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During the 19th century, women were excluded from official politics and decision-making. The rearing of children and protection of the family were to be key concepts in the broad movement for social reform to which educated Canadian women committed themselves. The reform movement can be understood only by considering it alongside the suffrage movement; more than a complement to the latter, the reform movement was the feminized version of the suffrage movement. Thesis in order to penetrate the political sphere, Canadian women engaged in philanthropic societies and social movements aimed to protect their rights and improve their social and economic position.
The reform movement attested to the democrats’ belief that an individual’s capabilities must be proven first of all, by property ownership and then civic virtue in order to take part in the affairs of state and city. Not everyone was naturally fit for civic responsibility (Frager and Patrias 107). The philanthropic movement was closely involved in the establishment of the welfare state, contributing content and sometimes political personnel. In accordance with a strict division of tasks within the social and political sectors, the women and men of the educated elite shouldered the task of making Canada into a more just and equitable society and defining the modalities of the new citizenship (Gleason et al 288).
The slow and gradual process that led to the women’s franchise was closely linked to the broad movement of social feminism, and it reflected the overlapping of the social demands proposed by the movement and changes within the state. In English Canada, the lead in the temperance movement was taken by reformers, physicians, and men of law whose concerns with curbing alcoholism and promoting public hygiene mirrored the agenda of the temperance movement in the United States. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) played a front-line role in the transformation of the anti-alcohol campaign into a political movement for women’s suffrage. An exclusively female organization founded in Picton, Ontario, in 1874, the Canadian WCTU counted 9,000 affiliated groups in 1891 and campaigned persistently in favor of government intervention against alcohol consumption, which was held responsible for a crime, displacement of families, political corruption, and a great many other evils. Convinced of the importance of anti-alcohol reforms, the members of the WCTU became involved in highly publicized campaigns across the country to enforce compliance from governments that had remained impervious to their speeches. Imbued with belief in their cause and disappointed with the reception they were given, the main leaders of the WCTU quickly turned toward political action to demand rights equal to those of men. They joined the activist women who, as early as 1852, had demonstrated their desire to reform property laws with respect to married women (Frager and Patrias 101).
The temperance movement, taken up by a number of other associations such as the Salvation Army, which recruited especially among working-class women, brought immediate results. Following the example of American suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony, who had been called upon to lend her support, groups of women demanded the franchise and, against all expectations, obtained it in British Columbia, where no organized group in favor of suffrage existed (Frager and Patrias 101). In 1873 that province became the first in the nation to grant women partial suffrage (the right to vote on the municipal level). In Ontario, the process was a great deal slower and more complicated. In 1882 the provincial government granted the right to vote in municipal elections to female property-owners, unmarried women, and widows. Then, two years later, it proclaimed the equality of men and women where access to higher education was concerned about opening universities and medical schools to women, and finally, it granted the right to vote in municipalities to unmarried women and widows without property (Gleason et al 111, 152). Married women remained without franchise even as the law emancipated them for the first time from their husbands’ guardianship and authorized them to be sole property-owners WCTU. This situation led married women to intensify their efforts within mutual aid and assistance organizations in Ontario and the Maritime Provinces.. From the end of the 1880s, the WCTU enjoyed national stature while other groups, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the Girls’ Friendly Association, an Anglican organization, achieved similar levels of popularity (Frager and Patrias 102-103).
In sum, these groups advocated rapid intervention, especially in working-class or underprivileged families, in order to do social work and to develop hygiene and education-in short, to ensure that minimum standards of children’s education be met. In fact, these standards were largely inspired by bourgeois morality, but also by new ideas about the role of mothers that developed as the mothering function was increasingly professionalized. Juvenile delinquency, which was commonly attributed to the fact that lower-class women worked, sparked a protest campaign and a discourse on motherhood that perfectly suited the government and the women activists behind the campaign.
Works Cited
Frager, R.A., Patrias, C. Discounted Labor: Women Workers in Canada 1870-1939. University of Toronto Press, 2005.
Gleason, M. et al. eds. Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, Oxford University Press, USA; 4 edition, 2003.
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