On a Pedestal, Holding Pandora’s Box

Girls on Coney Island from YouTube Silent Film.

One thing the suffragists, suffragettes and anti-suffragists agreed upon in 1910 was that women were superior to men. Girls were sugar and spice and everything nice (unless they dared misbehave) and boys were snips and snails and puppy dog’s tails (brutally severed with an axe just for fun.)

I found a 1912 report in the Montreal Gazette which confused me a bit – because I now know too much about the era. Had I read it, say, five years ago, I would have taken it at face value.

Professor McNaughten of McGill gave a talk to the Women’s Canadian Club in Montreal – in favour of women’s suffrage. This is the same man who authored The American Suffrage Association pamphlet I have on hand because Edith saved it, from 1908 – and which figures in my book Flo in the City.

The report says that MacNaughten is for women getting the vote.

This man, a professor of Greek, was a vocal supporter of women suffrage, but clearly not of the militant suffragettes.

This is a ritzy club, The Canadian Club, the guests that rainy night included a Greenshields, a McLennan, and others from Montreal’s elite families. Guests totalled 250. Also attending was Barbara Wiley, who was visiting Montreal as a guest of the Montreal Council of Women. Mrs. Leacock was there too. I assume that is Stephen Leacock’s wife.

The report says that MacNaughten is for women getting the vote “but it would be a thousand pities if in the process of gaining them they should do anything to lose their hold upon the quiet and gentle forces which are the secret of their influence in the world. They are now and always have been a mighty power even in the state without votes….There is a natural division of labour between the sexes, he say, and there are some things for which women have always accepted responsibility.What are they? ‘First PURITY. That is always a woman’s central concern.’ (See, I wasn’t exaggerating in my earlier blogs.) When women are pure you have the good times of history. When they are not, all goes wrong. Second, as purity cannot be without it: sensitiveness to the more delicate aspects of the world. Beauty, good manners and all the other things which cannot be eaten. (Now remember who is in the audience..) He continues “On this continent and in this city, where we are threatened with the most brutal forms of materialism, of insolent, vulgar wealth and the slavish admiration of it, it is the women, above all, who have stood for the finer and sweeter things.”

I could spend a life time deconstructing this speech in the context of the times. And what nerve. He lambasts the rich, and that’s who is in the audience. And he takes aim at Barbara Wiley, a guest from England, for she was, indeed, a militant suffragette. Upon arriving in Montreal she was asked about the hurling of an axe at Mr. Asquith. She replied, that it did him no harm and if it had hit him, it might have knocked some sense into his head.

Canada’s Backward Suffrage Movement

With All Her Might: A book about Canadian Suffragette Gertrude Harding by Gretchen Wilson. Harding was born in New Brunswick but fought for suffrage in England.

I found an odd article about the Canadian Suffrage Movement (or the lack of same) in the Canadian Magazine 1913. The same year Edith Nicholson went to see Mrs. Ethel Snowden speak at the meeting of the Canadian Council of Women in Montreal.

This article, by an Isabel Skelton, summarizes the movement in the US, Britain and world, while claiming that Canada is ‘backword’ in this regard.

In the US, claims Skelton, they have a history of equal rights movements and that is the reason for their active suffrage movement. In Britain, there are only 88 men for every hundred women, so they have many more working women than in Canada, and that is the reason for the active movement there.

In Canada, well, we are single minded homesteaders, she says, ‘intensely on the make” so ‘political and civic responsiblity does not loom large’ in our minds. And Canadian Women already have many rights… For instance, female property owners can vote at the municiple level and at the school board level and that’s what women care about, their immediate community and education… Our marriage and divorce laws do not discriminate in favour of men, she says. (Not exactly true.) For all these reasons, the suffrage movement is stalled here. Is comparatively inert. (That’s how she put it.) It also doesn’t help that were a huge diverse country, so it is hard to start a movement here.

On top of that, to plead for women’s suffrage just hasn’t been fashionable in Canada. Quite the opposite. The earliest proponents of woman suffrage in Canada turned off the leisure classes, with their ‘freakish dress and mannish manners’.

Theoretically Canadian women believe they must ‘be alive to problems pressing on us from without’ and vaguely desire the suffrage to remedy things, but their practical needs are somehow not crying enough to make their demands imperative…

An interesting point of view: but tell that to Margaret Nicholson and her daughters, Marion, Edith and Flora (of my novel Flo in the City), who cut out pro suffrage articles from the Montreal Witness, a pro-suffrage newspaper.

It would make more sense if Ms. Skelton were explaining why there is ‘no militant’ movement in Canada, for that seems to be the case, but there is, without a doubt, a suffrage movement, of sorts, even if there are no marches and parades. (Oddly, in the US, the anti-suffragists are using the ‘no one cares’ argument in their editorials, but this woman appears to be pro-suffrage, or on the fence. She says in the future, when women enter the workplace in larger numbers and face the inevitable problems, the movement might get going in Canada.)

But I’ve found a lot of articles about the Restless Woman Issue in the Montreal Gazette of the 1910 era, many reports of men and women giving talks about suffrage, pro and con. (In Pierre Berton’s Book, Marching as to War, he claims the Canadians Suffrage movement peaked in 1910.)

So, I dunno. I find it odd that, in this article, Canadians are described as the self-sufficient pioneers and Americans the socially-conscious, since the stereotype is quite the opposite today.

I have to wonder if all the ‘cowboy’ movies over the century have created this perception of the rugged American individualist..