upon immediately, Bird’s report pointed out the various problems that women went through including unequal pay, domestic abuse, and extreme working conditions. Towards the 1980s, there was still unequal pay with women receiving only 65 percent of the men’s salary. Most of the women faced sexual harassment a sign that it would take long to salvage women from the male chauvinistic attitude. For such reasons, women never advanced in their careers. Fortunately, the federal government of Canada took affirmative action that helped narrow down the gap between man and women salaries. Societal expectations on women to perform double duties as career women and family keepers are what hampered women from achieving equality which they for so long wanted.
In conclusion, the two cartoons represent the two waves of women activism in Canada. The first ensured that women acquired their right to vote at both the provincial and federal level while the second introduced women into different fields of work where they learned new skills and experiences. The society from which both cartoons were drawn is dominated by male chauvinism. Women are limited to the house and in case they work, they are discriminated and sexually harassed to the point they never advanced in their careers. It is the remarkable women of the nineteenth and twentieth century who struggled to acquire the equality, which the Canadian woman boasts of today.
Bibliography
HIST 2288 Unit 4: Labour and Women's Movements. n.d.
Women's Suffrage. n.d. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/womens-suffrage/ (accessed March 12, 2016).
The Calgary Eye Opener, March 18, 1916
Hou, Charles and Cynthia. 2002. Great Canadian Political Cartoons, 1915 to 1945, pg. 192. Moody's lookout press.
