The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada by Catherine L. Cleverdon

Author:Catherine L. Cleverdon [L. CLEVERDON CATHERINE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0802021085
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 1974-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

7

QUEBEC

The First Shall Be Last

BY AN ODD turn of fate French Canada, where the campaign to win political rights for women was longest in yielding results and came nearest to being a real struggle, appears to have been the first part of the British empire in which women made practical use of the right to cast a ballot.1 Abundant evidence exists that in certain parts of French Canada women occasionally voted during the early years of the nineteenth century.

The Constitutional Act of 1791, which established a representative assembly in Great Britain’s recently acquired French-speaking colony, defined voters only as “persons” fulfilling certain property qualifications. Unlike Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where women may have had the right to vote at this same period but did not use it, the women of Quebec had broader notions of the ground covered by the word “persons” and put their convictions into practice by voting on numerous occasions, at least between the years 1809 and 1834.

The earliest example on record was the occasion described by Senator L. O. David in his volume, Les Deux Papineau. In the bitterly contested election of 1809 several women of Montreal voted for Joseph Papineau, the candidate favoured by the French Canadians—among them his widowed mother. As oral voting was the practice in those days, the elderly woman announced her choice for all to hear: “For my son, M. Joseph Papineau, for I believe that he is a good and faithful subject.”2

Evidence appears that voting by women in Three Rivers was quite commonplace in 1820. From a letter of Judge P. Bedard to J. Neilson, Esq., dated July 1 of that year, we learn that women property owners voted and that in the case of a married woman, if the property was hers she did the voting, not her husband. The judge humorously described the misfortune which had befallen one of his own servants who had been so indiscreet as to place his property in his wife’s name. On election day the unhappy man appeared at the polling place, only to find himself doubly humiliated by being refused the franchise and then sent to get his wife to the polls because she was the qualified voter in that family.3

Until 1827 the assertion of political rights by women aroused no public controversy, but following the elections of that year the House of Assembly of Lower Canada received two petitions on December 4, 1828 with regard to the strange custom being practised in that part of His Majesty’s domains. That the inhabitants of the province were not of one mind on the question is evident since the petition from Quebec City berated a returning officer for refusal to accept the vote of a widow, while that from the Borough of William Henry claimed the returns from their district invalid because women’s votes had been included. After considerable legislative bickering, the petitions were eventually laid aside without any decision having been reached one way or the other.4

The derisive and humiliating treatment frequently

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